Podcast
FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev
Hosted by D. Blundell and Z.Shalev · EN
The Top 5 stories of the moment with Canada's #1 Shock Jock Dean Blundell and Former CBS News executive producer Zev Shalev.
www.narativ.org
www.narativ.org
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Trump Vanished for Eight Days. Then We Went on Air - and Who's Next on the Bari Weiss Hit List?
1w ago00:56:22Tap to summarizeFor 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 awayAt 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 directionTuesday, 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 livesTodd 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 attackersElias 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 bloodbathScott 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 PATTERNFive 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.The FiveStack with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev is broadcast LIVE Monday-Friday at 3 PM ET at Narativ.org and it’s 100% free. Sign up today and never miss a show. Thank you Lev Parnas, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, Lalisa, Sarah, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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BILL PULTE HAS AN EPSTEIN FILES PROBLEM; TRUMP TURNS ON NETANYAHU; PELLEY: MURDER OF "60 MINUTES"; REALITY STAR MAY BECOME LA MAYOR
1w ago00:57:38Tap to summarizeToday’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.5️⃣ Six States Vote — and Only One Date MattersSix 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.THIS IS THE GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT FOR TODAY GO TO GROUNDNEWS.COM TO READ IT, AND REMEMBER FIVESTACK VIEWERS GET 40% OFF THEIR VANTAGE PLAN. 4️⃣ “You’re Crazy” — Trump Turns on NetanyahuIsrael 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 MinutesScott 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 DeadThis 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 LedgerWe 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 PATTERNTrump 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.This is Narativ. We get there sooner. If this is the reporting you want in your inbox before it’s anywhere else, subscribe — free or paid — and bring someone with you. The work only holds if you do.Thank you Lev Parnas, Marnie Screams Into the Void, Noble Blend, Natasha Young, PJ Schuster, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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BREAKING: The $1.776 Billion Trump Slush Fund Is Dead
1w ago00:53:42Tap to summarizeDonald Trump just killed his own slush fund.Minutes before we came on air — a senior administration official told Axios the President’s $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund is, in their words, “dead for now.” Trump built that fund out of a lawsuit he filed against his own IRS, then aimed it at the people he calls victims of lawfare — a pot of taxpayer money critics said could cut checks to January 6 convicts. Judge Leonie Brinkema froze it Friday. Both parties turned on it over the weekend. And rather than defend it in open court on June 12, Trump pulled it himself.Here’s why that matters to you: it was your money — $1.776 billion of it — and he just walked away from it. Trump doesn’t walk away unless the fight is already lost. What’s next: the June 12 hearing is still on the calendar. A dropped plan is not a dismissed case. Watch that date.That was supposed to be number four tonight. It’s now the day’s biggest retreat. Here’s the rest of the countdown.5️⃣ THE TAPE THAT NAMES MELANIAThe number five story on the countdown today: a voicemail surfaced this weekend that drags the First Lady back into the Epstein story. Amanda Ungaro — the model who flew Epstein’s plane out of Paris as a teenager, then spent two decades with the man who introduced Donald to Melania, Paolo Zampolli — released a recording she left for Zampolli. On it, Ungaro alleges Melania worked as an escort tied to Epstein’s circle, and that Zampolli brokered the silence that buried it.We tell you what she says, not that it’s true. But Melania answered a rumor with an unscheduled White House denial back in April — and now there’s a tape, in the voice of someone who says she was there.4️⃣ THE FUND HE COULDN’T DEFENDNumber four is the story that broke at the top — so we’ll keep it short here: Trump’s $1.8 billion lawfare fund went from frozen to dead in three days, killed by his own retreat. The live thread is June 12, when Judge Brinkema’s hearing can put the underlying IRS settlement under oath.3️⃣ 70 PERCENT OF GAZA — AND A MILITARY MERGER IN THE NDAAThe number three story on the countdown today: Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his army to seize 70 percent of Gaza and told his commanders to strike the southern suburbs of Beirut. That’s a ceasefire turning into occupation. And while the bombs fall, the House quietly wrote Section 224 into its 2027 defense bill — a measure that fuses the U.S. and Israeli militaries on AI, cyber, and “data fusion,” which means your military’s data becomes Israel’s.The Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman calls it deeper integration than the U.S. holds with any country on earth. Why it matters: only 30 percent of Americans back Trump’s Iran war, and Congress is binding the two armies tighter anyway — in a defense bill, where nobody’s looking. What’s next: watch the floor amendments before this NDAA leaves committee.2️⃣ OIL SHOCK — BRENT TOPS $97The number two story on the countdown today: oil just told you the war is back. Brent crude jumped past $97 a barrel and U.S. crude past $94 within hours of Iran threatening to keep the Strait of Hormuz shut. One-fifth of the world’s oil moves through that strait.Here’s what it costs you: gas is already up 45 percent since this war began. When the White House says “calm” and the market says “$97,” believe the market — it has no reason to lie.1️⃣ IRAN WALKS — THE CEASEFIRE COLLAPSESThe number one story on the countdown today: the February ceasefire is gone. Over the weekend U.S. forces struck Iran’s coast, and Iran fired two ballistic missiles at American troops in Kuwait — both intercepted. Then Iran’s Revolutionary Guard-linked Tasnim agency signaled Tehran would walk away from the talks and keep Hormuz closed. That last part is Iranian state media — we attribute it, we don’t bank it.Meanwhile Trump spent the weekend telling Congress the war was “terminated” — on paper, to beat the War Powers clock — while the strikes kept flying. The fighting is the fact. The “peace” is a press release. What’s next: the next 48 hours tell us whether Tehran makes the walk-out official.The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3 PM ET. If this is the reporting you want more of, subscribe — it’s how we keep doing it.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Cat: Poli-Psych, LeftieProf, Peter W Shuster, Deeanna Burleson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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BREAKING: Trump’s Name Must Come Off The Kennedy Center
2w ago00:53:57Tap to summarizeBy the time Dean introduced Scott MacFarlane, a federal judge in Washington had already ordered Donald Trump’s name peeled off the Kennedy Center within 14 days. By the time we got to story five, the Freedom 250 concert Trump is planning for the South Lawn had collapsed from nine acts to three. By the end of the hour, the day’s argument was sitting in plain view — everything he touches is rotting in his hands, and Washington is starting to peel away.5️⃣ FREEDOM 250 COLLAPSES TO THREETrump’s “Great American State Fair” was announced 48 hours ago with nine performers. By Friday it was down to three: Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, and Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory — and Williams may also bail.Morris Day and the Time said they were never contacted. Martina McBride said the booking agent misled her about who was running it — Trump’s “Freedom 250,” not the congressionally chartered “America 250.” The Commodores walked. Bret Michaels — winner of Celebrity Apprentice, a man who in Dean’s line “would suck the chrome off a bumper for Donald Trump” — said no.The lineup didn’t collapse over politics in the abstract. It collapsed because nobody wants the stink. Vanilla Ice is the floor.4️⃣ THE SOUTH LAWN LOOKS LIKE A TRAILER PARKWorkers are parking on the White House lawn. Cranes, gaudy flags, chicken-coop fencing on the public side of the wrought iron. Behind it: the East Wing hole that may one day become Trump’s bunker — with hospital, drone port, and glass roof — and the UFC-branded Freedom 250 stage going up alongside.Steve Schmidt called it a used-car lot. Dean called it a hoarder’s yard. Scott — careful as ever — called it the worst possible optics during a moment his community is afraid to fill the tank. Gas is eight dollars a gallon in parts of California. Inflation jumped to 3.8%. Beef is up. And Trump is building a circus on the South Lawn.Jackie Kennedy would have set fire to the contractors.3️⃣ BONDI BLAMES BLANCHE, REFUSES TO ANSWER ON TRUMPPam Bondi arrived at the House Oversight Committee Friday morning under DOJ supervision — Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and as polarizing a figure as the agency has, sitting next to her. Then she pointed at her former deputy. Todd Blanche ran the Epstein release. The redaction errors were his. The decisions were his.On every question that touched her conversations with Donald Trump about the Epstein files, Bondi refused to answer. As Zev put it on air: that sounds like a confession. The Republicans on the committee didn’t show. Only James Comer. Friday before a holiday weekend, no oath, no cameras, no recording — a closed-door designed to die in a transcript nobody reads.Outside the room, survivors were pushed aside in the hallway so Bondi could enter unaccosted. Liz Stein — who was twenty-one and a college senior when Maxwell and Epstein found her in 1994 — refused the country’s framing afterward, on camera: not Republicans versus Democrats, not conspiracy versus cover-up. The crime of sex trafficking. More than a thousand identified victims. A Department of Justice that redacts survivors’ names and protects perpetrators.2️⃣ JUDGE FREEZES THE $1.776B SLUSH FUNDFederal Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily blocked Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund Friday morning. A hearing is set for June 12.The fund is the proceeds of a settlement Trump engineered with the IRS against himself — taxpayer money running to his allies through a vehicle even Republicans are walking away from. Brian Fitzpatrick first. Then Mike Flood of Nebraska, an off-the-radar Republican in an off-the-radar district, on the record trashing it. When Mike Flood is naming the slush fund a slush fund, the politics have cracked.The fund froze the same morning a different judge took Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center. Two courts. One Friday. Both pushing back on a Department of Justice that has stopped doing the work.1️⃣ TRUMP’S NAME COMES OFF THE KENNEDY CENTERU.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper halted the planned closure of the Kennedy Center and ordered Trump’s name removed within 14 days. Trump’s regime had been preparing to shut the building down on the Fourth of July.The lead plaintiff was Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee who was muted during the board meeting when the resolution to rename the building was voted through. They left her on mute. She sued. She won. Preservation groups joined her and won with her.The regime will appeal — they always do — and the order may get peeled back. For now, the cameras will be there when the letters come down. The federal courts are doing the work the Department of Justice will not.THE PATTERNFive stories. One Friday. A judge takes Trump’s name off a Washington landmark. A second judge freezes the cash vehicle he built for his friends. A former Attorney General arrives with a DOJ minder, blames her deputy for the Epstein cover-up, and refuses to answer a single question about her conversations with the president. The South Lawn looks like a carnival hauled in for a one-night stand. The concert collapses because Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are the floor of who will still take the booking.The story for the next 6 months is fatigue. Not outrage. The kind that bleeds through every issue at once — the slush fund, the $300 billion he’s promising Tehran, the eight-dollar gas, the Epstein cover-up, the cars on the White House lawn. Trump’s presidency is in free-fall, and we’re all too tired to deal with it, but now is not the time to fade away, or he’ll take us all down with him Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Ang Traders, Grace Alexandra Hayden, Leah Anderson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell and Scott MacFarlane! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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THIEL RUNS FOR THE EXITS, JUDGE OKS VOTE GRAB, 60 MINUTES GUTTED, AND INFLATION SPIKES UP SHARPLY
2w ago01:01:26Tap to summarize5️⃣ EVEN THIEL FLEES TRUMPThe donor decamped. Peter Thiel — the venture capitalist who funded J.D. Vance into the vice presidency, the founder of Palantir, the PayPal-mafia patron whose money built the operational core of MAGA — has moved his family to a twelve-million-dollar mansion in Barrio Parque, met Javier Milei at the Casa Rosada this afternoon, and bought a tract of land near Punta del Este in Uruguay that observers suspect will house a bunker, making Argentina his third escape hatch after New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and a Maltese passport in 2022. The man who built the surveillance company the Trump regime uses to vacuum up Americans’ data, and whose Valor Equity Partners took a forty-million-dollar Epstein injection around the 2016 election, does not believe the country he funded will hold — and Buenos Aires is the kind of city a man chooses when his name is about to come up under oath in Washington.4️⃣ TRUMP’S FACE ON THE $250 BILLThe Washington Post reports that two Treasury appointees, Brian Beach and Andrew Brown, ordered the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to prototype a $250 banknote with Donald Trump’s face on it — specifically, the Fulton County mugshot taken when he was booked on the Georgia election-interference indictment — and the bureau’s printing director was reassigned within weeks of flagging that federal law forbids putting a living person on U.S. currency. George Washington was asked at Mount Vernon whether his face belonged on American money; he said no, because that, he said, was what kings do. Two and a half centuries later, Trump’s appointees are doing it anyway, with the booking photograph of the man as he stood charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election — and the very fact that the country now needs a $250 note is the symbolic confession that today’s dollar buys what yesterday’s hundred used to.3️⃣ TRUMP JUDGE GREENLIGHTS MAIL-IN VOTING POWER GRABFederal judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee, a Federalist Society alumnus — today denied the plaintiffs’ request to block the executive order Trump signed March 31 restricting mail-in voting and ordering DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Postal Service to build a federal voter list, ruling that the case is not ripe and the plaintiffs lack standing because the order has not yet caused them concrete harm. He invited them to return when it has, and a parallel case before Judge Talwani in Boston hears argument June 2 on the same question. The procedural posture matters less than the practical one. The executive order continues to operate, the federal voter list build continues, and the mail-in restrictions roll forward into a midterm. 2️⃣ NAVARRO STEERED $620 MILLION TO DON JR.ProPublica documented today what Denver Riggleman has been reporting at Narativ for four months: Peter Navarro — Trump’s senior counselor, the man Don Jr. visited in prison and to whom Don Jr. dedicated a book — personally called the Pentagon and directed the Office of Strategic Capital to lend six hundred and twenty million dollars to Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth startup whose investors include Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm 1789 Capital, which took an undisclosed stake three months before the loan was announced and watched Vulcan’s valuation run from roughly two hundred million to roughly two billion dollars in the months that followed. Across Vulcan, the drone parts firm Unusual Machines, and the one-point-six-billion-dollar Kazakhstan rare-earth mine, Eric and Donald Jr. have now built a portfolio worth roughly three-point-two billion dollars in eighteen months, almost all of it on sole-source contracts and federally-greased deals from their father’s regime — and the Republican Party that spent two years investigating Hunter Biden over a few hundred thousand dollars sits silent at this. Their silence is the answer.1️⃣ INFLATION HITS 3.8% — TRUMP STALLS IRAN DEALThe April inflation reading came in at 3.8 percent, and the back-to-back monthly jumps of 0.9 percent in March and 0.6 percent in April mark the sharpest two-month spike since the 2022 surge — worse than anything Trump produced during his first term — while the Iran deal that would cool the oil price sits unsigned on his desk, he tells reporters he “won’t rush” it, and overnight U.S. and Iranian forces traded fresh strikes east of Bandar Abbas as Tehran fired a missile toward Kuwait. Trump is not defending the U.S. dollar — he is deliberately breaking it, because his personal stablecoin and his crypto portfolio, which independent reporting now estimates at roughly twenty billion dollars in Bitcoin and crypto futures, depend on the dollar’s continued devaluation, and every American paying more at the pump and at the grocery store this summer is paying, very directly, into Donald Trump’s personal hedge against the country he is running.🎯 THE PATTERNTake all five stories together and the day tells itself. The donor is fleeing because he does not believe the country he funded will hold. The Treasury is engraving the president’s mugshot on a banknote that should not exist because the dollar is being deliberately gutted. A Trump judge is handing the regime the machinery to thin the voter rolls before the midterms. The president’s senior counselor handed the president’s son six hundred and twenty million dollars through a Pentagon loan. And inflation is hitting the worst short-term spike since the pandemic surge because the Iran deal that would cool it sits unsigned. Add this week’s firings at CBS — Sharon Alfonsi, Tanya Simon, Cecilia Vega, Dragan Mihailović, Matthew Polevoy, all gone under Bari Weiss — and the press is being purged at the same time the currency, the courts, and the contracts are. The same hand is moving every piece. It is not a series of scandals. It is one operation, run in plain view, and every American is paying the bill while the people running it move their money offshore.Read The Narativ daily at narativ.org. Subscribe to support independent reporting that the captured press will not do.Thank you Caro Henry, Robin Payes, Debbie Hupp, LeftieProf, Lalisa, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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Skeleton With a Wig
2w ago00:42:02Tap to summarize1️⃣ THE CABINET MEETING THAT WASN’TOn Tuesday the White House posted that Donald Trump’s six-month physical had “checked out PERFECTLY.” On Wednesday at 11:56 AM the president sat down at his own Cabinet table and proved otherwise. Within the hour he threatened to bomb a US security partner — “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up” — confused Oman with Iran, then confused Venezuela with Iran in the same answer, then claimed America produces double the oil that Russia and Saudi Arabia produce combined, a number that is not real. He looked gaunt. Dean called him a skeleton with a wig. The shoulders sunken, the cadence slow, the pauses long enough that the room had time to wonder whether the sentence was coming. Cardiologist Jonathan Reiner is on the record about “extreme somnolence.” Rick Wilson said it plain on television this morning — the president is dying. Marco Rubio looked at the wall. Pete Hegseth looked at the floor. The Secretary of State responsible for the Iran negotiation and the Secretary of Defense responsible for the war it followed sat shooting darts with their eyes trying to get the president to stop talking. He kept going. Trump told the country that allowing the cameras in was the most transparent thing any administration had ever done. He may well be right. Every American who turned on a television at noon today saw exactly what his staffers have seen for months: the president who leads the free world cannot lead a meeting.5️⃣ KENNEDY CATCHES SNAKES, BLAMES CIRCUMCISIONWhile the Cabinet meeting unfolded, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services uploaded a video of himself catching two snakes barehanded on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s Palm Beach patio. His wife, Cheryl Hines, can be heard begging him to stop — Bobby, please. Bobby told the camera the snakes were water moccasins, venomous; they were Black Racers, non-venomous; he did not know what he was holding. They were mating, which is why they bit him. Forty-eight hours later the same Bobby Kennedy sat at the Cabinet table and told the country circumcision causes autism, citing two studies whose lead reviewer called their methods “truly appalling.” This is the same Bobby Kennedy who cut the head off a whale and drove it home on his Jeep, who staged a dead bear in Central Park as a bike-accident victim, whose Vice President admitted yesterday he is on the “RFK nutrient diet” but will not say what is in it because “I’ll get in trouble for it.” The pseudoscience used to be a podcast bit. Now it is federal health policy. And the man delivering it does not know a Black Racer from a water moccasin.4️⃣ TEHRAN TURNS THE INTERNET ONEighty-seven days after Iran cut its national internet — the longest national shutdown ever recorded — Tehran flipped the switch back on Wednesday. Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref called it “the first step toward free and regulated access,” the word regulated doing the work. A regime does not reopen its country when it has lost. Iran has been letting only 25 ships through the Strait of Hormuz in a 24-hour window against a pre-war average of more than 100 — Tehran controls the tap. Their people will see the videos the regime wants them to see: the 42 US military aircraft downed, the USS Gerald Ford in dry dock for two years, more than two-thirds of US munitions and interceptors in the region depleted. Trump told his Cabinet “we don’t need oil, we don’t need the straits, we don’t need anything.” His allies in Europe and Asia need the straits. Inflation needs the straits. If Trump thinks he forced regime change in Tehran, he is delusional. The new leaders of Iran are the same — if not worse — than the ones before.3️⃣ ALFONSI WALKS, CBS BURNSSharyn Alfonsi’s last day at 60 Minutes was Saturday. She left after nearly twenty years at CBS and published a statement today naming editor-in-chief Bari Weiss as the executive who killed her CECOT segment on migrants vanished into El Salvador’s prison system. CBS leadership’s behavior, Alfonsi wrote, was “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” — “a chilling message to the entire newsroom.” She said she has learned exactly what it costs to hold the line; hold it anyway. Weiss was installed in October by Larry Ellison, Benjamin Netanyahu’s biggest American backer. Ellison’s son David runs Paramount-Skydance, one regulatory approval from buying Warner Bros Discovery and putting CBS News and CNN under one roof with Weiss above both. The Netanyahu interview that aired on CBS a few weeks ago was handpicked by Netanyahu’s office, edited with the prime minister signing off on every syllable. CBS News is no longer CBS News. It is a lobby group for Donald Trump and his friends and a news service for Benjamin Netanyahu. Sharyn Alfonsi went scorched earth on her way out because there was no one left inside the building to fight beside her.2️⃣ TRUMP HANDS TALARICO A GIFTWithin minutes of being declared the Republican Senate nominee in Texas, Ken Paxton — twice indicted on securities fraud, impeached by his own Texas House in 2023, accused of using his office to help a donor who employed his mistress, friend of the pedophile Adam Hoffman whom he helped cut a sweetheart deal, twice unfaithful to his pro-life Christian wife — was met by James Talarico’s first general-election video. “Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America. He embodies the broken political system we’re running against. It’s puppet politicians who serve themselves and their billionaire mega donors instead of serving us. It’s time to come together: the People vs. Ken Paxton.” Talarico is 37, a Presbyterian seminarian, a Texas state representative, and the best Democratic fundraising story in the country — $27 million in the first quarter, more than every Republican Senate candidate in any state combined. He launched the People vs. Paxton Tour tonight at Rich’s Houston, timed to the third anniversary of Paxton’s impeachment. Cook Political Report moved Texas from Likely Republican to Lean Republican within the hour. The Senate Leadership Fund’s $342 million in fall ad reservations did not include Texas at this scale; they planned for Cornyn. Trump may have forced Cornyn off the board, but in doing so he handed Talarico exactly the foe Democrats prayed for. The rescue money for Paxton comes out of Alaska, North Carolina, Maine, and Ohio — the four seats Democrats actually need to take the chamber. Trump handed his party a Texas problem and his opponent a national platform on the same Tuesday night.THE PATTERNTrump is losing his grip. The Cabinet meeting showed a president no longer sharp, no longer coherent, no longer able to recall the names of countries his own military is at war with. He told the room he doesn’t care about November, claiming Paxton’s win shows how much support he really has. He did not see the gift he had just handed Democrats. It is the same shoot-before-you-think instinct he used to start the Iran war he is now losing, the same instinct his acolytes used to pull Sharyn Alfonsi’s CECOT story and run her contract out, the same instinct Bobby Kennedy uses to grab snakes he cannot identify and federal health policy he cannot defend. Every political move has consequences. A president who cannot tell Oman from Iran is not thinking clearly about the consequences of his next one. Day 493. That’s why you need to know sooner.Follow Dean: deanblundell.substack.comThank you Ellie Leonard, Leah Anderson, Micheal Scott, Ms.Yuse, Rachel-We are Renee and Keith, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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Bombs Iran. Posts "PERFECTLY." Loses Alabama. Rewrites the Vote. Launders Through a Braque.
2w ago00:55:45Tap to summarizeToday’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Iranian officials told Washington Monday to ignore Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts about a peace deal. They are, in the words a Tehran back-channel briefing used and the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Axios, Reuters and Al Jazeera later confirmed, “political theater for a domestic audience.” By Tuesday afternoon that read covered every story on Fivestack. The president walked into Walter Reed and walked out posting one word in all caps. He pulled his full cabinet to Camp David for tomorrow because the strike he ordered Monday collapsed the talks he had claimed Friday were nearly done. He demanded eight Sunni states join the Abraham Accords on one phone call and the line went silent. A federal court in Birmingham — two Trump-appointed judges on the panel — told Alabama its gerrymander was not “particularly complex or close.” And our own investigation published this morning showed where the money funding Jeffrey Epstein’s operation came from: a 1911 Georges Braque still life, a $30 million round-trip wire, and a bank that sat on three sides of the same table. Theater up top. Machinery underneath.5️⃣ Walter Reed — Trump’s “PERFECTLY” and Nothing ElseDonald Trump walked into Walter Reed Tuesday and walked out posting one word in all caps on Truth Social: PERFECTLY. That was the entire disclosure of the fourth publicly disclosed medical exam of his second term — the third Walter Reed visit in thirteen months. He turns eighty in June. Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Dick Cheney’s former personal physician, went on CNN and laid out what the camera shows: hand bruises covered with makeup (the White House said “handshakes”; Reiner called the explanation “not credible”), severe acute-chronic edema in the ankles, daytime somnolence putting him to sleep in the Oval and possibly at Arlington on Memorial Day. April 2025 released full bloodwork. July gave a diagnosis and no results. October went vaguer still and the press office sat on it until December. Today: one word. The succession question lives in the room nobody is allowed to enter.TODAY’S GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT IS: Read it at GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.4️⃣ Court Tosses Alabama’s 6-1 Map — SC Republicans Defect to Save ClyburnA unanimous three-judge federal panel in Birmingham — two of them Trump appointees — refused Tuesday to let Alabama use its 6-1 congressional map for the November midterms, ruling in a 79-page opinion that the map “intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution” and that the question was “not particularly complex or close.” AG Steve Marshall promised an immediate Supreme Court appeal. Hours later in South Carolina, state Senate Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats to kill a similar GOP map that would have eliminated the last majority-Black district in the state — preserving the seat of Representative James Clyburn, the first Black member of Congress elected from South Carolina in nearly a century. The Supreme Court gave the GOP the rule last month with its Louisiana decision weakening the Voting Rights Act. The rule still required something Alabama could not produce: a map that did not intentionally crack Black voters.3️⃣ Trump’s Election EO — and the NDA They Want Every Federal Employee to SignTrump’s executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” is the document voting rights groups warned about for two years — it restricts voter access, punishes states that make voting easier, and grew out of a seventeen-page draft that proposed declaring a national emergency to seize federal control of the 2026 midterms. Stacked on top this week: a White House proposal requiring every federal employee, including contractors, to sign a nondisclosure agreement banning any information that disparages the president or the administration. The whistleblower carve-out is paper; the regime’s track record with whistleblowers is doxx, swat, hand the address down to the incel army. Federal employees work for the public, for Congress, for the law — not for the president. The line runs from the EO to the NDA to the DOJ’s “mega masters” deporting people who missed a court notice. One machine.2️⃣ Narativ Exclusive — Black, Epstein, and the $30 Million BraqueOur investigation published this morning begins with one wire instruction Jeffrey Epstein sent his lawyer Darren Indyke: “ok to wire the 30 million.” On the deadline day of a §1031 like-kind exchange — midnight, November 23, 2016 — a U.S. Virgin Islands trust Epstein controlled bought a Giacometti and Georges Braque’s 1911 Le Guéridonfrom Apollo co-founder Leon Black for $30 million. The “buyer” was Epstein. The “fee” was money Black had just paid him — round-tripped Southern Trust → Southern Financial LLC → the Haze Trust → back to Black. Bank of America sat on three sides of the wire. Six months later Christie’s sold the Braque for $8.8 million; the Haze Trust netted $7,725,000 in fewer than two hundred days. A Ukrainian MC2 model who flew to Sochi the week of the sale pocketed a $772,500 “commission” on a sale she did not broker. Senator Wyden’s Senate Finance minority calls it a sham conveyance: $1.3 billion in deferred U.S. tax that funded Epstein’s offshore operation. Black testifies to House Oversight on June 26.1️⃣ Trump Strikes Iran — Talks Pause, IRGC Vows Retaliation, Cabinet Moves to Camp DavidWhile Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi were in the air Monday bound for peace talks in Doha, U.S. warplanes sank two Revolutionary Guard speedboats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and struck missile launch sites near Bandar Abbas, Iran’s major southern port and naval base. By Tuesday afternoon Ghalibaf was on a plane home — talks paused. The IRGC promised a “decisive reciprocal response.” Supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father after U.S.–Israeli bombs killed the elder Khamenei on the war’s opening day February 28, told the region American military bases are no longer safe. Trump moved Wednesday’s full cabinet meeting to Camp David. Days earlier he had phoned the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain on one call and demanded they all join the Abraham Accords as the price of peace; Pakistan rejected him on the line, and the silence ran long enough that Trump joked into the line, “are you still there?” U.S. intelligence assessments leaked this month confirm Iran retains thirty of thirty-three missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, seventy percent of its mobile launchers, and seventy percent of its prewar missile stockpile. And the Iranians told Washington this week to ignore Trump’s Truth Social posts about the deal — political theater for a domestic audience.🎯 The PatternThe Iranian foreign ministry gave us the day’s frame for free. Political theater for a domestic audience — the Truth Social posts, the PERFECTLY medical exam, the all-Sunni Abraham Accords ask, the election integrity EO, the federal NDA, the gerrymander dressed in civil-rights drag. Theater for the cameras at the top. And underneath: Bank of America on three sides of a $30 million wire that funded Jeffrey Epstein’s operation. A federal panel in Alabama with two Trump appointees on it telling the state its gerrymander is racist on its face. State Senators in deep-red South Carolina killing their own party’s map to save Clyburn’s district. A chronic-insomnia diagnosis the White House will not let the doctor speak. A cabinet meeting moved to Camp David because the talks the president claimed had succeeded had just been shattered by the strike the president ordered.A man who lights the building, calls the fire department, and asks for the credit — and a country whose institutions are deciding, one Trump-appointed judge and one state senator at a time, whether they are still willing to play the part assigned to them.Day 492. That’s why you need to know sooner.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.SubscribeWe do this reporting because no major outlet will. Subscribe at narativ.org. The Leon Black–Epstein investigation is the first of several. The receipts are real, and the room is full.— Zev ShalevThank you Robin Payes, LeftieProf, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, Jeanne Elbe, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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FiveStack: Trump is Cornered at 31% Approval; Senate Kills The Billionaire Ballroom; House Prepares for War Resolution Vote
3w ago00:58:18Tap to summarizeA pollster tied to Fox put Donald Trump’s approval at 31 percent today. Twenty-five is the number that ended Nixon. A president at 31 and sliding can no longer make his own party afraid of him — and on Thursday, his own party stopped pretending to be. The Senate killed the billion dollars he wanted for his ballroom. The House moved to take away his power to wage war. Two dozen Republicans lined up to kill the fund he built to pay the people who stormed the Capitol. Five stories, one engine: a cornered president, and the arithmetic that cornered him.5️⃣ The Ballroom Dies on a TechnicalityTrump wanted a billion dollars of public money for the ballroom going up on the White House lawn. He buried it inside a spending bill and called it Secret Service security. He did not get it.He lost it on a technicality, which is the only way anything stops this White House anymore. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse walked through the kill: the White House is a public building under the Environment and Public Works Committee, and it sits on national park land under Energy and Natural Resources. Republicans wrote their reconciliation bill without instructions to either committee. Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich sent their lawyers to argue the funding was therefore defective. The parliamentarian agreed in a day. Bye-bye, billionaire ballroom.What’s left is the question of why a president needs a billion-dollar fortress at all. Trump talks about drone ports and snipers and keeping the world safe. The likelier read is the one Dean gave it: this is a bunker, and a man builds a bunker when he does not plan to leave. The same afternoon, a commission of his own appointees approved his triumphal arch by the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The fortress and the monument, waved through on the same day. Trump noticed only the second one — “I finally get good news,” he said.4️⃣ The Democrats Disown Their Own AutopsyFor months the Democratic National Committee sat on its own report into why Kamala Harris lost. On Thursday, Chair Ken Martin released it — and stapled a note to the front saying the party “cannot independently verify the claims presented.” He published the autopsy and disowned the coroner in the same motion.Martin did not release it because he wanted the answers. He released it because hiding it had become the bigger story. So the report — which faults the Biden White House for never preparing Harris and says she “wrote off rural America” — hit every front page with the party’s own fingerprints smudged across it. The Democrats had a reckoning to write and a plan to write. They published a draft they refused to sign.This is the only story today that did not break against Trump by breaking toward someone. On a Thursday when every lever of his power jammed, the party built to replace him spent the morning arguing with its own paperwork. A 31 percent president is beatable. He still has to be beaten by somebody.3️⃣ Good Night, ColbertStephen Colbert taped the final Late Show on Thursday night, 11 years after he inherited the desk and a decade as the most-watched host in late night. CBS calls the cancellation “purely financial.” Colbert calls it what it followed: Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over a 60 Minutes edit — a payment Colbert named a “big fat bribe,” made while the company needed federal sign-off on an $8 billion merger.This is media capture in its most comfortable form — not a censor, a spreadsheet. The company settles, the merger clears, the loudest nightly critic of the president goes dark, and nobody has to say the word. Bari Weiss now runs the newsroom. The ratings are gone. A historic network is dying a quiet, self-inflicted death.The miscalculation is that it works. Late night is where the men at the Yankees game get their politics — the ones who do not read the Post and would never call themselves political. Kill Colbert, and every host still standing inherits a reason to swing harder and a martyr to swing for. Jon Stewart, on Colbert’s couch this week, named the future better than any pollster: a day when the country “repudiates this putrid administration,” he said, and the joyful noise from its bowels makes Hungary’s break from Orbán “look like an Amish Sabbath.”2️⃣ One Vote From the End of the Iran WarLast week the House split 212 to 212 on whether to pull the United States out of Trump’s war with Iran. A tie fails, and the war went on. On Thursday the arithmetic moved: Jared Golden, the lone Democratic holdout, said he would vote yes, and the House headed back to the floor. The final count is unconfirmed as this posts — but the count was never the real story.Watch what actually turned those votes. Not conscience — Dean called it the butterfly effect, and the plainer word is self-preservation. Trump spent sixteen months primarying the Republicans who crossed him: Thomas Massie for wanting the Epstein files, Bill Cassidy for voting against him nine percent of the time. The survivors looked at a 31 percent president and did the math. A vote to claw back war powers is no longer a vote against a strongman. It is a vote with the wind.It comes the same day Tehran hardened. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, ordered that the country’s near-weapons-grade uranium stay inside Iran — the exact concession Trump promised Israel a peace deal would deliver. So Trump now sits between a Congress moving to forbid him from fighting the war and an enemy refusing to give him a reason to stop. He owns the Strait of Hormuz, he says. What he owns is a war he cannot win and cannot end — and gas prices that will carry it into November.1️⃣ The Slush Fund — and the Quiet HalfHarry Dunn and Daniel Hodges held the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The men who beat them were pardoned. On May 20, those same men started filing claims against a $1.8 billion federal fund — and Dunn and Hodges sued to freeze it before a dollar moved.Read the claims out loud. One January 6 defendant who served 1,075 days wants $30 million. Michael Caputo wants $1.8 million “today.” Mike Lindell went on Fox to ask for $400 million. This is not compensation for a wrong. It is a down payment on the next one — money to keep the people who stormed the Capitol once ready to do it again. Two dozen Republicans now say they will help kill it, more than the math requires.The money was never the deepest part of this. The same settlement that created the fund barred the IRS, forever, from auditing Trump, his family, or his companies — and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a memo handing the Trump family permanent immunity from financial crimes, past, present, and future. So ask the obvious question: what is inside those sealed returns that is worth this much trouble to bury? Narativ has spent years tracing the Epstein money, and that trail runs through tax filings and financial records exactly like the ones Blanche just sealed. The fund is the loud half of this story. The immunity is the quiet half — Trump shredding the records while the country argues about the payouts.THE PATTERNAdd up the Thursday. The Senate took the ballroom. The House moved on the war. Two dozen Republicans turned on the slush fund. Even CBS folding and the Democrats fumbling their autopsy run on the same current — a 31 percent president generates no fear, and a strongman nobody fears is just a man. None of it was courage. Every Republican who found a spine this week found it in a poll. But the machine Trump built to make himself untouchable — the fund, the immunity, the war power, the ballroom he never has to leave — runs on fear, and the fear is draining out. He spent the day asking for good news. He should have been counting votes.The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3 PM ET with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Subscribe free or paid at narativ.org — paid subscriptions push this reporting in front of more people.Thank you Lev Parnas, Ellie Leonard, This Will Hold, LC - Silence is Complicity, Story Carrier, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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FiveStack: The Realignment Is Here
3w ago00:33:15Tap to summarizeDEAN BLUNDELL WAS OUT TODAYFive stories led the Fivestack today, and they were not five separate stories. Together they show a government doing two things at once. Abroad, it is redrawing the map. At home, it is rewriting the rules so the people in charge never have to answer for anything.Here is the day, counted down.5️⃣ The Castro Indictment Is About Cuba, Not 1996In Miami today, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment of Raúl Castro — Fidel’s younger brother and Cuba’s former president — over the 1996 shootdown of two planes flown by the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Four men died in that attack. It happened thirty years ago. There is no new evidence and no new witness.An indictment like this does not arrive thirty years late for legal reasons. It arrives because someone needs it now. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, opened the press conference by calling the charges “the first step” of several. What has already happened tells you what the next steps are: a gas blockade choking Cuba’s fuel supply, and a CIA director in Havana over the weekend. A CIA director does not drop into a country being squeezed that hard unless Washington is planning for what comes after the government that runs it.What comes after is the point. Raúl Castro is in his nineties. He will likely never stand trial. He will be removed from Cuba, brought to the United States to face the charges, and the Castro era will end — the same way Venezuela’s ended, with Nicolás Maduro pulled out of his residence and jailed in Brooklyn and a compliant management class left to run the country. This is not a court case. It is Cuba being pried out of the Russian and Chinese orbit and turned into an American client state. Greenland, and Canada should pay attention4️⃣ Xi Hosts Putin While the Western Alliance DriftsWhile Castro’s indictment played in Miami, Xi Jinping hosted Vladimir Putin in Beijing. The official agenda was energy and arms. The real message was the picture itself.Days earlier, Donald Trump had made his own trip to Beijing and come home with an order for 200 Boeings and a verbal promise of help on Iran — and nothing else. Putin’s visit was staged as the contrast: Russia elevated, America diminished, the Moscow–Beijing partnership on full display. That partnership is neither new nor loose. Russia and China are working a thirty-year strategic plan built around a melting Arctic, which will cut the trade routes between China and Europe and between China and North America by roughly a third. China now funds Moscow — a reversal of the Soviet years — and the two move together on military and trade.Trump told the world Xi had promised to stop arming Iran. The weapons in Iranian hands are Chinese. So are the weapons in Russian hands. The country supplying the enemy in a war America is fighting is the country its president flew to visit. Cuba and Venezuela leaving the Russia–China orbit is one half of the realignment. This is the other half, and it is not moving America’s way.3️⃣ The “Ballroom” Is a Military BaseTrump has stopped calling it a ballroom. Pressed today on whether the funding was in trouble, he said the building is going up — and then described what it actually is. The roof is a drone port. The structure is bulletproof. Underneath it is a full hospital. “It’s also a strong military position for our people,” he said. A military installation on the grounds of the White House, with a ballroom on top as the cover story.He once promised private partners would pay for it and no taxpayer money would be touched. That was a lie. One billion dollars in Secret Service funding, tied to the East Wing, has been written into the Senate’s ICE bill — the border-enforcement package — where almost no one would think to look for it. The bill funds a sharp surge in deportations. It also quietly funds the president’s fortified compound.2️⃣ 42 Aircraft Down — A Cost the Pentagon HidTrump keeps saying he won the war with Iran. The budget says otherwise. Forty-two American military aircraft have been lost or damaged in the fighting, and the Defense Department never reported it.The number exists only because the Congressional Research Service reverse-engineered it from the war’s spending. The war was first priced at about $25 billion. A later reassessment added $4 billion. That $4 billion gap is the aircraft: four F-15E Strike Eagles, an F-35A, an A-10, seven KC-135 tankers, an E-3 Sentry AWACS, two MC-130J special-operations planes, an HH-60W rescue helicopter, twenty-four MQ-9 Reaper drones, and an MQ-4C Triton. Iran shot or knocked them down in its response to the original US–Israeli strike. A won war does not cost a country two dozen Reapers and a stealth fighter, and it does not require the Pentagon to hide the count.1️⃣ Trump May Never Face a Tax Audit AgainNarativ broke the core of this one yesterday, live on air. Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. The settlement created a $1.776 billion fund — money with no real connection to the leak, bundled into the deal anyway. Then, late yesterday afternoon, a rider appeared.The rider is the story. It shields Trump from any audit or scrutiny of his past tax returns — and not only his. His family. His corporations. The sister corporations. His partners. As written, Donald Trump never has to face a tax audit again. It may be challenged in court. He has spent decades beating every attempt to examine what he has done, and there is no reason to assume this time is different.What the shield buries is the point. In 2016, the year he won the White House, Trump paid $750 in federal income tax. And Narativ’s investigation into the Epstein financial network keeps hitting the same wall — the Maison de l’Amitié, the Palm Beach mansion Trump bought and resold to a Russian oligarch at a markup of more than $50 million, the proceeds reaching him tax-free in a deal long read as Russian money laundering. Proving any of it requires the tax records. The rider is built so that no one ever gets them.THE PATTERNFive stories, one direction. Abroad, the map is being redrawn — Cuba and Venezuela pulled toward Washington, the Western alliance drifting while Moscow and Beijing consolidate. At home, the president is making himself and his family untouchable: a war whose true cost is concealed, a militarized White House paid for in the dark, a tax shield with no expiration date.The realignment of power and the escape from accountability are the same project. You move the borders and you move the rules at the same time, and you count on each story being too big and too fast for anyone to hold. Watch who lines up behind it. This week Jeff Bezos sat down with CNBC, called Trump “more mature, more disciplined,” and said he was “on the side of America” — the same Bezos whose company paid $70 million for a Melania documentary worth a fraction of that. The powerful are not resisting the realignment. They are paying to be on the right side of it.Narativ is reader-funded and ad-free. Subscribe to get the Fivestack, Narativ Live, and our ongoing investigation into the Epstein financial network — including tonight’s special report, Beneath Zorro, on what really happened underground at Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Rick Elizondo | R3Zondo, Jai C. Porter🇨🇦, Skutt Hope, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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BREAKING NEWS: DOJ DECLARES TRUMP AND HIS FAMILY CAN'T BE AUDITED BY IRS, EVER
3w ago00:57:00Tap to summarizeToday’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Donald Trump’s former personal defense lawyer — sat in front of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday morning and did five things in one hearing. He defended a $1.776 billion fund that pays Jan 6 rioters out of the Treasury. He answered for Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal prison transfer, which followed his own private interview with her in Tallahassee. He was cornered, after months of refusal, into agreeing to meet the Epstein survivors. He quietly signed and posted a second document that gives Donald Trump and every Trump entity forever-immunity from IRS audits. And while none of it triggered the follow-up question it should have in the room, the Office of Government Ethics revealed last week that Trump personally traded stocks 3,700 times in the first quarter alone. One hearing. One man. Five fronts.5️⃣ HOW THE PRESS IS BURYING THE AUDIT PARDONRead the major wires Tuesday afternoon. Most of them led with the slush fund — the $1.776 billion fund that pays Jan 6 rioters. The audit pardon, the second document Blanche signed Tuesday that gives Trump’s family and businesses forever-immunity from IRS audits, ran most often as a paragraph nine inside a Trump-IRS settlement story. The New York Times broke it as an “expanded agreement.” Reuters called it “an updated provision.” Most cable coverage Tuesday afternoon did not mention it at all. The Intercept called it “theft far worse than Watergate.” Fox didn’t run it.GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOTThe biggest story of the night is being filed as a footnote on the bigger story of the morning. Ground News flags the stories one side of the press is ignoring and shows you the framing gap on the same screen — bias rating, factuality score, source ownership, all built in. Tuesday is exactly why we use it. 40%off the Vantage Plan below:4️⃣ TRUMP TRADED 3,700 TIMES IN Q1 — CRAMER GOES SILENTThe U.S. Office of Government Ethics disclosed last week that Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Reporter Judd Legum, on Substack, has been tracking the receipts — Apple shares bought the day Trump publicly praised Apple, Thermo Fisher shares bought the day Trump toured a Thermo Fisher plant. The cleanest insider-trading paper trail an American president has ever produced. CNBC’s Jim Cramer was handed the news on air Monday and could not speak for ten seconds. Wall Street’s loudest voice did not have a word.3️⃣ BLANCHE, CORNERED ON THE EPSTEIN SURVIVORSIn a separate exchange in the same hearing, Blanche was pressed on whether the Justice Department would meet with the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. The senator asked him directly: “Will you reach out to them?” Blanche tried legalism. “Any lawyer can reach out to the Department of Justice.” The senator pressed again — would Blanche personally call the victims, since the lawyers had already tried. Blanche, eventually, after a minute of dodge: “Of course, yes, absolutely. That would be great. I would like to meet the survivors.”2️⃣ “THE PRESIDENT’S CONSIGLIERE”A senator pressed Blanche on his trip to Tallahassee last year, where Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell — an interview under “queen for a day” immunity where she could say whatever she wanted, without consequence. “Why did he send you down to talk to her?” the senator asked. Blanche: “He didn’t send me. I went.” The senator: “Yes, I do, frankly. Because you know...” “You’re a very gifted lawyer. But from my perspective, you have very little faith to the Constitution and the people of America, and you’re the president’s consigliere.” Blanche: “Your perspective is completely wrong, Senator, respectfully.” The senator: “Well, I think the facts will prove me right.” 1️⃣ TRUMP’S GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD The New York Times published a second document Blanche had signed Tuesday and quietly posted to the Justice Department’s website. Section C: “The United States releases, waives, acquits, and forever discharges each of the plaintiffs from...” pursuing any claim, examination, damages — and the affiliated-parties clause extends to “trusts, parents, sister or related companies, affiliates and subsidiaries.” Every Trump entity. Forever. No more audits. Brian Morrissey — Treasury’s general counsel, confirmed by the Senate seven months ago — walked out of the building Monday night. He wasn’t resigning over the slush fund. He was resigning over the perpetual cover. Mitchell, live on Narativ: “Todd Blanche doesn’t even have the authority to say that about the United States. He is not the United States.” The lawsuit was dropped before any judge could review a settlement. What Blanche signed is a contract. Contracts break. State attorneys general are already being briefed. The lawsuits are being drafted.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Today’s Fivestack was brought to you by Ground News. Forty percent off the Vantage Plan at groundnews.com/fivestack.Thank you Suzanne Sky, Skutt Hope, PJ Schuster, Micheal Scott, Courtney M 🇨🇦, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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