5️⃣ Leon Black Faces the Committee — $170 Million for “Tax Advice”

Leon Black sits for House Oversight tomorrow, and Zev set the stakes: $170 million paid to Jeffrey Epstein over the years for what Black calls tax and estate planning. Narativ has reported that much of it ran through tax swindles — including the art-deal scheme the show investigated a few weeks ago, which Zev called one of the most egregious examples of how Black and Epstein conspired to steal from the American taxpayer.

Zev set expectations low for the testimony itself. Black, he said, will follow the Bill Gates script — a 30-year friend of Epstein who claims he never knew, who will obfuscate, define the word “me,” and offer no real accountability. But Black is 1A in this story alongside Donald Trump: the financial crimes reach back to the 1987 crash, the $62.5 million he paid the US Virgin Islands in 2023 to escape prosecution, and the money that moved between Black and Russian women. Black has been photographed beside Vladimir Putin, and he traveled to Moscow with Trump in 1996. The money, Zev noted, keeps leading the same direction.

4️⃣ The Real Cost of Venezuela Comes Home

Two earthquakes leveled the towns west of Caracas on Wednesday night. The toll climbed through the show — at least 188 dead, and rising — in a country the United States captured in January and has occupied ever since. Marco Rubio has already sent resources, and Zev noted the policy itself is sound: you endear yourself to a people you now hold.

But Dean landed the contradiction hard. He reminded viewers of Hurricane Helene’s wreckage still unrepaired across North Carolina, of the Texas floods that killed children at Camp Mystic, of FEMA money Trump refused at home — while resources flow to Venezuela to protect oil. When you seize a nation, you seize its rubble too. The bill for empire doesn’t stop when the cameras leave.

3️⃣ A War He Calls “Over” Keeps Climbing

The Iran war’s price tag won’t stop rising. The administration sent Congress an $87.6 billion supplemental — $21 billion for munitions, $17.3 billion in operations, $12.1 billion classified that no one outside the room can see. And that number, Zev stressed, leaves out the biggest line: nine US sites hit in the first 48 hours, carriers in dry dock, dozens of aircraft destroyed. The real cost runs toward $200 billion.

Dean pushed it further — fold in the restitution and the deal-servicing meant to reopen Gulf investment, and the figure approaches half a trillion dollars for a war Zev called foolish to enter and worse to lose. That’s money, the two noted, that could have funded healthcare, the affordable housing Trump just abandoned, or the debt. Instead it went to a war the president promised he’d never fight.

2️⃣ Two 6-3 Rulings in a Day — The Court Guts TPS and Asylum

The Supreme Court spent the spring letting lower courts slow Trump down. Thursday it stopped pretending — twice. One 6-3 ruling ends Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, stripping protection from roughly 350,000 to half a million people who have built decades of American life and now face removal. The second revived border “metering,” capping how many asylum seekers can apply each day and turning the rest away at the door.

Zev flagged the human edge: Syrians sent back may face a hostile new regime as potential opponents; Haitians return to the most poverty-stricken country in the hemisphere. Dean named the design beneath the law — not protecting Americans, but vilifying everyone else, a cudgel sharpened since “they’re eating the pets.” Justice Sotomayor, dissenting from the bench, said the ruling “extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”

1️⃣ The Postmaster Enforces an Order the Courts Already Struck

The breaking story, and the one the show argued matters most: Postmaster General David Steiner testified Thursday that the Postal Service will withhold mail ballots from any state that won’t surrender its voter rolls. Asked directly by Senator Gary Peters whether USPS would still mail ballots to a non-complying state, Steiner answered: “No.” A federal judge struck down the underlying executive order a day earlier. Steiner is enforcing it anyway.

Dean called it plainly — an attempt to run January 6th through the mail — and read the order aloud: DHS directed to mash Social Security, immigration, and State Department records into citizenship lists; USPS, built by Congress to stay out of politics, turned into the gatekeeper of who may vote by mail. Combine that with the SAVE Act, he warned, and you build double jeopardy for anyone without a passport or driver’s license, anyone who changed their name, every woman who married last year and no longer matches a federal list. Zev traced the wider machine — the career election officials at DHS replaced by 2020 deniers, Pulte now atop ODNI, a multi-department assault on November. The courts may not stop it in time. That’s the alarm.

THE PATTERN

Read the five together and the shape is unmistakable: a regime spending half a trillion abroad while refusing FEMA at home, deporting the desperate while pardoning El Chapo’s people, and rewriting the rules of the next election through a mailroom and a barcode. Zev and Dean kept returning to one word — colonialism — and one comparison: Vladimir Putin. The cost of the Trump presidency, Zev said, will dwarf even the $80 trillion Narativ has tracked. But Dean closed on the read beneath the desperation: these are cornered rats, a fingernail from The Hague, and that fear is exactly why all of it is happening at once. Stay calm. Call your senator. Fight.

Narativ publishes the full investigation of Trump’s USPS midterm play today. Subscribe at narativ.org to read it.

Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Uncomfortable Truth by Monica, LC - Silence is Complicity, Grace Lovelace, julie elder, 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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