Lost in the sauce: Stories Trump probably hoped you wouldn't notice while he 'flooded the zone'

Happy Friday. It is Friday, at least.
Tonight, it is April 18th, and that means tonight is the 250-year anniversary of Paul Revere's famous midnight ride to warn that the British troops were coming. The secret signal went up in the steeple of Old North Church in Boston.
The code was planned in advance. They would hang one lantern in the steeple if the troops were coming by land.
They would hang two lanterns in the steeple if the troops were coming by sea. The signal that Paul Revere saw was two lanterns.
They were coming by sea. They were coming across the Charles River.
And Paul Revere set off on horseback a race to Lexington and Concord to warn everyone, to rouse the militia. And it was a successful warning.
The colonists were ready the next morning at dawn for what became the first battle of the Revolutionary War to free ourselves from British rule, to free ourselves from a king. Tonight, Old North Church in Boston, which still stands, they rang their bells at 6 p.m.
tonight, and churches all over the country rang their bells to commemorate the start of our revolution. It happened everywhere all over the country tonight at 6.
I was working prepping the show, and I heard the church down the block from me ringing its bells. I ran outside and instantly burst into tears because I'm a complete sap.
But if you heard your local church, or you heard anybody on street corners, anybody out ringing bells today, that was why. It's to commemorate the start of the American Revolution 250 years ago.
When I mentioned this anniversary on last night's show, you might remember we showed pictures of Old North Church in Boston. What we showed last night, though, when we had those images of Old North Church, those weren't live shots.
We were just showing you the file photos that we had on hand. I found out after we got off the air last night that while we were doing that segment on the show, this is actually what at that moment the steeple of Old North Church looked like.
Something was being projected on it as I spoke those words last night on this show about this church. You can see it says there, this is a projection on the Old North.
Let the warning ride forth once more. Tyranny is at our door.
And then it's a projection so they can change it over to other things. And then there was this one.
This is quite good. I kind of can't believe I didn't think of this myself.
One if by land, two if by D.C. Old North Church in Boston.
Tomorrow, on the 250th anniversary of those first battles in our revolution, the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, the battles that we won, that started the war, that we won to free us forever from ever suffering again under the tyranny of a king. tomorrow on that 250th anniversary.
We are expecting another Saturday with protests

in every state in the country. I think at every state capital in the country, but also in general in more than a thousand locations all across the country.
Much like we saw two weeks ago at the hands-off protests, people saying no kings. National Day of Protests tomorrow, April 19th.
No kings. People expressing their opposition to this presidency.
In the last 24 hours, we've seen Americans protesting in Eagan, Minnesota, against cuts to the VA. We saw Americans protesting within the last 24 hours in Annapolis, Maryland, protesting just outside the high walls of the U.S.
Naval Academy after the academy banned books from its library on orders from the president. WBAL covering that protest in Annapolis and also posting a list of the banned books on their website to accompany their story, which actually is very helpful.
That's the list of books that were removed from Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy.
In Foley, Alabama, in Deep Red, Alabama, there was a peaceful protest and also a counter-protest outside an event where Republican Congressman Barry Moore was speaking. We saw students and faculty at colleges all over the country yesterday protesting Trump's threats to universities and colleges and his arrests of international students, protests at American University in Washington, D.C., protests at Cal State Long Beach, protests at UCLA, protests at UC Berkeley, protests for the second time in a week at Florida International University in Miami, protests at the University of Albany in New York, protests at Northwestern in Illinois, which is one of the universities that has been targeted already by Trump.
He's trying to take away federal funding and grant funding from them. Also protests at Columbia University, which very famously has been targeted by Trump.
Also protests in downtown Manhattan near the campus of NYU. Also protests at the University of Houston in Texas and at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
We also just saw another large protest outside the ICE headquarters in New York. We saw a large protest in Elizabeth, New Jersey, over local fears by local residents that Union County, New Jersey, where Elizabeth is, they may contract with ICE to put an immigration prison there, a so-called detention facility there for ICE local residents coming out and saying that they will not stand for it.
A couple of weeks ago, you might remember us reporting on a big feisty protest at a little tiny airport in New Haven, Connecticut. They've got an airport there called Tweed Airport.
And there's a small airline called Avelo, A-V-E-L-O, that runs out of that airport, among others. They market themselves, I guess, as like New Haven's hometown airline.
I don't know exactly what that means. But bottom line, they're marketing themselves as a consumer airline for the general public.
but they are also simultaneously signing a huge contract with the Trump administration to use Avello flights and aircraft and their flight attendants and everything for deportation flights. I don't know how you market yourself to the general public while telling the general public, oh, also our flights and flight attendants and planes are being used by Trump to send people to other countries.

But these protests against Avello Airlines at New Haven Airport, I thought was going to be a one-off thing. It's now becoming a regular thing, and they are getting bigger over time.
At this latest one, protesters were joined by the U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal.
They're alongside the. And, you know, there is there's no shortage of stuff that the Trump administration is doing that would be a stop the presses moment in any other administration.
It's just that he's doing so many of these things at once that they can get lost in the sauce. Right.
I mean, Trump just this week has revealed a budget plan that will entirely eliminate the Head Start program everywhere in the country. This would have been a month's worth of headlines in any other administration.
I mean, Head Start is preschool, and Trump is going to cut it to zero. Nearly 50% of all Head Start funding in the whole country goes to rural areas, in which there often is no other child care option available for young parents.
Head Start is it. And Trump is zeroing out.
Head Start. Zero.
He's eliminating it. This week, Trump has yanked all AmeriCorps volunteers off their projects all across the country.
AmeriCorps is like the Peace Corps, but here at home, it sends young people aged 18 to 26 all around the country to do disaster response and conservation projects and education. They do things like building housing for veterans.
They just do good works on a voluntary basis in every state in the country. And they do it in exchange for helping pay for college.
It is considered to be a 100% successful program. It is broadly popular and non-controversial with both parties.
Trump himself supported it and funded it in his first term. But now, inexplicably and without warning, he has ended all AmeriCorps volunteer assignments right now in the middle of this week.
Pulled all those people out of what they were doing all over the country. Effective immediately.
No warning. No explanation.
And they are cutting virtually all the staff of the agency that oversees the volunteers and make sure the program runs. Why is Trump doing that? Do you remember Trump running for office saying he was going to kill AmeriCorps? Get rid of all those kids building housing for veterans.
Yeah, and we're going to get rid of preschool too. Am I right? I mean, you remember that from his rallies? They were hard to pay attention to.
They were long, but I don't remember that. Who's clamoring for this? AmeriCorps volunteers are already suing Trump to stop what he's doing.
Now California's governor, Gavin Newsom, says the state of California is going to sue him over this as well. We shall see.
But that's, like I said, one among many. Trump has now fired so many people at the National Weather Service that the agency yesterday sent out a blanket notice advising their staff that they're going to need to reduce or suspend weather balloon launches all over the country.
Weather balloon launches make weather forecasts accurate. The former administrator of NOAA tells USA Today that that factor and the staff shortages imposed by Trump are already degrading our weather forecasts in this country.
Washington Post reports that the number of meteorologists on staff at some local forecast offices is now half their normal staffing or less in multiple locations, and that is permanent and likely to get worse with what else Trump has in store for the National Weather Service and NOAA. Quote, as severe storm season ramps up, it's the offices in places such as Kansas City, Omaha, Louisville, Des Moines, and Grand Rapids that are facing the most significant staffing shortages.
And on top of that, to stop people who work in these agencies from letting the press and the public know about what Trump is doing to the Weather Service, to stop people from talking about how their weather forecasts are degrading because of what Trump is doing to the Weather Service, the Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is now, quote, installing monitoring software on NOAA employees' devices to track their communications so they can make sure they're not talking to the public and not talking to the press about the way Trump is decimating the weather service. Yesterday, the Trump administration tried to force through a basically total reduction in force at the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
It would have effectively fired the entire staff of the agency. The staff of that agency, I will tell you, is feisty as heck.
They got the firing notices yesterday afternoon. They were all supposed to be fired as of six o'clock tonight, but they figured out a way to get themselves in front of a federal judge this morning before today's 6 p.m.
deadline. And that judge this morning blocked the firings.
The judge, quote, told attorneys for the government she was deeply concerned about the apparently rushed efforts to implement a reduction in force of approximately 1,500 employees at the CFPB, which was set to take effect at 6 p.m. tonight.

The judge said the move by the Trump administration could be in direct violation of an injunction she had put in place already.

That injunction required terminations at the agency to be carried out only after a particularized assessment of individual employees' performance. The judge told attorneys from the Trump administration that this reduction in force thing that they tried to force through today, quote, is not going to happen in the meantime.
The judge ordered the Trump administration to advise agency leadership that they need to make that clear to employees who had been informed they would be ousted. In other words, the judge is telling CFPB, not only are you not firing those people today, which you were trying to do, but you are going to tell them that they are not being fired because they all got notices from you saying they're fired as of today.
You must notify them that they are not being fired. ABC News reports, quote, many of those employees sat in her courtroom Friday and several broke into tears following the hearing.
The judge in this case has also set a hearing for a week and a half from now, April 28th. She says she wants testimony from at least one Trump administration official and potentially one member of DOGE about what they tried to do here with trying to fire the whole agency.
She says she's basically going to get to the bottom of whether they've violated her court order with this attempt to fire these people, which again, they did not get away with, which she blocked and which they now have to answer for as potentially having violated a lawful court order. Like I said, those CFPB employees are feisty.
Every time there's a court hearing, they are filling the gallery. Every time there is anything going on with their agency, every single thing that they have tried to shiv that agency with, they have not only fought back, but they have shown up in person.
And it matters, and it is working, and they are still there hanging on. There is no shortage of fight in no shortage of people for no shortage of things that Trump is doing.
But one issue in particular keeps rising to the top, and it's because of the extremism of what Trump is doing specifically to immigrants. And it is just lighting up the country right now.
We've been covering this all this week in particular, but it really is every day. In Washtenaw County, Michigan this week, local residents packed into a county commissioner's meeting.
They filled up the room. They filled up the overflow room.

They filled up the hallway outside of both after the Trump administration threatened that county and demanded that that county needed to effectively inform to the Trump administration on local residents and even on county employees, presumably so people could be targeted by Trump's immigration agents.

The county is showing no signs of budging on that, and the community is backing them up on it. They packed this hearing.
You can see this headline in the local news and MLive here. Quote, residents make emotional pleas to support immigrants as feds demand information.
Residents packed a meeting of Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners to express support for the immigrant community. Quote, we do not want you to cave from the pressure you are under.
This video, you will remember this video. It is likely seared in your mind already.
This was a doctoral student from Tufts University being grabbed off the street by Trump's masked agents, screaming in fear as they grabbed her hands and chained her and put her in an unmarked vehicle. Her name is Ramesa Ozturk.
She was a Fulbright scholar and a PhD student. She's here in this country on a student visa.
She has been in an immigration prison in Louisiana since she was grabbed off the street by agents. But today, a federal judge ordered that she must be flown out of Louisiana.
She must be flown back to New England, specifically to Vermont, so she can attend a court hearing there in person about her case. A federal judge in Vermont ordered that she must be brought back to New England by May 1st.
Her hearing is May 9th. Today in Boston, a different federal judge issued an injunction that blocks Trump from deporting people to random third countries to which they have no relationship and to which no court has ordered them to be sent, at least not without giving that person a chance to make the case that they might be in danger if they were sent there.
And I'm not going to read you the whole thing. I know it's my want to read court rulings at length.
I'm just going to read you just a paragraph from this ruling. But this is one of those rulings, you can almost feel like it might be written in all capital letters.
It's not, but it has that vibe. It is making the point of this ruling very, very, very clear.
Let me read to you what the judge said. Quote, defendants, meaning the Trump administration, defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation.
All nine sitting justices of the United States Supreme Court, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States Congress, excuse me, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States Congress Congress, excuse me, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, I'm going to start again, sorry, all nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this court all disagree with that contention from the defendants. Now, this ruling will stop some of what Trump is trying to do in sending people to random countries they're not connected to.
The class to which this ruling applies includes any non-citizen who's had a final order of removal from this country. So it's people who have gone through the immigration process and from a court received an order of removal.
That, however, is not the circumstance for most of the people who the Trump administration has been shipping to El Salvador, to the lawless, bizarre, draconian forever prison there from which the U.S. government purports to not even have the power to remove people and return people that it admits it's sent there by mistake.
The Washington Post reported late last night that the whole basis the Trump administration has cited for why it's using that Salvadoran prison, for why it's using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to send people to that prison, why it's using the Alien Enemies Act to deny any kind of due process at all for the people they're shipping to that prison. The Trump administration's justification for doing that is because, in their minds, what they've affirmed in saying that's why they're using that law is that they contend that the United States is at war with Venezuela.
And that's the justification for Trump using that law. And that comes as a surprise, right? Did you know we were at war with Venezuela? The whole legal basis for the Trump administration claiming the right to do this in the way they've been doing it is that they say there is this criminal gang in Venezuela, this Tranda Aragua gang, and the Trump administration's contention is that that gang, that criminal gang, isn't just a gang.
Well, it is a gang, but they're also another thing which gives Trump kind of magic legal powers. Their contention is that that gang has supposedly been, like, deployed here on orders from Venezuela's president.
like he has sent them here as a little undercover army to invade us at his command on behalf of the government of Venezuela as a way of that country waging war against our country. And so they're like an army that we're fighting against because we're at war with that country.
I know it's, right? That's seriously their legal rationale for what Trump has done with this El Salvadoran prison. Okay.
Here's the Washington Post late last night. Quote, headline, U.S.
intelligence contradicts Trump's justification for mass deportations. Quote, the National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States' 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in mid-March, proclaiming without evidence that Tren de Aragua is perpetrating an invasion of the United States at the direction of the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Now for the last quote, the intelligence product found that the gang, quote, does not operate at the direction of Venezuela's leader.
This finding builds on U.S. intelligence findings from February as well, that the gang is not controlled by Venezuela.
The legal rationale for sending all these people to this prison in El Salvador appears to be a very tissue-thin fiction. But a U.S.
senator just today got back from El Salvador from trying to get one of his own constituents out of that prison. And now tonight, the ACLU has been fighting in an emergency court hearing in Washington, and now in an emergency application to the United States Supreme Court, to try to stop Trump from what they think is yet another effort by the Trump administration tonight to prepare more planefuls of men to be shipped off to that prison.
This is a legal drama, a legal emergency that has been unfolding tonight. It is unfolding now as we speak.
We're going to get the latest on it and expert help to understand it next. Stay with us.
It's President Trump's first 100 days and MSNBC's Alex Transcription by CastingWords Do you think now that he's pardoned everybody, he can count on this group of people again? Search for Trumpland with Alex Wagner wherever you're listening and follow. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to listen ad-free.
The small town of Anson, Texas, has a population of just over 2,000 people. Since 2019, Anson has been home to a big immigration prison, a 1,000-bed, what they call an ICE detention facility.
They call it the Blue Bonnet Detention Center. The following account was given last night by an immigration lawyer who's representing someone who's being held at that facility, a teenager born in 2006 who was applied for asylum in this country.
The lawyer says his client, the teenager, quote, was detained in Virginia on March 14th by immigration agents along with other relatives. Agents stated that a photograph found on Facebook proved the teenager was a member of Tren de Aragua and that one of the persons in the photograph had a gun.
The teenager pointed out to the agents that the gun in question was in fact a water pistol. Sometime between April 14th and April 16th, the teenager was transferred to Blue Bonnet Detention Facility in Texas, as was his father.
Last night, the teenager's lawyer received notice through the young man's father that the teenager had been taken away by agents. The agents returned for the teenager's belongings.
As he passed by, the teenager's father could see through a window that his son was crying. As the son and the agents were passing, the son held up a paper to the window.
Another detainee who spoke English was able to read that the paper said deportation. For the past month, the Trump administration has been using the same wartime law that was used for Japanese internment camps during World War II to arrest men from Venezuela and then fly them to a prison in a foreign country without any legal proceeding of any kind.
Their legal pretext is a hard-to-follow claim that somehow the United States is at war, like we were in World War II, I guess, except we're at war with Venezuela, which none of us knew. But that regardless means no due process for these men that they are arresting and imprisoning abroad, potentially for the rest of their lives.
About a week and a half ago, the U.S. Supreme Court told the Trump administration that if it wants to use that law, it needs to give the people it wants to fly out of the country the opportunity to go before a court, needs to give them the opportunity to contest the grounds for their removal.
But according to the ACLU, last night, a bunch of people in that detention center in Anson, Texas, that blue bonnet detention center, including that teenager, were told that they were going to be deported, quote, within 24 hours. The ACLU says some of them had allegedly, quote, already been loaded onto buses headed to some airport to fly them out of the country.
Just before we got on the air tonight, NBC News got this video of one bus and one van leaving that detention center, that Blue Bonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. We don't know who, if anyone, was a passenger on that bus.
We don't know where that bus was going. This afternoon, the ACLU rushed to four different courts, including the U.S.
Supreme Court, to try to stop those people from being shipped out of the country, possibly to that notorious prison in El Salvador, where the Trump administration claims it has no authority to get people out once they are there. Which is really something, given that it's giving them no day in court, no due process at all, before it sends them there.
Tonight, a federal judge in Washington was the first to weigh in. That judge held an emergency hearing.
A Trump administration lawyer told the court that he had no knowledge of any planes set to depart with immigrants on it tonight or tomorrow, but he said the administration reserves the right to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act. The ACLU explained that the Trump attorney's inability to share departure plans in court tonight, quote, does not give us much confidence that people will not be deported right away.
The judge reported, excuse me, the judge responded that he was, quote, sympathetic to the ACLU's concerns, but did not believe that he had the authority to rule on this matter because none of the plaintiffs are being held in Washington, D.C. Like I said, this is a fast-evolving story.
This is a legal drama that is still unfolding as we speak tonight. The question right now is, will the Fifth Circuit U.S.
Court of Appeals act tonight? Will the U.S. Supreme Court act tonight before, potentially, more immigrants are flown out of this country, perhaps irreparably and irrevocably, to a foreign prison from which the U.S.
says they can never be retrieved. If the Fifth Circuit or the United States Supreme Court does not act tonight, what do we believe will happen to the men in that Texas detention center and possibly on that bus? Joining us now is Aaron Reichland-Melnick.
He's an immigration attorney and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. He's been closely following this case.
Mr. Reikland-Melnick, thank you very much for joining us.
I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm not an expert in immigration law. Let me just ask you, first of all, if I explained any of that wrong or missed anything important about what we understand about this case thus far.
I think you've got the core of it. There are people that may be on a bus or may be waiting to be put on buses and that the government has said they will not send them to El Salvador or deport them under the Alien Enemies Act tomorrow.
But they haven't promised that they won't put them on a plane at 12.01 a.m. on Sunday morning.
In terms of what the district court judge said tonight in Washington, D.C., he expressed that he was essentially sympathetic to the case that was being made by the plaintiffs here, but he felt constrained by how the Supreme Court has ruled in this in cases of this type already. What do you make of the judges essentially saying tonight that he was inclined to act but felt his hands were tied? Yeah, this is Judge Boesberg, the same judge who the Supreme Court previously reversed his temporary restraining order, which had blocked the use of this ancient law in the past.
And what the Supreme Court said was that these cases need to be brought in habeas corpus relief. Now, the ACLU has said in front of Judge Boesberg, look, this is something slightly different.
We want you to rule that the process that the government is using is wrong. They need to use a different process, but that's a bit complicated.
And so Judge Boesberg said, at this moment, with the fact that you have all these other pending cases in different places in Texas, which is closer to where the action is going on, I don't feel comfortable at this point to weigh in. But he did get the government to commit to at least that there supposedly isn't going to be any flight tomorrow.
Right. And we should make clear Judge Boesberg is the judge that initially ordered the first

planes that were heading to El Salvador to turn around mid-flight and the Trump administration

didn't do it. We're still now litigating the consequences of that.
But I feel like because that water is under the bridge, and the men who were on those planes that didn't turn around are still and perhaps forever now locked up in that El Salvadoran prison, because since then, the Trump administration has articulated with glee that they feel utterly powerless to ever retrieve anybody from that prison. And once they're there, the U.S.
washes their hands of them and El Salvador can do with them as they will. And they don't think those people will ever get out.
The Supreme Court is aware of all of those things right now. Frankly, the Fifth Circuit U.S.
Court of Appeals is aware of all of those things right now.

If they believe, if they believe, as the ACLU suspects, that those planes are going to leave

Texas and fly yet more men irrevocably to that El Salvadoran prison, if not tomorrow,

then Sunday, if not Sunday, then Monday, do you believe the Supreme Court, in the reasoning that we've seen from them thus far, will be inclined to try to stop Trump from doing that? I think the Trump administration is very clearly trying to push the boundaries of what the Supreme Court ruled. Because in the Alien Enemies Act case, the Supreme Court was extremely clear.
Every person subject to this law has a right to due process. And the Supreme Court said that the one thing the Trump administration has to do if it wants to use this law is ensure that people are given notice that they're going to be subject to the law, and they're given enough time, reasonable time, and in a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief.
So enough time to actually go to a court and file a lawsuit. The ACLU says this should be at minimum 30 days, which is what people were given in World War II.
The Trump administration seems to be taking the position that reasonable time could be less than 24 hours. And of course, these are people who don't even necessarily speak English, who are handed notices in English telling them they're about to be deported under this law.
So the ACLU is saying you have to give more time. And if you don't, you're breaking what the Supreme Court said you have to do.
Right. You're breaking the principle that you said was operative here, even for these cases.
Yes. Thank you for helping us understand that.
Aaron Reikland Melnick is an immigration attorney and a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. And I just want to say, Aaron, that your public communications on this, your statements online, your use of social media to explain some of these things as they've been going.
We've got lawyers on staff. We talk to all sorts of different people and reporters and our own team about this stuff all the time.
You've been really helpful at explaining the stuff to the public in a way that I think makes a lot more people understand it than otherwise would. So I thank you for doing that.
And I'd encourage you to keep that up. It's a real service to your country.
Thank you very much. All right.
We got more news here ahead tonight. Stay with us.
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Sign up for MSNBC Daily at msnbc.com. It's just a little throwaway line and a much bigger story, but sometimes those little throwaway lines are very helpful and they really stick with me.
I'll show you what I mean. Here's the headline in the Wall Street Journal.
The headline is, Anxious trading partners promised to buy American to stave off Trump's tariffs. You've seen a million articles like this, right? The bulk of the article under that headline is about what you would expect.
Again, you've seen a lot like this. It's about various countries trying to strike deals with the U.S.
so they can get themselves some relief, some favored treatment from Trump amid his gigantic, catastrophic world tariff experiment. So the countries are trying to get themselves some kind of relief.
And among those discussed in this article is the nation of Vietnam. According to The Wall Street Journal, Vietnam has been trying to fend off harsh treatment under Trump's tariffs by, number one, buying American jets.
Number two, allowing the Starlink Internet service that's owned by Donald Trump's top campaign donor, Elon Musk, to operate inside their country. Weird that they decided that was a good idea.
And number three, here's the kicker. Vietnam has also, quote, decided to accelerate the approvals for a $1.5 billion Trump resort in Vietnam.
Oh, weird how that might get you better treatment from the U.S. government.
I mean, I'm sure Vietnam has lots of good reasons to make sure a Trump Organization resort project is moving forward. Lots and lots and lots of them.
It's weird that they think that might be correlated with the U.S. government giving them some sort of favorable treatment.
But let's just stick a pin in that one for a second. There's another story I want to tell you.
And I will tell you, even though I'm going to use the word

cryptocurrency in telling you this story, don't worry. You don't have to understand anything about

cryptocurrency in order to get this story. But here it is.
A couple of years ago, the Justice

Department accused an online cryptocurrency company, that's called Binance, of being basically

a supermarket for crime. DOJ accused Binance of being a giant money laundering hub for terrorists and cyber criminals and customers in sanctioned countries like Iran and Russia.
Binance pled guilty. They paid over $4 billion.
That was the largest fine ever in the history of crypto. Its founder spent four months in prison.
Ever since, Binance has been overseen by U.S. government-appointed monitors who ensure that Binance is no longer a supermarket for crime.
It is now following the law and making sure Binance is only operating overseas and not operating in the United States at all. Now, Binance, naturally, they would very much like to get out from under that oversight, and they would very much like to operate in the United States again.
But to do that, they need to get these pesky government monitors off their back. They need the U.S.
government to decide they are out of the doghouse. And it would make their return easier, of course, if their founder were no longer a convicted felon.
Well, when Donald Trump won the election last year, Binance sensed opportunity. This is also from the Wall Street Journal, quote, At an Abu Dhabi crypto conference last December, weeks before the inauguration, in the whales-only backroom accessible to attendees who had paid $10,000 for a VIP pass, Binance's founder mingled with Trump's sons, Trump's son Eric and Trump allies.
Eric was there to promote World Liberty, a crypto venture the Trump family had founded months earlier. that makes doohickeys.
Well, Binance, if they partnered with the Trump family in this enterprise, they could get Trump doohickeys in front of hundreds of millions of potential customers, which would, of course, mean lots of profit for the Trump family. That is what Binance is offering to the Trump family.
What does Binance want? Well, their convicted felon founder, quote, has been pushing for a Trump administration pardon, has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon. And the Wall Street Journal reports, quote, executives from Binance met with Treasury Department officials last month and discussed loosening U.S.
government oversight on the company. Quote, Binance executives are optimistic the Trump administration will acquiesce.
Oh, they are, are they? Maybe that's because as president, Donald Trump has already pardoned a whole slew of crypto felons and his Justice Department has just disbanded its crypto policing unit. And also because Trump's SEC halted an investigation of another crypto executive after that executive dumped $75 million into the Trump family crypto company.
So if the Wall Street Journal's reporting on this bears out, this is not even like, this isn't even like textbook corruption, because you would not need to get to the level of school that uses textbooks in order to get to this level of understanding

of corruption. This is like a coloring book of corruption.
This is like corruption that

you could understand if you'd never been to any school ever anywhere. In any other time

in American history, this scandal, one-tenth of this scandal, would be the end of a presidency.

But this is just like day that ends in Y. This is our life now.
We'll be right back. So Donald Trump's nominee to lead the IRS is this man.
His name is Billy Long. He is not an accountant.
He's not a tax lawyer. He has no background in tax, like, you know, like bookkeeping or math or anything that would be a typical credential for somebody who was appointed to lead the IRS.
His only relevant credential appears to be that he used to be a member of Congress. He then tried to run for Senate in 2022 and he lost his Senate race.
Billy Long is one of the last big Trump nominees who has not yet been confirmed. And that's bad timing because, oh boy, the work is really piling up over at the IRS.
But look at this. Just this week, two Democratic senators on the Finance Committee wrote to the IRS asking the agency to open a criminal investigation into a handful of companies that they say have been selling tax credits that don't actually exist.
And that obviously is problematic on its face, but it's even more concerning that Billy Long, Trump's choice to run the IRS, has, quote, direct financial ties to some of the companies implicated in this alleged scheme. The senators write that one of the companies, a company called Lifetime Advisors, hired Billy Long to do substantial work for it.
The senators say the other company, called White River Energy, paid Billy Long thousands of dollars for some kind of referral fee. Now, the senators say that it's unclear what role, if any, Billy Long played in promoting these bogus tax credits that allegedly don't exist.
But either way, these senators want the IRS to launch a criminal investigation into these firms that ran what they called a fraudulent scheme, including these firms that reportedly have direct financial ties to Trump's pick to run the IRS. And you kind of wish that was the end of the story, but of course it isn't.
I mentioned that Billy Long tried to run for Senate and lost a couple years ago. During that race, Billy Long loaned his campaign a bunch of his own personal money.
And when he lost, the campaign was in debt, which means the campaign owed money to Billy, to him personally. He's out of it, out of pocket himself.
As of last year, two years out from that failed Senate campaign, Billy Long was still in the hole by a lot. $130,000 he had given to his campaign.
His campaign had never been able to pay it back. And that's where this really gets interesting because, let's see, November, Trump gets elected president.
December, he announces Billy Long as his choice to run the IRS. And then look what happens next.
Quote, after Trump named Billy Long to head the IRS, Long's campaign committee suddenly raked in nearly $137,000 in less than three weeks in January. Money that Long then used to pay himself back, according to disclosure documents filed this week.
This was reported by the news organization The Lever this week. But I mean, great news for Billy, right? He got all his money back.
Trump gets elected in November. He names Billy in December, January.
Ka-ching! Right after Trump names him to run the IRS, all of a sudden that long-standing debt, money owed to Billy, gets paid off. Where did that money come from? Quote, at least one-third of the money came from donors working at firms in the tax consultancy industry or involved in major tax-related legal battles, including financial advisors for White River Energy and Lifetime Advisors.
Those are the ones that paid Billy Long thousands of

dollars, who two U.S. senators say should be investigated by the IRS for fraud.

All his debts cleared. Amazing.
Right after he gets picked to run the IRS.

We asked for comment from Billy Long and from the companies involved. We have not heard back.

We'll let you know if we do. More ahead tonight.
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