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Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board voted to close the venue after a federal judge blocked his latest attempt to rename it. His FBI has been accused of intimidating journalists whose coverage he doesn’t like. Meanwhile at the FBI, an agent tried to open a criminal investigation into Elon Musk over the DOGE productivity emails but was shut down. And Pennsylvania has now reported four measles deaths this year.
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Kennedy Center Board Votes to Close After Judge Blocks Trump’s Name
He would rather see a national landmark sit empty than let it exist without his name on it.
Trump’s hand-picked board of trustees at the Kennedy Center voted Tuesday to immediately shut down the renowned performing arts venue for renovations. The vote was taken just minutes after U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled that Trump could not put his name on the building or rename the plaza after himself.
Cooper wrote that such changes require authorization from Congress. He called the board’s resolution a direct challenge to both his court order and existing federal law.
This is the third time since February the board voted to close the building, each time citing emergency repairs. Trump himself has threatened to tear down the entire center if he is not allowed to put his name on it.
The Justice Department argued in court filings that blocking Trump’s name from the building would send donors fleeing and leave the center without funding to survive. The financial crisis, of course, began only after Trump attempted a takeover.
Democrats Flame Kash Patel For Using the FBI to Intimidate Journalists
If you’ve ever written negatively about Kash Patel, maybe check on your mom.
Senate Democrats on Tuesday accused the FBI director of abusing his agency’s power to go after reporters who wrote stories he didn’t like. The accusation came during a contentious four-and-a-half-hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Patel and several Democratic senators exchanged personal insults.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey noted that the FBI has raided reporters’ homes and subpoenaed their mothers after they wrote about the president. He then pointed to New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson, who the bureau ran a federal database search on after she wrote a story about the SWAT team that Patel assigned to escort his 26-year-old girlfriend.
In April, Patel filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic after the magazine published a story accusing him of excess drinking. The FBI then launched an insider threat investigation to identify who had spoken to the reporters.
Booker called Patel a “rogue FBI agent.” Republicans responded by accusing Booker of expecting special treatment, which is apparently what we’re calling accountability now.
FBI Agent Tried to Investigate Musk Over DOGE Emails
If this is what weaponization looks like, the weapon has jammed.
Also during Patel’s hearing on Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released internal FBI records showing that a special agent, Kevin Gounaud, had attempted to open a criminal investigation into Elon Musk in February 2025. No one from the bureau ever followed through.
Gounaud wanted to investigate the email from DOGE that asked federal employees to list five things they had accomplished that week. Musk had promoted the message on X and warned that silence would be treated as a resignation, a threat he later had to retract after backlash.
In an email to colleagues, Gounaud asserted Musk had broken information security rules and used his ownership of the social media platform X to profit. He volunteered to draw up the paperwork to open a case and find a prosecutor willing to take it.
Since then, DOGE goons have accessed sensitive databases at the Social Security Administration, the Treasury Department, and the IRS without following basic privacy protections. A whistleblower recently revealed that one copied half a billion records to a personal storage device.
None of it has been investigated by the FBI. That didn’t stop Grassley, a Republican, from framing the whole thing as evidence of anti-Trump bias within the bureau. It’s a new kind of persecution where nobody ever gets prosecuted.
Pennsylvania Reports Fourth Measles Death as CDC Refuses to Count
It took sixty years to eliminate measles and about eighteen months to bring it back.
Pennsylvania has reported a fourth measles death in 2026, making it the state’s deadliest year for the disease in more than three decades. One of the first two deaths, reported in August, was an infant.
All four were unvaccinated. Roughly half of the state’s 393 cases this year have been concentrated in Lancaster County, which has a large Amish population and some of the lowest vaccination rates in the state.
Nationally, the case count has surpassed 2,900 for 2026, already exceeding last year’s total of 2,289. Kindergarten vaccination rates for MMR have declined from 95.2 percent during the 2019-2020 school year to 92.4 percent this year, leaving an estimated 280,000 without protection.
The CDC, now headed by Trump appointee Dr. Erica Schwartz, refuses to count any of the four deaths. The agency says it doesn’t have enough information to determine if measles caused them, a position that public health officials across the country have strongly rejected.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Bari Weiss’s Revamped 60 Minutes Debuts to Its Worst Premiere Ratings This Century. Sunday’s Season 59 premiere of 60 Minutes drew 7.94 million viewers, down 21 percent from last year’s opener and the lowest season-opening audience for the series since at least 2000. It also lost a third of its audience in the key 25-to-54 age demographic that advertisers care most about. Over the past several months, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and her newly hired executive producer, Nick Bilton, have overhauled the show, letting go of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega after both objected to being ordered to inject right-wing talking points into their reporting. Scott Pelley, a longtime correspondent, was fired after questioning the firings at a staff meeting.
Thomas Massie Is One Republican Away From Forcing a Vote on More Epstein Files. Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie is now one GOP signature away from the 218 needed to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II. Massie accused the Department of Justice of illegally withholding more than 3 million documents and heavily redacting those it has released. The bill would require their release and allow victims and state attorneys general to sue if the DOJ doesn’t comply. On Monday, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, who is retiring, signed the discharge petition, bringing the total to 217. The House is going on recess for the midterms on Thursday, which means a vote would have to come in a lame-duck session, or under new leadership, if Democrats reclaim the majority.
Jimmy Kimmel’s Banned Interview With James Talarico Has Nearly 7 Million Views. Jimmy Kimmel last week announced that ABC would not air his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico due to threats from Trump’s FCC. Instead, the interview was uploaded to YouTube where it has since gained almost 7 million views. CBS received the same treatment in February when Stephen Colbert tried to book Talarico on his show, only to have the network block it. Trump’s FCC overturned a decades-old precedent by deciding that late-night shows do not get an exemption from the equal-time rule, which requires that stations give airtime to all other candidates in a race.
U.S. Clean Power Installations Hit an All-Time Record in the Second Quarter of 2026. Between April and June, the clean energy industry built more power than ever in a single quarter in American history. The biggest contributor was SunZia Wind in New Mexico, now the largest land-based wind project in the country, which took eighteen years to permit and build. SunZia connects its 916 turbines to California’s grid via a 550-mile transmission line and is estimated to generate $20.5 billion for the surrounding region over the life of the facility. All of this occurred as the Trump administration was doing everything it could to slow it down.
