Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
When Trump sneaked off Air Force One in a catering cart, he left behind everyone except his beloved personal aide, Natalie Harp. The Justice Department arrested a leading expert on far-right extremism who testified to the January 6 committee about the Proud Boys. Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House press secretary job, ending a tenure defined by lies. And the Trump administration paid Eswatini $5.1 million to hold a Cuban man in a maximum-security prison with no charges.
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Trump Saved His Beloved Personal Aide Over the Secretary of State
Marco Rubio is fourth in line for the presidency and he got bumped for the blonde aide.
Trump sneaked off Air Force One and boarded a decoy jet after the Secret Service flagged what the administration called a credible assassination threat from Iran on the way back from the NATO summit in Turkey. To escape the plane packed with press and staff, he and a select few hid in a catering truck.
Among those secretly chosen to accompany him on the military flight were Natalie Harp, his personal aide, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, and Director of Oval Office Operations Walt Nauta. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was left behind on the Qatari-gifted jet, as were Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent.
Trump says the switch was the Secret Service’s idea. “I just follow what they like to do,” he told reporters. He added that the plane he left behind “was at greater risk.”
Journalists on that plane were told to keep their windows closed for the entire flight. When one asked why, Trump explained it was “because you’re probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleaze bags that we have to deal with.”
The DOJ Arrested a Woman for Fighting the KKK
Being in a hate group in America has never been easier, and it was already pretty easy.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department arrested Heidi Beirich, the former chief financial officer of the Southern Poverty Law Center. She has been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.
The charges stem from the government’s ongoing case against the SPLC, filed in April over a now-ended program in which the group paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist organizations. The indictment alleges Beirich was in a romantic relationship with one of the informants, and that $140,000 of donor money somehow ended up in their joint bank account.
The informant program ran for decades and the SPLC says law enforcement knew about it the entire time. The organization has filed court documents showing it shared intelligence from the program with federal agencies, and that the information was used to put violent extremists in jail.
The arrest was announced by FBI Director Kash Patel, who previously severed the bureau’s relationship with the SPLC, calling it a “partisan smear machine.” Trump has called the SPLC “one of the greatest political scams in American History” and said the case should somehow invalidate the 2020 election.
Last week, a Trump-appointed judge denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the case as a vindictive prosecution and also denied its request for discovery into how the charges came to be, meaning the SPLC cannot access the internal DOJ communications that might prove the case is political. Multiple former prosecutors have called the charges lacking — even the conservative Society for the Rule of Law has filed a brief saying the prosecution is vindictive.
America Will Soon Be Lied to by Someone Else
Karoline Leavitt is stepping down to spend time with her kids, meaning she’ll now be lying to a smaller audience.
Trump announced Wednesday that the White House Press Secretary is resigning at the end of the month to “spend more time with her beautiful young children and family.” He called her one of the best press secretaries in the history of the office.
The record she leaves behind tells a different story. Leavitt lied that Trump had blocked $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, blamed a deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight that killed 67 people on DEI, called the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax,” and called a Maryland father wrongly deported by the administration a “foreign terrorist.”
Leavitt is the fifth woman in a high-ranking position to leave the Trump administration this year, following Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Leavitt’s replacement has yet to be announced, but all the others were replaced by men.
At eighteen months, Leavitt was Trump’s second-longest-serving press secretary. None of the others made it a year.
U.S. Paid Eswatini $5.1 Million to Hold Immigrants
Roberto Mosquera used to sit on his patio and tell his sister that Trump was going to change everything. Well, he wasn’t wrong.
Mosquera came to the United States on the Mariel boatlift from Cuba in 1980 when he was 12. He took a plea deal for a shooting in his twenties, serving nine years in prison. When Cuba refused to take him back, the government held him for six more years, until the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that indefinite immigration detention was unconstitutional.
Mosquera was released in 2002 on the condition that he check in with immigration authorities once a year. He complied for over two decades, while he built a life as a plumber, a born-again Christian, and a father of four.
Mosquera went to renew his work permit last June and was instead met by ICE agents. He was held without access to a lawyer for two weeks, then loaded onto a jet with four other men and flown to the Kingdom of Eswatini, a country he had never heard of, 8,000 miles from his home in Florida. He later found out that the Trump administration gave the nation $5.1 million to hold them.
Mosquera is still in a maximum-security prison in one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, with no charges, no appeal, and no way home. He went on a 30-day hunger strike demanding a lawyer and stopped only when his organs began to fail. He has since developed glaucoma and lost most of his vision in both eyes.
When a reporter reached him by video call, Mosquera asked one question: “Do you think I’ll ever get out of here?”
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