FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Denver Riggleman came on to break down five stories. He left having broken news of his own: the former Republican congressman and intelligence officer told Zev Shalev he is “at 99%” to run for governor of Virginia — and to run unaffiliated, as a one-man “party of the rational.”The reveal landed at the end of an hour that kept circling one idea. A president too weak to wait — collapsing abroad, sinking at home — is rushing everything, blaming everyone, and selling a peace nobody believes, while the guardrails that used to catch him are being pulled out one at a time. Filling in for Dean Blundell, Riggleman brought the credential that made the day’s intelligence story personal: fifteen years in the Air Force, a posting at the NSA, and four oaths to the Constitution. Here is how the five fit together.5️⃣ The Green-Slime LagoonTrump painted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue” for the 250th. The dark coating cooked the water, the algae bloomed, the paint peeled — and the president blamed vandals he cannot produce, routing reporters to the Interior Department and an investigation of “six people” while offering no evidence of his own.Riggleman read it as the whole administration in miniature. “An inveterate liar is going to inveterately lie,” he said. “It’s like, don’t believe your lying eyes.” The decision tree behind the pool, he argued, is the same one behind everything: “How does it help me? How does it help my buddies? How does it bind them to me? And where do we make money?”Zev called it the work of “the distraction president” — a man spending taxpayer hours on the color of a pool while the country slides. The vandals always appear. The proof never does.4️⃣ Pulte’s PurgeA housing-finance executive with no intelligence background now runs America’s spy agencies. Bill Pulte, the new acting Director of National Intelligence, began purging staff this week and ordered 300 to 400 of the roughly 1,000 employees at the National Counterterrorism Center identified for firing — the one center built to stop the next 9/11.This is where Riggleman stopped laughing. He worked alongside the NCTC in uniform, and he tied the cuts directly to the Iran fallout: an administration raising the risk of terror attacks while gutting the ability to detect them. “Whether you get shot on purpose or shot on accident, you’re still getting shot,” he said. He went further — calling the combination “treasonous,” and arguing there is no longer “baseline truth in the intelligence apparatus anymore. It’s whatever Trump wants.”His verdict on the larger pattern: the people who tell a president inconvenient truths are being replaced by people who won’t.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.3️⃣ The World Already VotedPew’s new 36-country survey put numbers to the freefall. A median of 23% express confidence in Trump’s handling of world affairs — below Putin, below Xi. Seventy-four percent disapprove of his handling of Iran. In Canada, the share calling the U.S. a reliable partner fell from 83% in 2022 to 35% today; in Germany, “considers our interests” cratered from 60% to 23%.Zev played the tell: Trump explaining why he signed the Iran deal at Versailles — “he knew my weakness, because I think Versailles is one of the great places.” A president drawn to palaces while allies walk away. Riggleman’s worry ran past the polling to the people behind it: that the world will not trust America “for generations,” because America is the country that elected this twice.2️⃣ The Deal That Isn’t a DealTrump says Iran agreed to inspections; Iran’s foreign minister says no procedure exists. Asked when inspectors would actually arrive, Trump said it himself: “At the appropriate time. There’s no rush.” Strip away the public squabbling and the talks are advancing — but on Tehran’s terms, with the nuclear question pushed to the next stage of a 60-day clock.Riggleman refused the fantasy that Iran will now play nice “after we assassinated their head of state.” The reported $300 billion, he warned, flows straight back into the IRGC and Iran’s proxies — and likely back to Trump-aligned companies through reconstruction, Starlink, oil and Hormuz tolls. His sharpest line cut at the strategy: “Think about how inept you have to be to be the country that actually invoked sympathy for Iran.” His read on the timeline was bluntly political — the rush is about the midterm hangover, not human lives, which is why the deal is unlikely to truly close.1️⃣ The Counterforce — and the WedgeFor years the question was where the answer to Trumpism would come from. Tonight it was on the ballot in New York, where Zohran Mamdani spent his capital to drag the party left — and the dividing line, race after race, was Israel. Zev’s call: support for Israel becomes the single biggest issue into November, a binary that follows voters from the primary to the general. Riggleman agreed it is “one of the three legs of the stool” being eaten away — alongside the economy and healthcare cuts in red districts, and the Epstein files he insists won’t go away.But Riggleman, who once took AIPAC money and felt the leash, warned the left against its own version of the right’s mistake: “reciprocal radicalization.” Zev likes democratic socialism as policy — he lives with it in Canada — but doubts its candidates survive a general electorate. His answer was the news of the night: a serious look at an independent run for Virginia governor, a state where a plurality can win and national money can flow, refusing AIPAC and JPAC alike. “What if I just told the truth? What would that look like?”THE PATTERNRiggleman’s grimmest line was also his thesis: “They won the money game. We have to win the future of America game.” The pool, the purge, the polls, the deal and the primary are one story — a corrupt, cornered administration converting the government into a revenue stream while dismantling the institutions that could stop it, and using Israel to split the opposition. He put the stakes in plain terms: the midterms still likely break toward Democrats, the House flips, the Senate lands near 50-50 with Vance the tiebreaker — but 2028, he said, “terrifies me.”And then the man who took the oath four times said he is 99% in. Whether a former spy running up the middle in Virginia is a dream or a strategy, the hunger he is betting on is real. The counterforce to Trumpism may not come from the left or the right. It may come from the exits.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Amy Gabrielle, Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, and many others for tuning into my live video with Denver Riggleman! 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

Five stories, one motion. On Thursday the president pulled America back from almost everything it has held for eighty years — the alliance that contained Russia, the war he says he ended, the courts that check him, even the Israeli hawks he used to arm. Each retreat left a space, and into every one of them someone else is already stepping. That was the through-line of today’s Fivestack.5️⃣ Vance Tells Israel “You Can’t Kill Your Way Out”For the first time, a senior Trump official said it to Israel’s face. JD Vance — who helped negotiate the Iran framework — named Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and dismissed their revolt against the deal as a “freakout,” warning Israel to “wake up and smell the reality.”It’s a real crack in a coalition that has run on lockstep support for Netanyahu’s government. Trump wants the war closed so he can bank the win; Israel’s far right wants it open. Watch the daylight widen — this is the rare fight where the administration is to Jerusalem’s left.4️⃣ Four Presidents, One Stage — Obama Opens His Center on JuneteenthWhile the sitting president gutted NATO, four former presidents shared a stage in Chicago. Barack and Michelle Obama dedicated their $850 million center with Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Bono performing and Clinton, Bush and Biden in the seats; the doors open to the public Friday, on Juneteenth.Dean took the turn the moment earns: this is the counter-image to the rest of the board. One definition of America was being dismantled in Washington today. Another was being enshrined on the South Side.3️⃣ “Your Moscow Will Burn” — Ukraine’s Biggest Strike on the CapitalA day after Trump shrugged him off at the G7 — “it has no impact on us, we’re thousands of miles away” — Zelensky made Moscow impossible to ignore. Ukraine’s largest drone barrage of the war shut all four Moscow airports and set fire to a refinery feeding 40 percent of the city’s gasoline.“If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well,” Zelensky said. Russia’s hard-liners answered by demanding the Kremlin “strike the enemy mercilessly.” The front line hasn’t moved in months; the war is climbing into the skies over both capitals — and that escalation is exactly what a vacuum invites.2️⃣ The Court Decides Who Is a CitizenThe Supreme Court closed its term on the question of who counts as American. Trump v. Barbara tests the order he signed on day one stripping birthright citizenship from children born here to parents without permanent status — a 160-year guarantee written into the Fourteenth Amendment.Whether the justices strike the order outright or simply shrink the power of any single judge to block him nationwide, the term ends the same way: with the presidency larger than it was. The same bench is also deciding how freely Trump can fire the heads of independent agencies.1️⃣ Hegseth Guts NATO — Trump Hands Putin the OpeningThe biggest story of the day was the quietest in tone and the loudest in consequence. In Brussels, Pete Hegseth cut — effective immediately — about a third of the U.S. forces Washington would send to Europe in a crisis, including strategic bombers allies can’t replace for years, and opened a six-month review of the rest. He called NATO “a paper tiger and a one-way street” and mocked allies for spending on “gender equity and climate change.”The assets he pulled are the exact ones that would blunt a Russian push into the Baltics, Poland or Romania. This is the authoritarian tell of the day: America retreating from the alliance built to contain Russia, on the same morning Russia’s capital is burning and its hawks are calling for a wider war. Trump didn’t end a war today. He cleared the path for the next one.THE PATTERNPut the five together and the shape is unmistakable. NATO, Ukraine, the Court, Israel — across every front, Trump is pulling America inward and downward, and the power he gives up doesn’t vanish. It moves to Moscow, to the bench, to whoever is willing to fill the space. The counterweight stood on a stage in Chicago today, four presidents deep. The question for the summer is whether that’s memory or a map.Subscribe to Narativ — the Fivestack runs Monday to Friday at 3 PM ET. Know Sooner.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Truthsayer, Jeanne Elbe, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈, Kim G, 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

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Donald Trump spent Tuesday losing. He lost a Vice President’s defense on live daytime television, lost his closest foreign ally in an Israeli courtroom, lost a court fight over his immigration freeze, and — on the show’s biggest story — signed away a decade of American pressure on Iran in a deal he admits he hasn’t read. On The Fivestack, Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell counted five stories down from five to one, and every one of them pointed the same direction: a regime running on cover stories, and an opponent who keeps winning in court while the President signs surrenders abroad.5️⃣ Vance Wanted the List. Now He Buries It.JD Vance went on The View to sell a memoir about faith and walked into an Epstein buzzsaw. He told the hosts “we’re not holding anything back,” then spent two minutes explaining why two and a half million pages remain sealed. He called himself “kind of a conspiracy theory on the Epstein stuff,” waved off the New York Times report that he ran Situation Room strategy on the files, and kept reaching for the same alibi: “I was inside the room.”Ana Navarro did the work the Vice President would not. Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act under duress, she said, only after Republican women — Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — refused to fold, and after he dragged Boebert into the Situation Room to break her. “That’s all true,” Vance conceded. As the team has reported, Trump has since spent months destroying the four Republicans who forced those files open. Two of them are the women Navarro named.4️⃣ Netanyahu Loses the RoomWhile Vance defended the President, Benjamin Netanyahu was losing in a Jerusalem courtroom. On the last day of cross-examination in his fraud trial, the Israeli Prime Minister’s pardon request collapsed and Netanyahu began shouting at the bench — “you’ve done something never before done” — until the judge told him he’d answered the question and to move on.Zev read the courtroom defeat against the Iran deal Trump is about to sign over Netanyahu’s objections. Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe told the show Netanyahu will do anything to derail the peace, because the war is the only thing keeping his coalition — and his freedom — intact. Netanyahu says the deal signed Friday “will not bind” Israel. The man who helped put him in power is walking away from him in real time.3️⃣ Narativ Exclusive — The First Lady’s Russian FriendThe show’s exclusive came from a story Zev published hours before air, built on an interview with Amanda Ungaro, a former partner of Paolo Zampolli. Zampolli is the modeling agent who brought Melania Knauss to America nearly thirty years ago, stayed close the entire time, and now holds an ambassadorship for global partnerships he received, Zev reports, through her. According to Ungaro, the First Lady and Zampolli remain close enough to text constantly.Peeling back who Zampolli is, Zev’s investigation found at least two Russian women working for him out of a UN sports body he runs — one tied closely to Vladimir Putin, the other, known as “Lana,” who Zev reports previously worked for Jeffrey Epstein. The crossover between Epstein’s world and Zampolli’s, long blurred, comes back into view, along with the open question Zev put on the table: in a friendship this durable and this useful, is Zampolli the First Lady’s handler? The reporting also raises a harder question — whether Melania Trump was involved in the deportation of someone close to Zampolli who may have known too much. Zev said the piece was checked and re-checked fact by fact before it ran.2️⃣ Blindspot — The Court Loss the Left IgnoredThis week’s Ground News Blindspot was a Trump defeat the left barely covered. U.S. District Judge John McConnell vacated the USCIS directive that froze asylum, green-card, and work-permit decisions for 39 countries — ruling the freeze likely unlawful. By the coverage breakdown, the right carried the story and the left looked away from a win on its own side.It is the cleanest example of the day’s theme: the rule of law held, a judge struck down an unlawful order, and the audience that should have celebrated it never heard. FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.1️⃣ The Surrender PackageThe number-one story was a capitulation. Dean and Zev laid out the terms of the Iran deal: roughly $324 billion flowing to Tehran, with $150 billion due this month; oil and petrochemical sanctions suspended; the naval blockade lifted within thirty days — already underway, with Iranian supertankers sailing the Strait of Hormuz, which reopens under IRGC management. U.S. forces withdraw from the Gulf. Iran’s missile program stays fully intact. In exchange, America gets a pinky promise to talk about uranium. Trump signed it without reading it, and says he’ll read the text aloud, word for word, for the first time on Friday.How Tehran pulled it off is the part that lingers. Per DropSite News reporter Jeremy Scahill, confirmed by additional sources, Iran’s negotiating team added two senior psychologists — specialists in dementia, cognitive impairment, and antisocial behavior — after April’s Islamabad talks went south. Their job was not policy. It was to assess the President’s mental state, which they judged “very mentally ill and extremely impaired,” and to route every message through mediators tuned to that assessment. Once Iran started managing Trump’s psychology, an Iranian official said, “we got exactly what we wanted.” Dean’s full sourcing is at DeanBlundell.substack.com.THE PATTERNFive stories, one point Dean kept coming back to: if you are looking for hope, it is in the losses. Trump lost the files argument, lost his ally in court, lost the immigration freeze, and is about to lose decades of leverage on Iran — and a foreign adversary did it by studying his mind and telling him what he needed to hear. The cover stories hold the coalition together: Vance’s “full transparency,” Netanyahu’s war, the modeling-agent friend nobody was supposed to examine. Underneath them, the man at the center signed a surrender he hasn’t read, and the people who told the truth about the files are the ones being erased.Narativ is reader-supported. The Zampolli investigation and the daily Fivestack are the work of a small team. Subscribe at narativ.org to get it first — Know Sooner.Thank you Lev Parnas, Cat: Poli-Psych, LeftieProf, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Lori Modafferi, 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

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. Trump spent Thursday governing by press release — and got caught at every turn. He named a new spy chief on Truth Social, posted a ceasefire Iran says never happened, and let the rest of the machine grind on: a Supreme Court finishing off the Voting Rights Act, a Justice Department indicting protesters while the named walk free, and a New Mexico crime scene dug to bedrock with nobody allowed to look. Five stories, one tell — the performance is the policy now, and the institutions built to call it are folding instead.5️⃣ The Supreme Court Finishes Off the Voting Rights ActThe Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this week and cleared Alabama to run the GOP map a three-judge panel had already called intentional race discrimination. The map stands. The discrimination finding doesn’t. Alabama heads into the 2026 midterms with six Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic — the lines drawn, the remedy removed.Dean and Zev tied it back to the rot underneath: a billionaire’s court that decides one day for the Constitution and the next for Trump’s immunity, with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, Alito, and Roberts as the standing exhibit. Zev pointed to Denver Riggleman, who had the receipts on Ginni Thomas and January 6th and asked for a subpoena — until Liz Cheney said no. The point isn’t a single ruling. It’s that the body meant to be the last check keeps choosing not to be one, and stops pretending to be embarrassed about it.4️⃣ Zorro Ranch — the Hole, the Blackmail, the Next NamesSomebody carved a hole the size of forty-seven Olympic pools out of Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — 155,000 cubic yards, 20 to 25 feet deep, next to the main house. Narativ’s shadow analysis of drone and satellite imagery shows a squared, leveled structure that appeared around 2014–15 and vanished this year. Eddie Aragon dates the dig to late January, early February — before the Epstein files went public, and before the search. The likeliest read, Zev’s read, is a crypto-mining vault tied to Epstein’s crypto years, not the biolab the speculation wants; either way, the timing is the tell. You don’t move forty-seven pools of dirt to resurface a garden.The cover-up is the story now. New Mexico’s AG was told to stand down by the federal government. No mainstream outlet will touch the dig. And it widened on air: Bill Gates testified this week — on the record, for the first time — that Epstein tried to blackmail him, vindicating the reporting Zev first broke in 2019. Todd Blanche and Kash Patel are now set to be hauled in. Leon Black is next. The ground proves something was there; the silence proves someone wants it gone.3️⃣ The DOJ Indicts Eight Protesters While the Named Walk FreeThe Justice Department indicted eight pro-Palestinian activists it says ran a harassment campaign against University of Michigan officials and the Jewish Federation of Detroit to force the school to divest from Israel. Set that beside the segment that came right before it — the names in the Epstein files walking free — and the two speeds of this DOJ are the whole point: fast on dissent, frozen on the powerful.Dean carried it north. Hours after a Toronto officer was killed investigating a shooting at the U.S. embassy, Trump’s ambassador Pete Hoekstra used a symposium to lecture Canada about buying American booze and F-35s. Same regime, same instinct — punish, posture, alienate — whether the target is a Michigan protester or a neighboring country.2️⃣ Clayton Replaces Pulte at DNI — the Cold OpenThe show opened on the break: minutes before air, Trump posted to Truth Social that Jay Clayton is his pick to run national intelligence, pushing Bill Pulte out eleven days before he was due to take the chair. It’s about FISA. With Section 702 lapsing and Republicans in open revolt over arming Pulte — a man who’d used his housing post to chase mortgage-fraud claims against Trump’s enemies — the President swapped in a company man: former SEC chairman, current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Sullivan & Cromwell alumnus.Zev’s read: Clayton is a serious figure, which is exactly why he won’t last long — Trump would rather have a loyalist than a professional, but with the midterms 150 days out and his approval at 27 percent, he needed the appearance of seriousness. The swap quiets the FISA fight and buys a veneer of integrity heading into an election. The intelligence chair changed hands by social-media post, the same way this President now does everything.1️⃣ Trump Fakes an Iran Ceasefire — and Iran Says It Never HappenedFor the second straight night the U.S. bombed Iran, and Trump promised a third — “very hard tonight” — and threatened to seize Kharg Island. Then, at 1:28 p.m., he reversed it on Truth Social: he’d “canceled the scheduled strikes,” he wrote, citing a deal approved by the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, and a half-dozen more. Zev fact-checked it live. Iran’s IRGC rejected the claim as “totally baseless” — no agreement, no memorandum, no consultations. An Israeli officer told Channel 12 the same: nothing reached, no one talking.So the headline beat of the war was a ceasefire that exists only in a post. Dean and Zev read it as theater for the markets — telegraph a strike, cancel it, move oil and equities into the weekend, repeat. Hegseth fronts the announcements while the CENTCOM commander stays off-camera. Inflation sits at 4.2 percent, Iran still effectively holds the Strait of Hormuz, and the war runs on a president’s clock with no vote in Congress and no fact behind the latest claim. The bombs were real this week. The peace was a press release.THE PATTERNThursday was a day of governing by post — a spy chief named, a war called off, a deal invented — and a day of institutions declining to say no: a Court that won’t, a DOJ that won’t, a federal government that told New Mexico to stand down. The performance and the impunity are the same machine. The open question for next week is the only one that matters: who is left with the power to check him, and what cracks first when they keep choosing not to use it. Amanda Ungaro starts answering tonight.The Fivestack airs Mon–Fri, 3 PM ET. Tonight on Narativ Live, 7 PM ET: Amanda Ungaro — former partner of Epstein associate Paolo Zampoli — in her first long-form interview. Subscribe free at narativ.org to watch live; paid subscribers get every replay and the full archive.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Petrena Wilbur, LeftieProf, Lalisa, Leah Anderson, 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

ON NOW! OUR FLASH SALE: 50% OFF ANNUAL PLANS - FOR FIVE HOURS ONLY ! ENDS AT MIDNIGHT ET The strongman act runs on a single assumption: that no one gets to say no. Monday, on five different fronts, someone did. A fired anchor said it to the network that bent toward the president. The man who built the Hunter Biden smear said it about his own operation. A reporter on a Wisconsin farm said it until Trump walked off the set. A federal judge said it to the name on the building. And an Iranian missile barrage said it loudest of all — by forcing Israel to stand down and exposing the rift Washington can no longer hide. Five stories, one crack running through all of them.5️⃣ “There Is No Democracy Without Journalism”Scott Pelley got fired from 60 Minutes, and this weekend he told the New York Times what it felt like: the death of a spouse. Thirty-seven years at CBS, forty-two years married — “that’s the depth of my devotion.” Then he named the cause. CBS’s new editorial chief, Bari Weiss, put “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events” — a level of political interference Pelley said he had never seen in nearly four decades.The breaking point was a story. Weiss wanted protesters painted as more violent and Renee Nicole Good cast as a domestic terrorist aiming her car at police. Pelley looked at the same footage and refused — she wasn’t that person, and he wouldn’t make her one. He stopped being a “team guy” the moment he wouldn’t lie. The new executive producer, Nick Bilton, then accused Pelley of physically assaulting him, only to retract it in the room the second Pelley denied it. No one was fired for the false accusation. Pelley was fired for the truth.Zev, who covered alongside Pelley in his CBS years, vouched for the man behind the patriotism — the correspondent who sat on the steps of the tour bus writing notes, who crawled through deserts and slept in foxholes filling with water. Asked about Trump calling him a “stiff” who doesn’t care about his country, Pelley’s answer landed like a verdict: he’s never worn the uniform, but he’s been shot at in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait for this country — and he’s not aware the president has ever done the same. “There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. And that is why I am a journalist.” The lawsuit, Dean noted, is coming sooner than people think.4️⃣ The Man Who Built the Laptop Lie Sat Across From Hunter BidenFor a decade the hottest topic in American politics was Hunter Biden’s laptop. The second-hottest was the man who helped engineer the operation behind it. This weekend, on Dean’s “Coffee & Tea with Lev and Dean,” both men sat at the same virtual table — Lev Parnas, the Giuliani fixer who went hunting for Biden dirt, and Hunter Biden, the human being that machinery was pointed at.Parnas said plainly what he’s already said under oath. The laptop held the nudes, the footage of addiction, the wreckage of a man deep in his disease — and nothing else. No espionage. No foreign agent. No corruption. The other eighty percent, the Biden-crime narrative that nearly turned an election, was invented. Parnas knows because he was inside the machine that built it. The man Marjorie Taylor Greene put on the House floor in graphic detail sold $225,000 of his own paintings; the families running half-million-dollar access clubs and routing rare-earth and Kazakhstan deals through the White House go unmentioned.But the segment wasn’t a takedown. It was an amends. Parnas apologizing to Hunter was part of his recovery; Hunter — early in his own sobriety — accepting it was part of his. Two men who no longer have to hide, Dean said, looked freer than anyone in MAGA. Both Zev and Dean see something the GOP should fear heading into 2026 and 2028: a comeback story America tends to love, run by a man who owns every receipt instead of running from them.3️⃣ Trump Walked Off the FarmKristen Welker asked Trump for evidence. He didn’t have any. Pressed on his 2020 fraud claims and the $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund that could compensate the January 6 rioters who beat police, Trump ran the routine Zev has watched a hundred times — lean in, raise the voice, the finger in the face, the blowup. Then the question came one more time. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” He crushed his lapel mic underfoot and left. “I’ve had enough.”The walkout is the answer. He’ll hold court for hours when he’s winning; the instant the questions reach the money and the mob, he’s gone. And the target, both hosts noted, is rarely random. The cabinet members he’s fired, the reporters he savages — overwhelmingly women, met with a contempt he saves for them alone. The rage isn’t new. It’s the oldest thing about him.2️⃣ The Name Comes DownMonday the Kennedy Center deleted Trump’s name from its website — not by choice, by court order. A federal judge ruled the renaming illegal: Congress named the living memorial to John F. Kennedy, and only Congress can change it. The board he packed had voted in December, the signage went up overnight, the merch hit the gift shop. A single paragraph from the bench unwound all of it.And tonight he walks into Madison Square Garden for the NBA Finals, where the welcome is an eight-foot iron fence, TSA-level screening, and a Knicks crowd told there will be no tailgates and no watch parties because one ego insisted on coming. He was booed at the Commanders game. He was booed at the UFC card in Miami. Humiliated in the courts downtown and on his own home court uptown — same day, same man.1️⃣ Israel Loaded the Reprisal — and Didn’t Fire ItIran hammered Israel. Israel loaded its response. And then, within the hour, it stood down. No retaliation on Iran. Not because Netanyahu blinked — because Trump made him. The rift the Fivestack has tracked for weeks just crossed out of name-calling and into the kinetic: real bombs, real missiles, real lives, and a public fracture between Washington and Jerusalem that neither man can paper over now.The reveal is the weakness underneath it. Trump doesn’t need these two to stop hating each other; he needs the war to stop so he can wear the peacemaker’s crown — and he can’t make it stop. Iran has no elections to lose. Trump does, at roughly 30% approval, with the war bleeding him at home. So every time he announces a deal is near, Israel strikes, Iran strikes back, and the lie gets exposed again. Two days ago he insisted he was the shot-caller. Twenty minutes later Netanyahu bombed Iran anyway.Iran read all of it and played it flawlessly. It proved Trump weak, proved the United States weak, and proved the alliance that once attacked it is now breaking apart — the best position Tehran has held in a generation. The danger sits with an Israel that hasn’t grasped where this leads: a future without American backing, telling itself it can go alone. Zev’s read is the one to carry forward — this rift doesn’t shrink from here. It grows, and grows, and grows.THE PATTERNThe performance of strength depends on never being contradicted. Monday the contradictions arrived all at once — from a newsroom, from a reformed operative, from a reporter, from a judge, from an adversary half a world away. The Kennedy Center name didn’t come off because Trump relented; it came off because a court made him. Israel didn’t holster the reprisal because Netanyahu chose peace; it holstered because the alliance is cracking and the weaker partner felt it. Strip away the convoy and the bulletproof glass and the packed boards, and what’s left is a man who can’t take a question, can’t win a war, and can’t keep his name on a wall. Told no, five times, in a single afternoon.The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3PM ET with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Watch the full episode and subscribe at narativ.org. Hunter Biden’s sit-down with Lev Parnas — “Coffee & Tea with Lev and Dean” — is at deanblundell.substack.com.Thank you This Will Hold, Lyudmila and Daniel, LC - Silence is Complicity, Dr. Eric Lullove, Robin Payes, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell and Lev Parnas! 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

Today’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

By 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

1️⃣ 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

A 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

Today’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

5️⃣ TRUMP LANDS IN BEIJING — XI SENDS A DEPUTYAir Force One touched down at Beijing Capital at 7:50 PM local time, 7:50 AM Eastern. Three hundred Chinese children in blue and white uniforms waved American and Chinese flags. The man at the foot of the stairs was Vice President Han Zheng. Xi Jinping was not there. He will receive Trump on Thursday morning. Melania did not make the trip. The first lady stayed home.The choreography of the welcome was deliberate. The Chinese president sent his deputy to the tarmac. The American president walked off the plane with billionaires and a Hollywood director accused by six women. Xi made Trump wait a day for the photo. The trip is officially about trade and Taiwan. Trump arrived in Beijing with the Iran war burning $4 billion of US weapons every fourteen days, the Strait of Hormuz frozen, his tariffs surviving on a court reprieve, and CPI printing 3.8%. Xi sets the terms Thursday. The trade concession Xi extracts is the news.4️⃣ BRETT RATNER FLIES TO CHINA WITH TRUMPDean called it on air. The flying Epstein memorial. Among the cabinet and the CEOs on Air Force One — Musk, Cook, Huang, Fink, Solomon, Schwarzman, Hegseth, Rubio — was a name no one expected. Brett Ratner. Accused in 2017 by Olivia Munn, Natasha Henstridge, and four other women of sexual harassment and assault. Another woman accused him of rape; he sued, then dropped it. Elliot Page accused him of outing him on the X-Men set at eighteen. Forced out of Hollywood at the peak of MeToo.Ratner directed the Melania documentary for Amazon. Two-thirds of the New York crew asked not to be credited. Crew members described “chaos” on set. He lived at Mar-a-Lago while filming it. The Epstein files name him — emails confirm he was used by Epstein as a bridge to other people for nearly a decade. There is a photograph of Brett Ratner shirtless and embracing Jean-Luc Brunel, the modeling agent who scouted underage girls in Europe for Epstein and who killed himself in his Paris cell in 2022.The Hollywood Reporter says Ratner is scouting locations for Rush Hour 4. Not buying it. He is on the plane because the plane is full of men who knew what Epstein was and stayed in the room. The Palm Beach hearing on Tuesday put a fourteen-year-old, an Uzbek model named Rosa, and a 1996 whistleblower named Maria Farmer on the record as survivors of that network. The same week, the President of the United States flew the network’s documentarian to Beijing on Air Force One. The signal is the choice. The choice is the signal.3️⃣ UAE SECRETLY STRUCK IRAN IN APRILThe Wall Street Journal reported overnight that the United Arab Emirates carried out a covert military strike on Iran in April — an attack on the Lavan Island refinery in the Persian Gulf. The Trump administration knew. The Trump administration welcomed it. The Iran war is no longer a US war. It is a Gulf coalition war, fought partly in the open and partly in shadows, and the White House is quietly recruiting more Gulf states to join the strikes.Iran’s parliament speaker says the Islamic Republic’s military is “ready to teach a lesson” to any aggressor. Qatar accuses Iran of “weaponising” the Strait of Hormuz and “blackmailing” Gulf states. Iran today accused Kuwait of attacking it. The whole region is fragmenting into a multi-front war, and the United States is the player making it possible. Israel is doing everything under the umbrella of US security. Kuwait is doing everything under the umbrella of US security. The UAE struck Iran with US blessing.And the receipt is on the water. The USS Gerald R. Ford, flagship of the American navy, limped out of Greece this week. Iran damaged it badly enough that it is going to dry dock for two years. Two years. Bob Kagan — one of the country’s longest-serving war hawks — wrote in The Atlantic that the war is lost. Donald Trump’s response to Kagan was to call Americans who report on the lost war guilty of “virtual treason.” That is the word he used. Treason.2️⃣ PATEL PULLED FBI COUNTERINTEL OFF IRANSenator Chris Van Hollen pressed Kash Patel yesterday on three things — the Atlantic reporting on his drinking, the journalists Acting AG Todd Blanche just announced he would subpoena, and the FBI counterintelligence agents Patel quietly pulled off the Iran threat beat. Patel lashed out. Patel accused the senator of drinking on the taxpayer dime. Patel agreed on the record to take an alcohol-use-disorders test. And Patel admitted the counterintel agents had been moved.The reporters who covered the Iran war — the same reporters Blanche is now subpoenaing — have been telling the country for weeks that the FBI’s Iran threat unit has been gutted. Patel confirmed it under oath. The FBI counterintelligence agents responsible for catching Iranian threats inside the United States were pulled off the case at the same time the Iran war was widening into a Gulf coalition war. Brian Driscoll, the former FBI second-in-command fired in March for refusing to assemble political-target lists, has filed a lawsuit revealing that thousands of FBI agents — including the child-trafficking units — were reassigned or fired.Bloomberg’s verdict this morning, in a column written by the editorial board: “Patel FBI Senate Hearing — He’s an Embarrassment and a Risk.” The captured bureau is no longer protecting the country. The captured bureau is protecting the man at the top.1️⃣ DOJ SUBPOENAS WSJ REPORTERSThe biggest story of the day. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer until January, the man Trump credits with keeping him “out of jail” — has now actually subpoenaed Wall Street Journal reporters over Iran-war leaks. The WSJ publisher fired back today, calling the subpoenas “an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering.” The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called it a return to the surveillance regime curtailed after Trump’s first term. Bondi rolled back the Biden-era restrictions on subpoenaing reporters before Trump fired her on April 2. Blanche stepped in and walked through the door Bondi opened.The trigger was Trump’s reaction to Kagan. The reporters telling Americans the Iran war is lost. The reporters telling Americans the war is costing $29 billion. The reporters telling Americans the UAE secretly struck Iran. Trump passed Blanche a stack of news clippings with a sticky note that said “treason.” Blanche complied.The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch. The Wall Street Journal is now fighting Donald Trump’s DOJ in court for the right of American journalists to do their jobs. When Murdoch sues Trump over press freedom, the room has flipped. The First Amendment is being dismantled in plain sight by a man whose only qualification is loyalty.THE PATTERNThis morning Trump deplaned in Beijing in front of three hundred Chinese children waving American flags and the lights of a state visit. The men who got off the plane with him are the men who funded him, hung around Jeffrey Epstein, built their fortunes in China, and now need Xi Jinping’s permission to keep them. The host of the banquet is arming the enemy Trump cannot defeat. The aircraft carrier sent to defeat that enemy is going into dry dock for two years. The reporters telling the story are getting subpoenaed by Trump’s former defense lawyer. The FBI Director who could investigate the threat has been pulled off the beat. The Justice Department is preparing to charge a former president. And the American president told the country on the South Lawn yesterday that he does not think about Americans’ financial situation. Day 479.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Courtney, Lalisa, Yolanda D., Maureen Drews, 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

The plan today was a five-story countdown . The plan did not survive Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes.Sunday night, the prime minister of Israel walked onto Bari Weiss’s captured CBS — “Breitbart Light,” as Dean Blundell called it about thirty seconds into the show — and effectively told the American people that he gets to decide when their war with Iran ends, what their soldiers will be asked to do, and what their citizens may say on social media. Donald Trump sat off-screen in Washington and posted backup in all capital letters. “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE… AT A MUCH HIGHER LEVEL.”We started number five. We never got there. The whole hour turned into one Fivestack on one story — the captured presidency, the cudgel, the criminals, and the gas-station line that is coming for everyone in fourteen days. Here is what landed.5️⃣ Breitbart Light at 60 MinutesThe format used to mean something. Sixty Minutes used to be where presidents and prime ministers got asked hard questions in front of seventeen million Americans. Sunday night, under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, the foreign prime minister of Israel got to sit and tell the American host that the United States must continue his war, must send American troops into Iran, must police what Americans say online — and the host nodded along.Dean called it on air. “That was the most dystopian interview I have ever seen from that capacity.” The s**t-eating grin, he said, gave it away. Netanyahu knew he had captured the American presidency, and the network anchor was pretending not to notice.This is the first stack: the country lost its premier interview slot to a foreign leader on prime time, and the host treated it as a courtesy call.4️⃣ The cudgel and the hate crimeInside the same interview, Netanyahu told the world he intends to “fight back” against people on social media who say negative things about Israel. He did not define negative. He did not define Israel. He did not need to.What he gets out of this play is something nobody talks about on cable news: every time he calls a critic of Bibi Netanyahu an anti-Semite, the actual anti-Semites in America and Canada are handed permission to attack ordinary Jews. Jewish Canadians are one percent of the country’s population and the target of seventy percent of religious hate crimes there, Dean said on air, citing the most recent figures from the agencies that protect Jewish communities in Toronto. Cafe Landwer — a beloved Jewish-owned breakfast chain in Toronto — has been attacked with bags of vomit at its doors. Not because it is Israeli. Because it is Jewish.“He doesn’t care about the American Jews at all,” Zev said on air. “He is using the fact that American Jews are liberals as a way to make them targets.”Sixty-nine percent of American Jews voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump have not forgiven any of them for it.3️⃣ The sect that captured Israel — and what it did with the keysMalcolm Nance walked Zev through it on Narativ Breaking News this morning. Dean walked Zev through it again on the Fivestack this afternoon. The story is the same story.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union started flowing into Israel. Russians arrived under the Law of Return on the slimmest claim of Jewish heritage. Big argument whether half of them were Jewish at all. Mobsters. Intelligence officers. Oligarchs. Hand grenades in Ashdod bars. Some stayed and turned the Israeli political map hard right. Many lily-padded off to Florida — where they continue their work today.The result, six presidents later: an Israeli government aligned with Moscow on most things that matter, an Israeli prime minister friendlier to Vladimir Putin than to seventy percent of his own diaspora, and an Israeli right whose loudest voices speak a Russian Jewish brand of politics that has very little to do with the liberal socialist Zionism that built the country.“This is a movement by a corrupt criminal organization that has seeped its way into the world’s democracies,” Zev said today, “and has taken over Israel’s democracy and installed Bibi Netanyahu as a strongman figurehead. And it is doing the same thing in America.”That is not a metaphor. That is a thirty-year trafficking operation that ends with a foreign prime minister on 60 Minutes telling Americans what they may post online.2️⃣ Bibi funded Hamas. Bibi killed JCPOA. Bibi needs Iran.Two facts that do not appear in the Sunday night interview, and that Dean and Zev put on the table again today.Benjamin Netanyahu approved the cash flow from Qatar to Hamas in Gaza for years before October 7. That is on the record. He built up the enemy he then declared he had to wipe out. The same play, exactly, that Donald Trump runs every time he needs a villain.And in 2012, when Barack Obama was running for re-election and pursuing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, Netanyahu backed Mitt Romney from a foreign capital. He sandbagged Obama’s foreign policy for seven straight years. When the JCPOA finally passed in 2015, Netanyahu went on a global speaking tour to destroy it. Donald Trump killed the deal in his first term as a favor to him.“He needs Iran to be his enemy,” Zev said on air, “because that is what gives him the power. Otherwise he does not stay in power.”The man on 60 Minutes Sunday night demanding a third American strike on Iran is the same man who fed Hamas, killed the deal that would have ended the nuclear standoff, and now wants American soldiers to go to Natanz and Fordow and Isfahan and dig his enemy out for him.1️⃣ Fourteen days to the gas-station lineThis is where it lands. Not in foreign policy. In Akron. In Calgary. In Tampa.Bloomberg’s research, which Malcolm Nance walked Narativ through this morning and Dean walked the Fivestack through this afternoon: physical oil already trades fifty to seventy-five dollars above the futures price. First-week-of-June oil-shock stress arrives. By September, if conditions do not change, every refinery, every pipeline and every bunker in the Western world runs dry.Dean’s translation, on air, for the people who do not read Bloomberg: six dollars a liter for gas, eight for diesel, and a line at the pump that the country has not seen since the Carter administration. “This is 1979 all over again. All over again.”The president who started this war by tearing up Obama’s deal in 2018 — because, in the words of Ken Harbaugh on Dean’s show last week, “Obama is Black” — is the same president who now has to explain to his MAGA base why their summer vacation costs three times what it cost last year, why the flight to Disney was cancelled, and why the gas station has a line that goes around the block.The country that elected Donald Trump in 2024 to bring prices down is about to pay the highest energy bill since Jimmy Carter — to make Benjamin Netanyahu happy.THE PATTERNFive threads. One story. Three criminals.Vladimir Putin in a bunker in Krasnodar, his honor-guard parade rolling World War II tanks across a CGI sky. Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes calling for the third war in five years against the enemy he built. Donald Trump on Truth Social in capital letters, his arsenal empty, his Senate being investigated for telling the truth out loud, his DOJ purging its own prosecutors over the last fight.All three of them facing prison if they stop running. All three of them willing to set the world on fire to keep moving. All three of them propped up by the same Russian organized criminal network that has been doing this work, patiently, since the Soviet Union opened its borders.Six years ago, Narativ reported that the Trump–Netanyahu axis was an espionage operation, not a foreign policy. This afternoon on the Fivestack, Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev arranged the rest of the pieces on the table — Bari Weiss’s CBS, the Toronto bakery attacks, the Chabad sect, the Qatar cash to Hamas, the 1979 gas line — and let the audience land the verdict.They are not three different stories. They are one criminal enterprise wearing three different flags.And in fourteen days, the bill comes due at every gas station in America.Thank you Caro Henry, Elaine Cimino, Peter W Shuster, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, 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

The President of the United States lost the Saudis. The Commerce Secretary forgot his story. A federal judge found a lost note by Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk’s ex-partner says she’s done with right, and Ted Turner — the man who built 24-hour news — died on a day tailor-made for cable news..Trump declared “Operation Project Freedom” on Truth Social Sunday. He told nobody — not Mohammed bin Salman, not Oman, not Kuwait, not the UAE — that he was going to launch a U.S. Navy escort mission through the Strait of Hormuz that needed their bases, their airspace, and their overflight rights to function.Saudi Arabia revoked all three.Within thirty-six hours, Project Freedom was dead on the tarmac. Trump called MBS to fix it. The call did not fix it. The White House dressed up the retreat as a “great progress” peace deal. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei went on Al Mayadeen Thursday morning and called the proposal “unrealistic,” demanding war reparations as a precondition for any agreement. The Iranians sent the deal back like a wrong order.5️⃣ Mullin’s customs law — DHS reaches into CanadaThe U.S. Department of Homeland Security used a 1930 customs statute — Section 1509 of the Tariff Act, written to verify duty payments on shipped merchandise — to subpoena Google for the full digital life of a Canadian who criticized ICE on X. Hundreds of similar subpoenas have gone to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord since the start of the second Trump term, aimed at anyone who criticized ICE or pointed to ICE locations. The 2017 Inspector General audit of the same statute found one in five Section 1509 summonses exceeded the agency’s legal authority. CBP folded then. DHS has not folded now.4️⃣ The note the DOJ never hadWednesday evening, Judge Kenneth Karas unsealed a yellow legal-pad note in White Plains. The text: “They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” / “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.” / “NO FUN… NOT WORTH IT!!”Epstein’s cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione — a former NYPD officer convicted of murdering four people — found the note in a graphic novel after Epstein’s July 2019 jail-cell incident and kept it. It sat in his court file for years. It is not in the three-million-page Epstein Files Transparency Act release. The Justice Department admits it has never seen the document.It surfaced because The New York Times petitioned the court to unseal it. Without that petition, it would still be a sealed exhibit in a federal courthouse.3️⃣ Lutnick under not-oathHoward Lutnick did not testify Wednesday. He gave a transcribed interview, off-camera, not under oath, in front of the House Oversight Committee for more than four hours. By the end of it the Republican chairman, James Comer, was telling reporters Lutnick had not been truthful.The story keeps refusing to stay still. The first version: Lutnick met Epstein once in 1998, saw the massage table, was disgusted, never spoke to him again. The second version, as the files came out: Lutnick sat next door at 11 East 71st Street for twenty-one years, did Adfin with Epstein in 2012, kept Cantor Ventures correspondence going through 2014, took his wife and four children and a full deployment of nannies to Little St. James in December 2012, accepted a $50,000 contribution from Epstein for a 2017 dinner honoring himself, and emailed Epstein about a museum expansion through 2018.Wednesday produced version three. Lutnick, who had told a podcast that Epstein was one of the greatest blackmailers of all time, told the committee that he had simply been speculating and that Epstein never engaged in blackmail. The podcast audio exists.Rep. Ro Khanna, on camera afterwards: “If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript, he would have fired Howard Lutnick.”Marjorie Taylor Greene has now publicly described Trump telling Pam Bondi that the Epstein files would hurt his Mar-a-Lago friends. Lutnick is one of those friends. Behind the not-oath, behind the closed doors, the cover-up is still operating in real time.2️⃣ One receipt, no defection — Ashley St ClairThe Washington Post ran Ashley St Clair’s account this morning. She named one chat — “Fight Fight Fight.” She named one administration figure inside it — James Blair. She told the Post the right-wing online influencer machine is paid, scripted, and coordinated. The press treated the interview like a confession.It was an interview.She did not call the FBI. She did not call the RCMP. She did not call NATO StratCom in Riga. A real defector from a foreign-funded influence operation goes to investigators with the contracts, the names, and the wire transfers — and goes to journalists only after that. Christopher Wylie did it with Cambridge Analytica. Frances Haugen did it with Facebook. Cassidy Hutchinson did it with January 6. The Tenet Media indictment did the work for the influencers who never came forward.Musk sent St Clair $2.5 million as part of the paternity dispute. She has been in the right-wing influencer economy since at least 2020. Six years of cash flow is a career, not an awakening. The contracts, funders, and other names are still missing. And Narativ has tied Elon Musk — the father of her son — to the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus. The mother of his child went to WaPo, not the FBI. The receipts are still missing.1️⃣ Turner gone — the man who built 24-hour newsTed Turner died Wednesday at 87. Lewy body dementia. The brash Atlanta yachtsman launched CNN in June 1980, when nobody in the industry believed news could fill twenty-four hours and the rest of cable went to dead air after midnight. He gave a billion to start the United Nations Foundation in 1997. He bought the Atlanta Braves. He kept buffalo on more land than anyone alive.Turner sold the company. The company sold the news. The 24-hour cycle he built to chase truth around the planet is the same cycle that ducked four of today’s biggest stories on its own air.He was no saint. Jane Fonda’s account of being married to him is its own reckoning. Dean said it on the show — sure, he was a piece of work. But Turner believed a country deserved to know what was happening to it as it was happening. He believed news belonged on the air the moment it broke, not at six-thirty after the editor decided what mattered. He bet on the audience. The bet paid. The audience is still there.What he built is no longer chasing the story.The patternFive stories, one news cycle. Saudi Arabia denied a U.S. President basing rights for an operation he announced on Truth Social. Iran called the deal a face-saving fiction and demanded reparations. DHS used a customs law about widget shipments to subpoena a Canadian. A federal judge had to release a document the DOJ had never bothered to find. A sitting Cabinet member admitted he had been lying for twenty years about a convicted sex trafficker. A right-wing influencer handed in one chat name and called it a defection.Six years ago Narativ wrote that the Epstein network was an espionage operation, not a sex scandal. Six years ago Narativ wrote that the influencer economy on the right was a paid information operation. Six years ago Narativ wrote that the Trump-Russia file was a kompromat file, not a paperwork dispute. The stories of this week are not new stories. They are the same story, finally surfacing.The man who built cable to chase that story died Wednesday. The cable he built is no longer doing the work.We are.35% off annual subscriptions on RN — Subscribe to Narativ.org. Subscribe to deanblundell.substack.com. The 24-hour news cycle is no longer chasing this. We are.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Robin Payes, Marnie Screams Into the Void, Grace Alexandra Hayden, 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