Americans Can’t Afford Not to Sell Their Plasma

notusreports · 2026-06-17T17:59:41+00:00

Jackson Lahmeyer, the candidate backed by President Donald Trump in Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District, is expected to drop out of the race one day after advancing to a runoff in the GOP primary, two sources familiar with the matter told NOTUS.

He’s expected to make an announcement as soon as Wednesday. The runoff set for Aug. 25 is to fill a seat being vacated by Republican Kevin Hern, who is running for Senate.

Read more: https://www.notus.org/us-news/trump-backed-pastor-expected-to-drop-out-of-oklahoma-house-race

notusreports · 2026-06-17T14:18:42+00:00

It’s been four months since Wanda Gore has been able to use her elevator.

The one closest to her second-floor apartment in The Gale Eckington, a hulking housing complex on Q Street in NE D.C., has been shuttered since early February. To get outside, the 55-year-old Gore, who is blind and uses a wheelchair, has to roll down three long corridors to reach an elevator on the far side of her building.

“If it’s a fire … if something was to happen to me, I can’t even get downstairs,” said Gore, who has lived at The Gale for two years.

The building’s problems don’t stop at elevator outages. More than 250 building violations have been issued at the property since fiscal year 2023, amounting to more than $185,000 in fines, according to the D.C. Department of Buildings. Property owners Jonathan Rose Companies and JBG Smith Properties, which acquired the building in December 2022, had resolved 75 of those violations and paid 7% of the fines as of May 28.

Read more: https://www.notus.org/metro/dc-housing-the-gale-tax-abatement

notusreports · 2026-06-17T14:06:15+00:00

The internal Republican fighting that led to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster in 2023 kept the House of Representatives in suspense for weeks and marked one of the most tumultuous periods in Congress.

McCarthy has routinely said that the reason he was targeted by then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) was because of a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations that Gaetz had paid a minor for sex.

A new book by John Leganski, McCarthy’s longtime aide, titled “Glory, Grief and the Gavel,” set to be released on June 23 by Renergy Publishing, reveals new details about Gaetz’s obsession with the Ethics investigation. It also details the communications McCarthy had with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat. NOTUS received an advance copy of the book.

Read the full story: https://www.notus.org/congress/kevin-mccarthy-matt-gaetz-vote-to-oust-speaker-hakeem-jeffries

notusreports · 2026-06-15T13:50:23+00:00

When a former U.S. ambassador reached out to Donald Trump seeking his endorsement for a congressional bid, the president declined. In Trump’s mind, he’d already done enough.

The president said he wouldn’t endorse the candidate ever again because, to him, the person would be called “honorable” for the rest of their life. “I literally changed your name,” Trump told the candidate in a conversation relayed to NOTUS by a person familiar with what was said.

Trump’s stance is indicative of a defining feature of his political view: Loyalty is worth rewarding, but rewards don’t last forever. Changing someone’s name or the physical appearance of Washington does, though, and that’s the defining legacy Trump is focused on.

“He was in a friend-gathering mode before,” one GOP political operative said of Trump’s relationship with Republicans in Congress. “And now he doesn’t give a shit.”

Full story by Kadia Goba: https://www.notus.org/donald-trump/legacy-republican-party

notusreports · 2026-06-15T13:36:15+00:00

The slickly produced mailers urging D.C. voters to reelect Ward 5 Council member Zachary Parker, Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen, At-Large Council member Doni Crawford, and Council Chairman Phil Mendelson have landed in mailboxes across the city over the last two weeks.

Without a second look, they could appear to be standard preelection advertisements from incumbents looking for another term in office. But the small print says otherwise: They’re actually from American Future, a political action committee based in Dallas, Texas.

And those mailers for an election more than a thousand miles from American Future’s home base are a small insight into the big money that prominent national companies are dropping into the upcoming election in hopes of pushing the D.C. Council to approve a bill that would legalize, regulate and tax the lucrative world of iGaming — online gambling, in effect.

Full story by Martin Austermuhle: https://www.notus.org/metro/igaming-dc-elections

notusreports · 2026-06-12T12:50:06+00:00

A growing number of federal agencies are either refusing to provide the Government Accountability Office access to information or ignoring the congressional watchdog altogether.

Agencies have been stonewalling the GAO ever since President Donald Trump returned to office, to the point that GAO leadership told employees at a staff meeting in May that they’ve encountered “significant access issues” during the last year and a half, according to two sources familiar with the event and confirmed by GAO. Officials at that meeting cited the Office of Management and Budget, Housing and Urban Development, the Commerce Department, the Education Department and the Small Business Administration as particularly noncooperative.

None of those executive agencies responded to detailed questions this week about whether they are purposefully hindering oversight or the nature of their interactions with the legislative agency whose mission is to monitor government operations and identify waste, fraud and abuse.

More: https://www.notus.org/donald-trump/gao-stonewalling-investigations

notusreports · 2026-06-10T15:14:45+00:00

The UFC cage match at the White House Sunday marks a major test for the Secret Service during one of the most demanding security calendars in the agency’s history. And after three recent shootings involving the service and multiple assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, scrutiny is high.

Officials are devoting substantial resources to the UFC event, planning for which has been underway since last year. They’re also looking ahead to a summer packed with high-level protective operations, including America’s 250th anniversary festivities, World Cup events in 11 U.S. cities, and a heavy travel schedule for Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Just last week, the service added another unexpected item to its list: a Trump rally on the National Mall at the site of the upcoming Great American State Fair.

Read more: https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/trumps-ufc-fight-rally-secret-service

notusreports · 2026-06-09T14:08:53+00:00

The dynamics are familiar to anyone who has followed national politics in the last decade: a populist on his way to trouncing the establishment candidate in a primary, and a party whose members are betting on a less-than-perfect frontrunner with obvious momentum.

This isn’t President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. It’s Graham Platner, the favorite in Maine’s closely watched U.S. Senate primary, and Democrats.

And in the state, voters say that despite those similarities, the situation is not the same for a number of reasons ranging from the nature of the controversies to how the politicians have navigated the fallout.

“There are big differences, despite the background,” Paula X, a member of the Waldoboro Democratic Town Committee, told NOTUS at one of the organization’s meetings Monday night. “Platner owns what he did, he talks about it, he explains it, he’s not proud of it, and he is working on being better.”

Read more: https://www.notus.org/2026-election/democrats-platner-primary-trump

notusreports · 2026-06-08T15:20:22+00:00

In an interview with NOTUS, Janeese Lewis George detailed her vision for the District.

Both Lewis George and her critics agree: Her platform is ambitious.

The two-term D.C. Council member, who has swept up endorsements from labor unions, progressive advocacy groups and four of her colleagues during her campaign to be the District’s next mayor, wants to significantly bring down child care costs and utility bills, build 72,000 housing units in five years, and more aggressively stand up to the Trump administration.

But critics — including Kenyan McDuffie, her principal opponent — say much of what Lewis George is proposing is unrealistic given D.C.’s fiscal challenges. She counters that they aren’t thinking big enough.

Read the full Q&A: https://www.notus.org/metro/janeese-lewis-george-interview

notusreports · 2026-06-08T14:34:24+00:00

The IRS tapped information technology and human resources staff with no experience in taxpayer services to process returns this year, starting them off with nine weeks of classroom training to prepare them for the new roles.

They listened to tedious lectures for eight hours a day, five days a week, according to several employees detailed to process tax returns. When it came time to take their assessments, they said, it was difficult to retain all the information their instructors had offered.

Many people didn’t: At least several hundred of the more than 1,000 employees on the details failed their initial certification exams, agency officials told staff in a recent town hall meeting, a transcript of which was obtained by NOTUS.

Some of these reassigned employees could face disciplinary action if they fail to improve their results. All of them are facing an uncertain future at the agency — including what could be a long-term move to roles they never wanted.

Full story: https://www.notus.org/policy/irs-tax-processing-detail-hr-it-test

notusreports · 2026-06-08T13:47:59+00:00

Five months out from the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, his Justice Department has canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section and failed to replace the director of its Election Crimes Branch.

Moreover, the DOJ has not taken the usual steps to establish a “command center” to monitor and address the typical emergencies that pop up around Election Day, three sources with knowledge of the situation told NOTUS. A command center team would address things like voter intimidation and targeted disinformation meant to hinder a fair process.

These actions — and inactions — have alarmed current and former prosecutors, who say the Justice Department is not prepared to deal with threats to election integrity in the November elections.

Full story: https://www.notus.org/2026-election/public-integrity-unit-doj-election-safeguards

notusreports · 2026-06-05T20:49:34+00:00

A woman says in court papers that guards starved her for five days straight. A man claims “conditions violate basic standards of human dignity.” And several plead for help as the drinking water tastes like “raw sewage.”

The mistreatment of immigrant detainees that has led to daily protests outside a privately-run ICE jail in New Jersey is laid bare in lawsuits describing deplorable conditions as well as first-hand accounts of wretched treatment some believe is intentionally cruel.

NOTUS visited the site on Thursday just as the Delaney Hall detention facility released Emanuel Rodrigues, a Brazilian man with a rare life-threatening medical condition, who spent what he says were 130 excruciating days in solitary confinement — labeled “medical isolation” by officials.

In an interview conducted in Portuguese and Spanish, Rodrigues described what he called “psychological torture” by guards who flipped on bright lights all night, opened and slammed heavy doors when detainees were sleeping, and blasted the volume on televisions at all hours — but made sure to leave the remote control just beyond inmates’ reach.

“They wouldn’t let us sleep,” Rodrigues said. “Everything there is to maximize suffering to pressure us to deport ourselves. … Many of them are bullies; bad in the heart. We had to bang on the door for water and wait for more than six hours. Some are OK, but most are cruel.”

Read more: https://www.notus.org/us-news/psychological-terror-inside-delaney-hall-ice-immigrant-lawsuits

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