Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were getting whiplash watching Trump call off the Iran strikes again, he’s called this war over so many times since February that it has reruns, his Interior Department got caught hiding evidence from federal prosecutors over the reflecting pool, his Agriculture Under Secretary took away your right to fight a radioactive mine next to the first national monument in America, he blamed Minnesota for getting hacked by Iran, and he offered to trade away his own attorney general to keep the IRS off his tax returns. Plus a slush fund, and a map of Africa that a chatbot made up.

Jeanine Pirro dropped the felony vandalism case against David Hearn on Friday and accused Doug Burgum’s Interior Department of hiding evidence from her own prosecutors. Hearn is the 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist who touched the water in the reflecting pool, and for that he got arrested and indicted by a grand jury.

Here’s what Interior had in writing the whole time. May 14, the new sealant failed. June 11, the contractor emailed to say the peeling came from overspray during installation, not knives. The liner failed on its own. On July 1, Interior officials walked Pirro’s prosecutors around that pool and, in her words, “not one of them mentioned it.” Hearn was indicted the next day.

Four days later Burgum went on CNN and said there were box cutters and there was, quote, “no possible way” this was anything but vandalism. So either he never read his own department’s emails, or he read them and went on television and lied. Pick one.

And Trump started all this. He ordered the work in April, said it would take a week, set the deadline at the Fourth of July, and skipped the bidding to hand it to a Virginia company whose qualification was doing the pools at his golf club. First federal job they’d ever had. It’s now over sixteen million dollars. The rush job peeled, and a 67-year-old got the indictment for it.

Then Saturday, after his own U.S. attorney put all of this in writing, Trump posted that he disagrees with Pirro “100%.” He doesn’t care about the evidence, he cares about never being wrong. This is a narcissistic man baby who’s spent his whole life believing that if he says a thing loudly enough it becomes true.

Michael Boren, Trump’s Under Secretary of Agriculture, is fast-tracking a four hundred foot deep radioactive open pit mine in northeastern Wyoming, fourteen air miles from Devils Tower. That’s the rock from Close Encounters. It’s also Bear Lodge, sacred to more than twenty Northern Plains nations, and the first national monument Teddy Roosevelt ever created.

You get thirty days to comment, closing August 28, and that’s it. No draft study. No objections process. Normally you’d read the agency’s findings, argue with them, and formally object, and somebody would have to answer you in writing. Boren is signing this one himself so none of that applies. Fourteen counties and agencies got a formal seat at the review. Not one tribal nation did. Will Pattiz at More Than Just Parks broke this and built the comment tool.

Thirty Minnesota water systems were hit by a cyberattack this week, one of at least seven states the FBI warned about Thursday. Trump, in front of his cabinet: “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, oh, is Iran? Iran should be so lucky.” He didn’t mention the governor of a single one of the other six states. Walz’s response: “Trump can’t beat Iran because he’s too busy waging war with Minnesota.” DOGE also gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose entire job is stopping exactly this.

And Todd Blanche still isn’t attorney general. He was supposed to be confirmed this week. He wasn’t, because Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are holding him over the anti-weaponization fund. That’s one point seven seven six billion dollars of your money, set aside to