I’m reluctant to publish tonight given what’s happening in Minnesota, but I have a backlog of news items. For now, I’ll direct you to Don Lemon’s remarks about hearing from the president in regard to the protests. https://twitter.com/brooklynmutt/status/1266173717140385793

• Adding this after I’d published as it just happened and relates to Minneapolis. The president has called the protesters “thugs” and said they should be shot. He blamed the situation on “the radical left mayor.”

• The president celebrated The Atlantic laying off 20% of their staff. If any other president had done this, the Republican Party would have lost their minds. Instead, they’re silent.

• Despite the current attacks on mail-in voting, Kayleigh McEnany has voted by mail in every election for more than a decade. She’s defended this saying “absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason.” The state of Florida allows any voter to vote by mail for any reason.

• The Trump campaign’s new chief of staff was arrested for campaign finance fraud, discovered during a cocaine bust. (Charges were eventually dropped)

• The president tweeted out a video that began by saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” A terrorist follower of the president attempted to assassinate multiple members of the media and Democratic politicians in 2018. So vanished are expectations of decency, there has been little coverage of the president saying Democrats should be dead.

• Trump is now running ads mocking Joe Biden for wearing a mask during the pandemic, as his own CDC recommends. The president also shared a Federalist article saying that wearing a mask represents “a culture of silence, slavery, and social death.” Multiple Republican politicians, following the president’s lead, have joined the president in attacking the use of masks. Wearing a mask is one of the best and simplest ways to combat the spread of Covid-19, which has now killed over 100,000 Americans. The Republican response to the pandemic continues to be pretending it does not exist.

• Mike Pence Chief of Staff Marc Short owns between $500,000 and $1.6 million worth of stocks in companies related to the government’s pandemic response. Short declared some of these stocks to be a conflict of interest, but did not divest from any of them.

• Remdesivir is a drug that has shown some efficiency in treating Covid-19. The federal government botched distributions of the drug at the beginning of May. They sent it out to hospitals without consulting them and to facilities that did not have the required refrigeration needed to store the drug.

• OANN has been banned from press briefings by the WHCA because they refused to honor the rotation set up by the WHCA to maintain distancing. Since the ban, they have missed zero press briefings, though their reporters must stand at the back of the room as the guest of the press secretary. Today OANN reporter Chanel Rion, a conspiracy theorist, asked Kayleigh McEnany if Trump would welcome being sued by Joe Scarborough for defamation so Trump could depose Scarborough over the baseless lie that Scarborough killed a worker in his office, which the president keeps pushing despite the family begging him not to. McEnany deferred the question then ended the press conference.

• The White House justified firing Inspector General Steve Linick by saying they suspected him of leaking stories to the press. They lied. Linick had already been investigated and cleared of the leaks earlier in the year.

• Furious over Twitter appending a fact check to one of his lies about mail-in voting, the president today signed an executive order regarding social media moderation. At the heart of the issue is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It provides legal protections to sites for content posted by users. (In short, if you post something defamatory on Twitter, Twitter can’t be sued for it). This EO is almost entirely toothless but if these protections were removed, the result would be Twitter removing Trump’s account, not Twitter ceasing to fact check him. Removing their immunity would mean the company could be found liable for the president’s lies.

• Outgoing Acting DNI Richard Grenell has been touting his declassifications of the calls between Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Except he did not declassify the calls. He declassified a summary of the calls. This echoes Trump constantly saying he released a transcript of his calls with Ukrainian president Zelensky when he had only released a summary of the transcripts.

• The CDC has removed warnings about religious gatherings from their website. Until last Friday, the site warned about having choirs/singing or shared items. Those warnings are gone. In March, one infected person at a choir practice gave the virus to 85% of the people present, 52 people. 2 of them died from the infection.