Featured

California woman says she was raped by Rep. Eric Swalwell in 2018

A new rape allegation against Rep. Eric Swalwell surfaced as he exits a California governor bid and says he will resign from Congress, but the public record so far is largely a press-conference claim pending any law-enforcement filing or corroboration.

Apr 14, 2026

Featured

Trump turns against ‘unacceptable’ Meloni

Trump publicly breaks with Giorgia Meloni after she criticized his remarks about the pope, turning a once-useful alliance into a political liability with consequences for Italy–U.S. relations.

Apr 14, 2026

Buried.News

The stories buried under the noise

Primary focus

Trump fires Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary

A Cabinet secretary was forced out amid contracting and oversight scrutiny, signaling that executive control—not transparent accountability—can dictate leadership of the agency driving mass detention and deportation.

Mar 5, 2026

Featured

Trump’s Acting A.G. Says He Won’t Release Even One More Epstein File

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says DOJ has released “everything” in the Epstein files, but lawmakers and prior reporting point to millions of pages still withheld and heavy redactions that keep public accountability out of reach.

Apr 14, 2026

Featured

CNN Data Guru Predicts Major Disaster for Trump After Dems Flip Mar-a-Lago

A Democrat flipping the Florida district that includes Mar-a-Lago is real news, but using it to “predict” a national midterm wave oversells what one low-turnout special election can prove.

Mar 25, 2026

RFK Jr cut off dead raccoon’s penis on family vacation ‘to study later’

A new RFK Jr. biography leans on his private diaries to surface a grotesque roadkill anecdote—raising bigger questions about what’s verified, what’s hearsay, and why sensational personal stories are being used to frame a sitting HHS secretary.

Executive

Apr 14, 2026

Sources

https://www.irishstar.com/culture/entertainment/rfk-jr-dead-raccoon-penis-37011736

Summary

A biography by journalist Isabel Vincent claims Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s private 1999–2001 diaries include an entry describing him cutting the penis from a road-killed raccoon on I-684 while his children waited in the car. The Irish Star write-up amplifies the shock value while bundling in other animal-related allegations and character attacks with uneven sourcing. It matters because salacious claims can drown out the provenance of the underlying records and blur the line between documented entries, secondhand assertions, and politically timed narratives about a top public-health official.

Reality Check

The most verifiable part of this story is that **a reputable mainstream outlet (People) is reporting that Vincent’s book cites a dated diary entry describing the raccoon incident**, and that Vincent told People he took the genitals to “study them later.” But the Irish Star framing collapses multiple categories of material into one scandal stream—**direct diary text**, **the author’s interpretation**, **Kennedy’s own past public comments about roadkill**, and **separate allegations (including from relatives)**—without consistently labeling what is documented versus disputed or secondhand. Treat the raccoon anecdote as **“reported in a new biography citing private diaries”** unless and until the underlying diary pages are independently authenticated or published in full context.

Detail

The Irish Star story is based on a new biography, *RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise*, by investigative journalist Isabel Vincent. The book reportedly draws on RFK Jr.’s private journals kept in New York City between 1999 and 2001 and said to be updated daily. A quoted diary entry dated Nov. 11, 2001 describes Kennedy pulling over on I-684 and cutting a dead raccoon’s penis out of the animal while his children waited in the car. People magazine reports Vincent said Kennedy took the genitals to “study them later.” The article claims the journals were shared with Vincent after Mary Richardson Kennedy’s death by suicide on May 16, 2012, and frames Mary as having held the journals as “leverage” during their divorce. The piece adds broader animal-related stories (bear carcass in Central Park; whale incident; feeding hawks via blended animals) without clearly separating confirmed reporting, Kennedy’s own statements, and family allegations. Separately reported 2024 coverage quotes Kennedy saying he has picked up roadkill his whole life and had a freezer full of it, in the context of press questions about the Central Park bear-carcass story. The Irish Star also mentions claims about affairs and that Kennedy flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane twice, attributing details to the biography without independently documenting the flight records in the article text.

Norms Impact

Trump admin demands states exempt ISPs from net neutrality and price laws

Federal broadband money is being conditioned on statewide carve-outs for ISPs, turning a deployment grant into a tool to override state net neutrality and affordability laws.

Executive

Oct 30, 2025

⚖ Legal Exposure

Ethics Violation

Likely Unlawful

Potentially Criminal

Likely Criminal

Exposure is primarily civil/administrative: the NTIA’s conditioning of BEAD grants on statewide exemptions from net neutrality and price laws raises significant investigative red flags for improper or ultra vires grant conditions and arbitrary/capricious agency action. The article does not provide facts showing a money-to-access-to-official-act exchange or personal enrichment that would support bribery, honest-services fraud, or other transactional public-corruption charges without additional evidence.

Sources

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/trump-admin-demands-states-exempt-isps-from-net-neutrality-and-price-laws/

Summary

The Trump administration is withholding BEAD broadband-deployment grants from states unless they exempt participating ISPs from state net neutrality and price regulations statewide. Through NTIA, the Commerce Department is using federal funding conditions to effectively preempt state consumer-protection regimes that courts have previously upheld. The practical consequence is that unserved and underserved communities can lose years of broadband buildout while states face coercive pressure to repeal or suspend laws to access money.

Reality Check

This funding leverage weaponizes federal spending power to pressure states into dismantling duly enacted consumer protections, setting a precedent that lets the executive branch accomplish de facto preemption without Congress. On this record it reads less like routine grant administration and more like coercive conditionality: a statewide exemption demand untethered to specific funded build areas and timed to force policy surrender while unserved communities wait. The stronger legal fight is constitutional and administrative—Spending Clause coercion and Administrative Procedure Act arbitrariness—rather than an obvious criminal case; the conduct instead squarely implicates abuse-of-power norms by converting a $42 billion public program into a bargaining chip against state law.

Legal Summary

Legal Analysis

18 U.S.C. § 201 (Bribery of public officials; illegal gratuities)

The article describes federal grant funding being conditioned on states providing regulatory exemptions benefiting ISPs (net neutrality/price-law carveouts), but it does not allege any personal thing-of-value to the federal decisionmaker(s) or a specific corrupt exchange with an identifiable private payer.
Without allegations of payments, gifts, or other personal enrichment tied to Roth/NTIA or other officials, core quid-pro-quo bribery/gratuity elements are not supported on the provided facts.

18 U.S.C. § 1346 (Honest services fraud) / 18 U.S.C. § 1343 (Wire fraud)

Structural corruption exposure would require a kickback/bribe or self-dealing scheme depriving the public of honest services; the article alleges policy leverage (withholding BEAD grants) to achieve deregulatory outcomes favoring ISPs, but no private payment, concealed conflict, or personal benefit.
The conduct described is more consistent with a contested legal interpretation and program-eligibility conditioning rather than a fraud scheme, absent allegations of corrupt personal gain.

5 U.S.C. § 706 (APA arbitrary/capricious review) / Spending Clause grant-conditions risk (civil/administrative exposure)

NTIA is allegedly imposing an expansive interpretation of the BEAD statute (treating net neutrality as rate regulation; requiring statewide exemptions beyond grant-funded areas), creating potential administrative-law vulnerability and coercive-condition arguments.
Threatening to withhold congressionally appropriated funds unless states change unrelated statewide law/regulation is an investigative red flag for abuse-of-discretion/ultra vires conditioning, though the article frames it as “consistent with the law” and does not establish illegality conclusively.

5 C.F.R. Part 2635 (Standards of Ethical Conduct) (ethics/conflicts—fact-dependent)

The article suggests alignment with broadband lobby goals (“allies in the Trump administration”) but provides no facts of gifts, employment negotiations, or financial conflicts that would establish a provable ethics violation.

Conclusion: The described conduct presents a serious investigative red flag focused on coercive program administration and potential ultra vires/APA issues rather than prosecutable structural corruption, because the article does not allege money/personal benefit flowing to officials in exchange for official action.

Detail

Commerce Department official Arielle Roth, an assistant secretary leading the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), said states will not receive Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program grants if they enforce net neutrality rules or broadband price regulations. Roth stated in a Hudson Institute speech that, because BEAD’s authorizing law bars NTIA from regulating broadband rates, NTIA will treat state “broadband-specific economic regulations, such as price regulation and net neutrality” as impermissible for BEAD participation.

Roth said any state accepting BEAD funds must exempt BEAD providers from those state laws across their entire in-state service footprint during the BEAD period of performance, not only within BEAD-funded build areas. The approach risks conflicts with existing laws in California (net neutrality) and New York (low-income broadband pricing). States could object to NTIA decisions and sue, but litigation could take years, potentially delaying service to unserved homes. Roth also said NTIA is seeking additional state commitments on permitting, utility-pole access, and higher provider matching funds, and that several state plans incorporating these commitments would be approved soon.