The Read | The DNC Released an Autopsy. The Body Is Missing.
Plus: a DOJ lawyer hid the Smith report under "Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf," three networks skipped the Vance/Omar confirmation, and the Feeding Our Future ringleader got 41 years.
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In Today’s Read
The DNC’s 2024 autopsy came out 192 pages with the exec summary and conclusion literally blank. Gaza doesn’t appear once. The chairman fired the author the same day and told you not to trust what’s inside.
A managing assistant U.S. attorney in Southern Florida allegedly emailed herself Volume II of Jack Smith’s sealed report, twice, after renaming the file “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf.” She pleaded not guilty Wednesday.
JD Vance confirmed at a White House briefing that DOJ is probing Ilhan Omar for immigration fraud and family financial ties. ABC, NBC, and CBS evening news ran zero seconds on it. Her March disclosure amendment also revalued her husband’s companies from $30 million to zero.
Aimee Bock got 500 months and $243 million in restitution for the Feeding Our Future scheme. Same day, DOJ charged 15 more Minnesotans in a $90 million Medicaid fraud sweep.
The Senate punted ICE and CBP funding past Trump’s June 1 deadline after GOP senators revolted over the DOJ’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
The DNC’s autopsy is missing a body
The Story.
The Democratic National Committee released its 2024 election autopsy on May 21 after CNN obtained the document and forced the issue. The report runs 192 pages. The author is Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who DNC Chair Ken Martin announced was no longer with the committee hours after publication.
Martin’s release statement reads more like a disavowal: “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it.” The exec summary, the conclusion, and the “Notes for the reader” section are blank. The words “Gaza,” “Israel,” “Palestinians,” and “Walz” do not appear anywhere in 192 pages. Biden’s decision to run again is not analyzed.
What the report does say: identity politics is a crutch, kitchen-table economics is the path forward, the assumption “Trump’s negatives were baked in” was “a major failure of analysis,” and state-party support was cut.
The Left’s read. The Intercept and Common Dreams are furious about the Gaza omission. The Intercept quoted a policy executive who met with Rivera in July 2025 and was told privately, “the data clearly showed Gaza had hurt Biden and Harris.” Then Rivera handed in 192 pages with no Gaza analysis. MaddowBlog and MSNBC are running the autopsy-of-the-autopsy frame: who got to Rivera between July and December?
The Right’s read. The Washington Times is celebrating the identity-politics-as-a-crutch finding and the rural-America critique (“Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate. The math doesn’t work.”). The frame: Democrats just admitted, in their own document, that they do not care about rural America, and the bet that nonwhite voter growth would carry them forever was a fantasy.
What both sides are skipping. The 2028 prospect. Mediaite reported that Martin only released the report after a phone call with an unnamed 2028 Democratic prospect left him “rattled.” Nobody has the name yet. That call is the story under the story, and neither the Intercept frame (Gaza) nor the Washington Times frame (identity politics) is chasing it.
Everyone thought Ken Martin was holding the autopsy back because it was damaging to Harris or Biden. The truth was simpler. It was embarrassing for the DNC because there was no autopsy.
There’s no analysis of the campaigns, no examination of Harris’s coronation, no reckoning with Biden’s debate collapse. Entire sections sit blank. The thing is riddled with spelling errors. The only substantive finding is that the Democrats blew up their own coalition by assuming non-whites would vote Democrat forever. When they didn’t, the Democrats couldn’t tell their donors why.
The Left’s biggest criticism is the Gaza omission. They want it to be THE reason Harris lost. It isn’t. Foreign policy sits at the bottom of voter priority lists cycle after cycle. The Left wants the omitted data to confirm their pro-Palestine, blame-Israel-for-everything trajectory. The likelier read is that Harris lost because she was a bad candidate forced on the electorate. They need Gaza to be the story so they don’t have to confront the harder one: their cultural policies are unpopular.
The 192-page autopsy of a party that lost the White House, the Senate, the House, and the down-ballot map has no substance and no reflection. It exposes their incompetence. The party stays unpopular and keeps getting pulled further left. They have learned nothing. The seeds of antisemitism since October 7 have only grown. Look at the most recent Democratic primary winners. A large portion are Hamas apologists and/or socialists. Harris is still ranking at the top of 2028 Democratic primary polls.
I want to know which 2028 prospect got Martin on the phone. My guess is Kamala. The speculation was that the report was damaging to her, and the play would be to make the DNC and Martin sacrifice themselves by releasing this joke of an autopsy. Whoever takes the stage in August is the one on that rattled call.
Worth flagging. Akela Lacy at The Intercept had the Gaza-omission story first and ran the Rivera-told-us-privately receipts. Credit where due. The left is doing the cross-check on the left’s own party. The right press wasn’t going to.
IKYMI
A fair share of the recent Democratic primary winners I called Hamas apologists or socialists are DSA members or DSA-endorsed. The Democratic Socialists of America is the political machine quietly unseating moderate incumbents and putting people on your city council. Most readers have no idea how the DSA actually operates, who funds it, or how it picks its targets.
Read about it here. 👇
A DOJ prosecutor allegedly emailed herself the Smith report under “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf”
The Story.
On May 20, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida unsealed an indictment against Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, 62, of Port St. Lucie. Lineberger was the managing assistant U.S. attorney in the Fort Pierce branch of the SDFL, the office that handled the Trump classified-documents prosecution. She pleaded not guilty in West Palm Beach on Wednesday.
The charges: one felony count of obstruction, one felony count of concealing public records, and two misdemeanor counts of theft of government property. Prosecutors allege Lineberger received Volume II of Jack Smith’s sealed report, the classified-documents volume Judge Aileen Cannon had blocked from release, and emailed it from her DOJ account to her personal email accounts twice. In fall 2025, she allegedly renamed the file “chocolate cake recipe.” In December, she allegedly renamed it “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf” and sent it to her personal Gmail and her personal Hotmail.
The Left’s read. The Washington Post led procedurally, then pivoted hard to Rep. Jamie Raskin’s statement that the Smith report contains “damning” evidence that Trump retained classified documents tied to his business interests. The angle: the real story isn’t Lineberger, it’s what was in the report she tried to get out. CNN runs the same beat.
The Right’s read. Jonathan Turley at Fox News, under “Recipe for Disaster,” and the Washington Examiner ran the obvious frame: a career DOJ insider tried to exfiltrate a sealed federal document by disguising it as a cake recipe. Trump’s DOJ caught one of its own. The irony lands hard: the office handling Trump’s classified documents case produced an officer charged with mishandling classified documents.
What both sides are skipping. The Cannon gag order itself. Cannon had blocked Volume II from release, and Lineberger’s alleged exfiltration happened while that order was in force. Neither side wants to ask whether sealing a document of high political salience produces the very leak incentive it was meant to prevent. The Post would have to credit the right’s longtime complaint about over-sealing; the right would have to credit the left’s argument that suppression breeds whistleblowing. So neither touches it.
A career DOJ attorney saw Volume II, renamed it after a cake, and emailed it to her personal Hotmail. Also, who still has Hotmail?
Quick context. Volume II is the classified documents half of Jack Smith’s final report. After Cannon dismissed the case in 2024, Smith finalized two volumes. Garland released Volume I, the election-interference half, in January 2025. Volume II got sealed when Cannon barred Garland or any successor AG from releasing it publicly. That order was still in force the day Lineberger allegedly emailed Volume II to her Hotmail.
So we are all on the same page. The DOJ, a sealed report, and dessert filenames, it reads like a bad spy novel. I picture an Angela Lansbury type. But it’s not a joke, the Biden DOJ pursued Trump for mishandling classified documents. Having an insider justifying moving evidence into a personal inbox is a service to the resistance. We have seen similar play repeatedly. The same thing happened with Russiagate, Trump’s tax records, and Carter Page. It’s a pattern. And now Lineberger is emailing herself a report that is under a gag order concealed as a cake recipe?
Why? Was she keeping it as leverage against the president or to monetize it?
The president is over 2 years into his second term after the first was plagued with institutional opposition. Clearly, the problem still exists. Watch whether DOJ ever surfaces filings showing Lineberger sent Volume II to anyone outside the department. The indictment doesn’t yet allege a third-party recipient. If one surfaces, the cake disguise shifts from internal exfiltration to an active leak. Did anyone else at the SDFL office squirrel away a copy? Will we eventually see Volume II on the front page of WaPo?
Worth flagging. Turley’s column is the cleanest legal walkthrough of the charges I’ve seen. He sticks to what’s in the indictment. Read it.
A sitting VP confirmed a federal probe into a sitting congresswoman. Three networks skipped it.
The Story.
On May 19, at a White House press briefing, Vice President JD Vance confirmed that the Department of Justice is actively investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar for immigration fraud and family financial ties. Vance said “it certainly seems like something fishy is there” about Omar’s 2009 marriage, and added: “If we think that there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime.”
The immigration-fraud allegation is old. It centers on Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who multiple investigators have alleged is her biological brother. The financial angle is newer and overlaps with her reported ties to the Feeding Our Future fraud network (see the Quick Rundown for more). The Biden DOJ ran a financial probe in 2024 that closed without charges. Omar denied wrongdoing, called the probe “racist, creepy, and weird,” and said any claim of knowledge of the Feeding Our Future scheme is “flat-out false.”
The financial picture got worse for her in March. Omar amended her 2024 financial disclosure after the original filing valued husband Tim Mynett’s two companies at $6 million to $30 million, a sharp jump from prior years. The amended filing revalued the companies at zero and reported income from them between $102,502 and $1.005 million. Her attorney called the original an accountant’s error. Independent accountants have publicly said the math doesn’t reconcile.
Then NewsBusters audited the May 19 evening news broadcasts. ABC, NBC, and CBS did not lead with the Vance confirmation. None of them mentioned it. Zero seconds across the three of them.
The Left’s read. MaddowBlog framed Vance’s confirmation as “another person Trump doesn’t like” being added to a political-revenge list, and tied it to the administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” as a single architecture of payback. The frame: the probe is the story, not the substance. Slate and the WaPo opinion section run the same angle.
The Right’s read. Fox 9 Minneapolis, the Daily Caller, and Fox News reported the confirmation straight and pivoted to substance: the brother-marriage receipts, Feeding Our Future donations from defendants, the Minnesota state fraud committee’s parallel suspicion. The frame: the Biden probe was thin because it had to be, the family-finances angle is new, and the only question is whether DOJ produces filings.
What both sides are skipping. The networks. Not the probe itself, the network silence around it. A sitting VP confirming a federal investigation into a sitting member of Congress at a White House briefing is, by any normal news-judgment standard, a national lead. NewsBusters compared it to coverage volume on the Santos investigation. Networds ran Santos investigation non stop, zero on Omar.
Did three of the largest news operations in the country decline to lead with a White House confirmation of a federal probe into a sitting congresswoman? Yes. So which institution is “weaponizing” here? The DOJ, which has to produce filings and meet the burden in court, or the editors who decided viewers shouldn’t know the briefing happened?
The brother-marriage allegations are old. The Biden probe closed without charges. Fine. A news outlet should still report on it, but let’s grant the networks the benefit of the doubt on old news. The Feeding Our Future angle is genuinely new, the sentenced ringleader is named Omar, and the Minnesota state fraud committee is parallel-tracking. The VP of the United States addressed it from the podium, and they reported nothing.
The test: if DOJ produces filings within 90 days, will the networks report? Can they keep ignoring the story? If DOJ produces, Vance’s “fishy” line ages well. My money is they find a fish. The media will run “weaponization” and “retribution” with accusations of racism and xenophobia mixed in. Omar will become the face for Trump’s alleged attacks on all immigrants.
Watch whether MSNBC books Omar for a friendly hit. Watch whether DOJ files anything within 30 days showing actual scope. If the networks still won’t touch it after the Bock sentencing dropped the same day, they’re not going to. They’re just crossing their fingers you won’t notice.
Aimee Bock got 500 months and a $243 million restitution order Thursday for the Feeding Our Future scheme. At least 57 people billed the federal government $250 million for pandemic-era meals never served. Bock told the court “I don’t have the words to express just how horrible I feel.” CBS Minnesota.
DOJ also charged 15 more Minnesotans in a separate $90 million Medicaid fraud sweep across seven state programs. Assistant AG Colin McDonald called the charges “unprecedented,” flanked by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz. Fox News.
The DOJ unsealed a 20-page Miami indictment charging 94-year-old Raúl Castro and five Cuban pilots over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. Charges include conspiracy, murder, and aircraft destruction. Acting AG Todd Blanche said it was no “show indictment.” CBS News, Daily Wire.
The Senate punted ICE and CBP funding past Trump’s June 1 deadline after GOP senators revolted over the DOJ’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Grassley and Cotton reportedly erupted at Deputy AG Blanche behind closed doors. The parliamentarian also stripped a $1 billion Secret Service ballroom-security line. CBS News, Fox News, Daily Signal.
Kyle Busch, two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, died Thursday at 41 after a severe illness. Busch holds the all-time wins record across NASCAR’s top three series. Eleven days before he died, he radioed for a “shot” from a doctor at Watkins Glen. CBS News.
Stephen Colbert’s Late Show signs off tonight after CBS canceled the show ahead of the Paramount-Skydance merger. John Oliver and David Letterman appeared on the finale; Letterman delivered an on-air “good night and good luck, motherf---ers” aimed at CBS leadership. The Hill.
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