The Daily Grift

Trump is selling one and a half million dollar tickets to a cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House next month. Same fundraising team running the East Wing ballroom and the Kennedy Center renovation is collecting the sponsorship checks. A Republican lobbyist describes it on the record as “another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give undisclosed money to and gain favor with Trump...

Nobody is coming to formally confirm what most of us already know. Today on the Daily Grift - we walk every receipt Donald Trump has paid Russia since the morning he first took the oath of office. The sanctions he tried to lift on day one. The press conference where he sided with Vladimir Putin over our own spy agencies. The afternoon he handed the Russian foreign minister classified intelligence...

Vladimir Putin has a rabbi. Jared Kushner’s family pays the rabbi’s organization. The FBI has known about it for six years. Today on the Daily Grift - I walk through a religious institution Putin built in 1999 with oligarch money, the $295M Manhattan real estate deal that connected it to Trump’s son-in-law, and the FBI memo that named Kushner as a Russian-money-laundering conduit. The Bureau gave...

There is a boring little piece of paper that has caught billions of dollars of drug cartel money, terrorist financing, and Russian oligarch cash since 1970 - and the Treasury Secretary of the United States just announced he wants to soften it. Today on The Daily Grift, we follow the ten-day window between a quiet FinCEN rule change and Scott Bessent’s public speech asking for even less enforcement...

Before we go any further with my Russian Receipts essay series, we need to talk about the elephant in the room. I still see commenters saying the whole Trump-Russia connection was a hoax. That it was overblown. That Mueller cleared everyone. That’s absolutely, positively not true. I took the weekend to put this episode together so we could clear that up before I go any further. Today’s episode exp...

Every decade, the vehicle changes. The customers stay the same. In 1984, it was condos. Shell companies, all cash, Trump at the closing. Now it’s a memecoin dinner where 19 of the top 25 holders are likely foreign nationals - and the agencies that are supposed to stop it have been gutted from the inside. Today, I trace the full 40-year pipeline from Trump Tower to World Liberty Financial and ask t...

The whisper network just beat the political establishment. Eric Swalwell - sitting US Congressman, frontrunner for California governor, prime-time cable news fixture - is out in 72 hours, accused of raping a former staffer twice and sending unsolicited graphic messages to at least three other women. The Manhattan DA opened a criminal investigation. The House Ethics Committee opened a formal probe....

The ceasefire is two days old and every piece of it has a price tag. Someone turned $13,200 into $467,000 betting on the Iran ceasefire hours before Trump announced it - while Trump Jr. holds a financial stake in the platform it happened on. Meanwhile, Trump pitched a toll booth on the Strait of Hormuz, Israel killed 254 people in Lebanon the same day it was excluded from the deal, and Pete Hegset...

The president told the nation the war is almost over. The Pentagon is asking for $200 billion. The money goes to companies owned by the Deputy Defense Secretary’s old firm. And the FBI got hacked three times by the country we are bombing - after the director fired the team that was supposed to be watching them. Today’s episode follows the money from Trump’s Wednesday address to the defense contrac...

The law is working exactly as redesigned - it just depends on who you are. Today’s episode follows 23,000 criminal cases the DOJ quietly dropped to triple immigration prosecutions. Then we trace how an oil lobbyist’s name ended up in the metadata of the letter he wrote against pollution rules - and how he’s now running the EPA office that writes them. And we close with a pardoned nursing home owne...

Happy April Fool’s Day. Today’s episode is about the oldest trick in Washington: the promise of reform. Congress spent Q1 swearing it would pass a stock trading ban. Q1 just ended. Congress went on vacation. Meanwhile, the Deputy Attorney General killed crypto enforcement while personally holding crypto - and nobody is being held accountable for any of it. And we close with two numbers you need to...

If you read the essays below, you know the No Kings math and why Elizabeth Warren's two-cent tax makes billionaires act like the revolution is coming. Today on the podcast: Bank of America just paid $72.5 million for looking the other way while Jeffrey Epstein ran a trafficking operation through their accounts - and they're the third bank to settle. The DOJ admitted it's sharing your voter registr...

This weekend, nine million Americans showed up to the largest single-day protest in US history - in all 50 states, including deep red Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. The White House called them a leftist funding network. Then Congress left for a two-week vacation during the longest government shutdown in American history. Meanwhile, the oil futures insider trading story keeps getting worse, and a fed...

This is The Daily Grift - a new daily podcast from me, Rachel Hurley. It’s news for people who are sick of the news. Every morning, I dig through the day’s biggest political stories and find the grift - the corruption, the cover-ups, the hypocrisy, the money trails, the quiet power grabs that both parties should find outrageous but somehow nobody is talking about. I connect the dots so you don’t h...