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ONE YEAR LATER

NSPM-7 turns one, notches its first prosecutor to quit and its first DA to be referred, same week

By SalStaff Writer · the milkman edition, 26 September 2026

A year ago the administration signed a memo nobody outside a few staffers noticed, a national security directive ordering federal agencies to disrupt organizations the White House filed under "left." A year is enough time to see what a blueprint becomes once people with subpoena power get handed it and nothing to lose. Early this month, two U.S. senators opened an inquiry into reports that the Internal Revenue Service was drafting a plan to point its exam division at left-leaning nonprofits, the kind of penalty that doesn't need to win in court, because the audit itself is the sentence, and it arrives before anyone gets a hearing. Wyden and Warnock called it what a senator can call it in public: an investigation. The document itself, read straight, is a targeting memo with a congressional inquiry sitting on top of it like a lid that doesn't seal.

Two weeks later, a federal judge in Philadelphia did the same. District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has spent public time insinuating that the president is a 35-time felon, was referred by that judge to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation. The Washington Examiner ran the referral as poetic justice.

Then this week the machine produced its first defector. Sheri Mecklenburg, a career federal prosecutor, resigned from Justice and put it in writing: U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros "personally directed" the prosecution of the Broadview 6, and it ended her career. She is the staff — the person who does the paperwork instead of writing the memo, and instead of staying quiet, she quit and told a reporter why, which is the only alarm a bureaucracy has left once everyone above her stopped answering to anyone outside it.

Put the three next to each other and the word "blueprint" in that anniversary story stops sounding like a metaphor. A directive turned one this month, and in the same few weeks it produced an audit plan under Senate inquiry, a resignation letter naming a sitting U.S. attorney, and a district attorney referred to federal prosecutors for the opinion Krasner holds about the man who signed the memo. Nobody had to leak an org chart. It filed itself, one press release at a time, and the only person in the story who quit is the one who was working inside it.

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White House answers Zelensky's diesel blame same day, his China request two weeks and counting

By SalStaff Writer · the milkman edition, 26 September 2026

On September 6th, Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner flew to Kyiv and called their talks with Ukrainian officials "encouraging," "substantive," "important" — the diplomatic equivalent of don't worry, we're handling it. Eight days later, on September 14th, Trump announced on Truth Social that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to stop hitting each other's energy targets. He did not announce it clean. The next day, September 15th, he said it again, this time on the record to the New York Post: Zelensky "has to stop knocking out diesel fuel." Twice inside two days, the White House found the words for the price of diesel.

Ukraine has taken billions in American support; a meeting should not be the ask, it should be Tuesday. But the meeting was the easy part. Sitting underneath it, unresolved, was the actual request Zelensky says he made directly to Trump: get China, Xi Jinping specifically, into the business of ending the invasion.

Line up the paper trail and it reads like a schedule of priorities, not a diplomacy. A diesel accusation: same-day delivery, twice. A ceasefire that cost Ukraine its ability to hit Russian oil revenue: a press release. A face-to-face meeting: a photo op, arranged. A request to lean on the one country with real leverage over Moscow's income: two weeks of nothing, and counting.

Nobody is claiming the China ask got lost in the mail. It got exactly as much attention as it was going to get, which is none, while the diesel number — the one line item that shows up on a receipt at a gas station — got answered before the ink dried. The invasion is in its fifth year. The silence now has a date stamped on it, and every day that passes, the date just gets longer.

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Netanyahu threatens libel suit over report The New York Times just confirmed was true

By SalStaff Writer · the milkman edition, 26 September 2026

On September 9th, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a warning letter threatening a libel lawsuit against a newspaper. The newspaper was Haaretz. The story it wanted to sue over: that in September 2023, United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan told Netanyahu, on a phone call, that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning "a major event" against Israel — weeks before more than 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7th.

Netanyahu denied receiving that warning. He also sent the letter — addressed to Haaretz and to the two reporters, Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, who wrote the story — threatening to sue all three over it. Haaretz did not retract anything. The paper said it stood by its reporting.

That was Sept. 9. Today is Sept. 26. What arrived instead is worse for him than any court date. The New York Times assigned three of its own journalists to the story, and on Friday the paper of record backed it: Netanyahu was warned.

He confirmed the rest of it himself. Returning from the United Nations, where Common Dreams reports he used his speech "to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians" in Gaza, Netanyahu landed home to a story that had grown, not died, in the two and a half weeks since his letter went out. A libel threat is supposed to freeze a story while the target decides whether to make good on the promise to sue. This one froze nothing.

The letter functioned as a bet: that Haaretz would fold, that the story would die from being ignored, that nobody else would call the Emiratis and ask what they told him in that September 2023 phone call. The bet lost. The confirmation came from the one newsroom a libel threat doesn't reach.

So here is where the fold leaves it. A warning letter, still unfiled as a lawsuit, outlived by the story it was sent to kill, confirmed by a newspaper Netanyahu never threatened. The reporters he wanted to sue are still working. The story he wanted buried made The New York Times. The one thing he actually did — write the letter — is the only part of this that hasn't moved in two and a half weeks.

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THIRD TIME

Supreme Court blocks Missouri Republicans' congressional map for third time this year.

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 26 September 2026

In 2022, the Missouri Legislature enacted a congressional map. In 2025, like Republican legislators in several other states responding to pressure from the White House, it enacted a new one — a 7-1 House map, the design Republicans wanted. Under the Missouri Constitution, a new law does not take effect if enough voters sign a referendum petition against it, and enough had. The Missouri Supreme Court ordered the state back onto its 2022 lines pending that vote. That single fact is what the rest of September has been arguing about.

On September 5, Missouri asked the U.S. Supreme Court to override the state court before November, telling Justice Brett Kavanaugh that the ruling had created a "federal-election-administration disaster." On September 8, Kavanaugh denied the request. Two days later, on September 10, the full Court blocked a separate federal order that had let Missouri keep using the 7-1 map anyway — with no noted dissents, from a bench that includes three of the same president's appointees. Democracy groups, in their own account, called it the second loss for the GOP's map in as many days.

It did not end there. On September 21, a three-judge federal appeals panel reopened the question, and by September 23 the fight was back at the Supreme Court for a third time in three weeks, less than fifty days before the midterms. On September 25, the Court blocked the 7-1 map again, this time in an unsigned decision warning that switching maps again this close to the election "would usher in electoral chaos." Missouri stays on its 2022 lines. Same map, same bench, third rejection since Labor Day.

The same Friday, in a separate order, the same Court let the Trump administration's citizenship database back onto state voter rolls — the tool a federal appeals panel had blocked three weeks earlier. Two rulings, one bench, one day: a map Missouri Republicans drew gets thrown out for a third time, and a voter-screening tool lower courts had rejected gets waved through on its first trip to the top. The Court that finds "electoral chaos" in redrawn districts finds none in a new database that decides who counts as a voter in the first place. Missouri voters get their 2022 map back because a court said so three times. Whoever built the database only had to ask once.

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White House bars CNN from Air Force One, funds taxpayer ads instead, calls that patriotism.

By LouOne More Question · the sunrise edition, 26 September 2026

You're smart people. I know it, because I watched you get all the way to three before I did.

Three: that's how many outlets the White House told to stay off the grounds this month — CNN, Politico, MS NOW, banned in one week, back in September, per The Hill. Can a White House run without hearing from three of its beat reporters? The court didn't think so. A judge ordered the access restored — Thursday, the Times says, plain as that, no hedging needed, just Thursday — and for about forty-eight hours the reporters had their badges back.

Then Saturday came along, and it turns out "restored" has an expiration date. CNN was pulled off the pool for Air Force One again — this time for the Tennessee trip, this time just the one outlet, this time the seat went to Real America's Voice News, per the Post. Does a seat on the plane go to whoever asks the fewest questions? I wrote it down. I'm not saying anything. I'm asking.

I want to tell you about my car, because it's the only demonstration I've got in me some weeks. Every morning I drive it to the toll plaza on Route 9, and every morning there's a fast lane and a cash lane, and every morning somebody in a truck ahead of me gets waved straight through while I'm digging in the cupholder for quarters. There's no bulletin explaining why. You just notice, over time, that it's always the same truck.

Back to the pool. When CNN got pulled the first time — the whole three of them, back in September — the rest of the press corps didn't just shrug it off. ABC, CBS, NBC, even Fox News, by the Common Dreams account, refused to cover for the empty seats. There was an event with no audio because nobody wanted to run the microphone. Does a White House that bans its critics end up talking to a room with the sound off? That's not me saying it. That's what happened, per the wire, that week.

Not that it was illegal. Not that it was cruel. Just that it was a bad play, the kind a smart operation doesn't run. I wrote that down too. Does a former West Wing staffer publicly second-guessing the plan from the outside sound like an operation with its confidence intact?

Now here's the part I almost forgot, and I only remembered because I went back through my notes for something else entirely. The same week the plane seat went to Real America's Voice News, the White House was out defending a taxpayer-funded television campaign — ads, running ahead of the midterms, paid for the way government ads get paid for — and when somebody asked whether that looked partisan, the response, and I have this one word for word: "Patriotism isn't partisan."

Oh — hang on, before you go. I want to read that back to you one more time, next to the other thing, because I think they belong on the same page. The seat on the plane went to the friendlier outlet. The ad calling itself patriotic ran on the public's dime. And the line the White House chose, the actual sentence, was: patriotism isn't partisan.

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New York Post calls Gaza 'genocide' a lie six weeks after rights group reports evidence hauled away by the ton.

By LouOne More Question · the sunrise edition, 26 September 2026

You're a smart operation. I mean that plain, no needle in it — the New York Post runs actual wire copy, keeps an actual morgue, employs people who get up early enough to read six-week-old files before they write the new one. A smart operation like that doesn't make the mistake sitting on page nine of this morning's paper, which is why I keep coming back to it, the way you'd go back over a receipt that adds up wrong.

I'm not accusing anybody of anything. I want to say that up front, because my wife says I lead with the accusation and lose the room before I've made the case. I'm just a guy with a garage full of paperwork I can't throw out, and a habit of checking one file against the file next to it before I sign anything.

Here's today's page, word for word, near as I can read my own handwriting: Governor Hochul let Zohran Mamdani's "genocide" description of Gaza go by uncorrected, and that was a lie somebody in Albany should've caught. That's the story. I wrote it down because I wanted to get it right before I went looking for what came before it.

What came before it is dated six weeks earlier — August, if you're keeping track — and it's not from the Post, it's a wire item out of Prism, quoting a group called Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Their count, not mine: more than eleven million U.S. tons of debris removed from Gaza, debris the group says was likely holding human remains and evidence of war crimes. Eleven million tons. I had to write that number twice because the first time I didn't believe I'd copied it right.

Now, I fix cars for a living — badly enough that the one in my garage still needs a new fan belt — and I know what it looks like when two invoices for the same job don't agree. One says the part was never installed. The other's a photograph of the part, in the trash, out back. I never have to guess which invoice is telling the truth. I just check which one's got the earlier date stamped on it. Can you check the date stamped on these two?

I drove down to the corner store this morning — the raincoat, since it was raining, since it's always raining when I want to think something through — and asked the guy behind the counter if he'd read the Post. He had. I asked if he'd read the item from August. He hadn't heard of it. That's not his fault. It's not on today's page. It's in the file next to it.

So here's what I keep circling, and I promise I'm almost done: a newspaper can call a word a lie. That's the paper's job, calling words what they are. But the same paper's own morgue already had, six weeks earlier, a rights group's count of the evidence — the actual physical evidence, by the ton — being hauled off the ground where it happened. I wrote both dates on the same page of my notebook, side by side, so I wouldn't lose either one.

Oh — before you go, one more thing, because I almost walked out without asking it. If this morning's job was correcting a word somebody used for what happened in Gaza, and the paper's own file, six weeks old, was already sitting there on what happened to the evidence of what happened in Gaza, which one of those two documents was the editor supposed to read first?

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Texas Democrat wins primary vowing to flip the state blue, then swings right three times in a month.

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 26 September 2026

On September 22, Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa won her Democratic primary for governor with almost twice the votes Beto O'Rourke pulled in the same race in 2018. "We flip Texas, and it's over," she told The Nation, the kind of line a party prints on a bumper sticker before it means anything.

Twenty days before that win, on September 2, Hinojosa was already hedging what the mandate would look like: asked about Gov. Greg Abbott's pause on new data-center approvals, she told CBS she doubted he'd stick to it, calling it an attempt to protect his own reelection chances. Eight days after that, on September 10, she went further and backed Trump's $5,000 dividend outright — with one carve-out, that it not be conditioned on the midterms the way Trump proposed it. She still took the dividend. Three days after the primary that made her the nominee, on September 25, she turned on Biden, blaming his record on immigration for hurting Democrats in the 2024 cycle. "He was silent mostly," she told Politico. "He hid from it."

Line them up in the order they happened and it stops looking like three separate news cycles and starts looking like a memo: skepticism of a Republican governor's regulation, an endorsement of a Republican president's cash payment, a rebuke of the last Democratic president's silence — inside one month, before and after the win that was supposed to prove the progressive math worked. The primary produced twice the votes. It did not produce three positions of a party moving left.

None of this costs Hinojosa anything with the base she needed to clear a primary; it's the general electorate, the one that hasn't flipped Texas since Democrats started promising it would, that these three moves are aimed at.

The dividend detail is the one worth sitting with: Hinojosa's own objection to the current system wasn't the size of the check, it was what she called the billions already going to "grift." She wants a bigger check with a shorter memo attached. That's not a rejection of the sales pitch. That's a request for better terms on it.

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Utah Valley University planned three officers for thousands; state law may grant immunity for that plan.

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 26 September 2026

The number in the new report is three: three university law-enforcement officers assigned the day Charlie Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, for an outdoor event the school itself expected to draw several thousand people. Three officers, thousands of people — the ratio alone tells the story before the report reaches its findings.

The New York Post ran that report under a headline citing several security failures at the university.

Ten days before that report became public, Kirk's family had already filed a notice of claim, the legal first step under Utah law toward suing the state, Utah Valley University, the campus police department, and the officials who approved that staffing plan. A notice of claim doesn't require the family to prove intent. It requires them to state what happened. What happened, the family can now say with a citation, is three.

What the family may not get, according to legal analysts who reviewed the claim, is a court willing to let that number decide anything. Utah's government immunity statute is broad enough that even lawyers sympathetic to the family call the evidence powerful and the odds long. The state can be sued in name; the same law that let the university plan for three officers may also let it answer for none.

So the accounting for the day Charlie Kirk died has two columns now. One lists three officers against several thousand attendees, and a report that names the shortfall a failure without softening it. The other lists a statute passed long before anyone at Utah Valley University drew up a staffing chart, built to keep a number that small from reaching a jury. The family has priced the gap at a lawsuit. Utah's immunity law prices the same gap at zero, and the two numbers are what get argued over next.

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