🇺🇸☕️ HAPPY BIRTHDAY USA ☙ Friday, July 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠 🇺🇸

The Grey Lady protests too much over leaked FBI memo; polycrisis news; DC readies the most elaborate July 4th in history, a record-chasing fireworks show, and the world's tallest birthday candle; more

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Tomorrow is the nation’s 250th celebration of its founding and Independence from Great Britain. We’ve beaten the odds! Since C&C will be ‘closed’ tomorrow for the holiday, let me now wish everyone a patriotic and joyful Fourth of July. (Don’t blow your hand off.) Your star-spangled roundup includes: the New York Times melting down over a leaked memo that reveals Kash Patel quietly surging hundreds of FBI analysts into Fulton County's 2020 records; a trio of headlines the Times buried, from a Walz pardon to a wired-up Newsom insider to an indicted Olympic canoeist; the Red State Renaissance rolling through North Carolina and Florida; plus a full accounting of tomorrow's history-shattering 250th celebration corporate media forgot to describe — and much more.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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The New York Times sneered so hard yesterday that it snapped off its ugly face, betraying a deeper, truer layer of terror below its ordinary veneer of arrogant dismissiveness. Behold, the headline:

Ruh-roh! The two-page story, which required four senior Times reporters to write, was based on a single leaked personnel memo authorizing overtime for a surge of investigative staff into Fulton County, Georgia (i.e., Atlanta), and related to the 2020 election case.

Sorry— instead of ‘staff,’ I should have said two hundred and sixty analysts. Even “Scores” hardly does it justice. The headline should have said, “Hundreds.” Literally hundreds of FBI election analysts— versus one county, in one investigation, for two weeks.

It is historic. In typical federal cases, surges run “about five to ten analysts.” But “a former senior F.B.I. official could not recall an investigative surge of this magnitude occurring previously outside of a sustained command post around an event like an election or inauguration or a major violent episode, such as a terrorist attack,” the Times explained.

It is urgent. “Overtime (including weekends and holidays) has been authorized.” It “needs to be completed” within two weeks. It is “part of a priority effort by Kash Patel,” which will “complete approximately 708 records checks.” But, “the type of records being checked is unknown,” the Times complained. Imagine your worst fears.

It is enraging the New York Times. The brief article was based on a single, short personnel memo and zero anonymous sources. Nobody’s talking. (Of course, the story did not even reproduce or link the memo.)

But even without anything besides the staffing memo being available to report, the story was packed with furious language and childish name-calling by the reporters, like: “Trump’s ongoing push to prove his baseless claims,” “Kurt Olsen, an election denier who works in the Trump administration,” “every conspiracy theory from Mr. Trump and his allies,” “false claims,” “debunked claims,” “their many baseless claims,” and, in case it wasn’t yet perfectly clear, “a sham investigation.”

I lifted all those juvenile outrage nuggets from the straight news section of the story, not from Democrats’ reaction quotes, which were relatively tame by comparison. For instance, clueless Fulton County Election Supervisor Robb Pitts unconvincingly shrugged, “I have no clue, nor have I been notified of any of this.” Then why were you even in this story, Robb? Oh, never mind.

It took four senior reporters, plus who knows how many editors, to jam a temper tantrum of editorial into a routine news story about a leaked FBI staffing memo. My eyes rolled so hard I briefly saw angels playing harps. It wasn’t four junior reporters, either.

The squad of reporters assigned to write this low-information memo story were the paper’s attack dogs. For example, one was Alan Feuer, whom we’ve seen before: he’s the Times’ January 6th and Trump Criminal Cases reporter.

Why this razor-thin story, already assigned to three senior reporters, needed an extra Alan Feuer is a question I will leave for my readers to ponder.

🔥 Here’s a more interesting question to mull over: if the Times is right, and the Fulton investigation is a dry fishing hole, then it seems like the Times should smugly say something like, knock yourselves out, guys; keep on proving how secure the 2020 election was. Maybe one day you’ll be satisfied.

If the Times is really worried about public confidence in elections, then isn’t allowing losers to investigate better than yelling shut up and calling them names in straight news stories?

In other words, isn’t more transparency —even if driven by “losers”— the only way the public builds confidence in elections? Wouldn’t another ‘useless’ army of FBI analysts combing the same ballots and logs just pile more evidence onto the stack, proving even more conclusively that the outcome was fair?

Instead, a roving gang of anti-Trump reporters, frustrated by their own sources’ cautious comments, made the fiery argument that efforts to test the election “sow doubt and distrust,” “risk eroding public trust,” and “cast a shadow over the integrity of the 2026 elections.” Instead, they did everything they could to delegitimize the investigators and their motives: labeling Trump’s claims “baseless,” calling Olsen an “election denier,” branding the whole thing a “sham investigation,” and treating the very existence of a probe as a threat to democracy itself.

Methinks the Grey Lady doth protest too much.

🔥 However horrifying the staffing memo was to the Times and its progressive readers, it was a fireworks extravaganza and a laser light show for the rest of us. What better July 4th birthday cake could you ask for than this?

Kash Patel and the rest of the Trump Administration are keeping things tightly under wraps —as they should— but we can tell from the memo that, whatever they’re doing, they are doing it fast and they are going big. Which raises fascinating possibilities for the midterm elections.

In April, Kash told the Washington Times, “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim.”

Same‑president midterms are usually low-turnout for the party in power. That is why, in 38 of 41 cases, including in Trump 1.0, the governing party loses control of Congress. But this kind of “army of 260 analysts” story is potentially rocket fuel for turnout— if Trump’s team handles it right.

It gives the base a vivid, concrete image of the administration finally going to war over 2020.

In any same‑president midterm, where apathy and complacency aren’t just risks— they are the default setting. So this new FBI initiative can be transformed into a mobilizing war cry: “They lied about Georgia, they tried to bury the evidence, and now Trump is finally digging. If you want him to finish the job —on 2020, on SAVE America, on cleaning up elections— you must show up in November.”

Against that, Democrats are juggling what even the Times has finally admitted is a polycrisis: divisive Supreme Court culture‑war rulings, internal fractures over trans athletes and gay marriage, funding and debt problems, ActBlue and billionaire indictments, USAID closure, affordability pressures driving ‘democratic‑socialist’ growth in big blue cities throwing Dem incumbents into disarray and sparking an intra-party civil war, fraud-scandal eruptions and investigations, the deep state and its intelligence agencies are under fire, the USPS is preparing mail-in ballot rules, and a gerontocracy narrative is hitting their leadership harder than Republicans.

Those are not legacy structural problems. Those are all new problems since just last year. Democrats’ indescribable polycrisis is climaxing prematurely— right before midterm election season kicks off. (Lucky for Trump, again.)

Meanwhile, Democrats’ key panic-lever issues have been defanged. Epstein is in the rearview. Climate has collapsed. Oil prices —with pump prices to follow soon— are crashing. Iran is over. Tariff hysteria has cratered. Popular drug prices plunging. Crime rates are bottoming out. Welfare fraud prosecutions and multi-billion-dollar recoveries. Inner-city gangs are being dismantled. The Capital has been redecorated. Employment, inflation, stock markets, Trump accounts— all heading the right way.

Now Democrats also must defend why a massive federal election probe they insisted was impossible or illegitimate is suddenly underway— and defend it without opposing transparency. Then … suppose the FBI starts indicting people for 2020 voting fraud. It would be electrifying.

In short: the doomscrollers were wrong. 2020 isn’t over, not by a long shot. It’s just beginning. Forget the polls and the prediction markets— the midterms are absolutely in play..

Happy Fourth of July! 🇺🇸

🔥 Still aren’t convinced? Here are some more astonishing headlines for you, to further illustrate the point. Headline from the same New York Times, yesterday:

He expressed regret! I express my regret. So never mind! Let him stay! Walz pardoned a notorious pedophile, just to rescue him from being deported. In other words, the convicted child abuser only got the pardon because he was an illegal immigrant. Legal Americans can get stuffed.

Not good optics. Not right now.

🔥 Want another one? Yesterday, the New York Post reported, “Exclusive — Gavin Newsom appointee wore FBI wire in corruption probe.”

“The FBI had a mole inside Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political orbit before the agency’s corruption probe expanded into the governor and his wife,” the Post reported. Not just any Newsom appointee. She is Alexis Podesta, a key player in top California politics and mixed up in the slew of prosecutions related to campaign finance fraud cases swirling around current gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra.

The prosecutions have already netted Governor Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, who in May pleaded guilty to bank fraud conspiracy, tax fraud, and making false statements to feds. At the time, I speculated that DOJ must have turned one of the conspirators, since it had text messages and emails from the group. We now know that Alexis Podesta was unindicted “Co-Conspirator 2” in Williamson’s indictment.

Podesta, meanwhile, remains uncharged and still sits on the State Compensation Insurance Fund board, collecting a public salary while serving as the FBI’s cooperator in a widening corruption probe that now touches Newsom, his wife, and his replacement candidate, Xavier Becerra.

After “discovering misconduct,” Alexis’s lawyer said she began cooperating with the FBI, wearing a wire from at least June 2024 and secretly recording conversations with Williamson. Biden was president in 2024, not Trump. So all of Newsom’s bleating last month about being in the crosshairs of a Trump revenge tour is already exposed as a poorly considered lie.

“One by one,” Governor Newsom whined in his poorly produced selfie video last week, “anyone who has challenged Donald Trump has ended up on his hit list, and today I proudly join that list.” But the call was coming from inside the house.

🔥 Want one more? Try this New York Times headline on for size, also published yesterday:

“National Park Service employees observed Hearn, 67, actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands,” U.S. Attorney for the District, Jeanine Pirro, said. “According to witnesses, Hearn damaged approximately two square feet of sealant from the bottom of the pool.”

He faces ten years in federal prison. He wasn’t taking it seriously at the time. When a parks employee told him to stop, Ms. Pirro said, Hearn was “belligerent, rude and disrespectful.” He’s taking it a lot more seriously now, I’d bet.

The Times did everything it could to minimize Hearn’s guilt. It lauded his Olympic record —he paddled his canoe around some poles twenty years ago— and repeated all his self-serving denials. “I was just a curious, concerned citizen,” Hearn reportedly fibbed. (His lawyers must be having migraines. He should shut up and stop talking to reporters.)

The buried lede was that Hearn was indicted by a Washington, DC grand jury. You may recall that DC grand juries are 99% Democrat. They indicted every single J6 tourist, and recently refused three times to indict the sandwich hurler. So despite the Times’ protests, there must have been enough evidence to convince a skeptical blue grand jury to indict Hearn for felony destruction of government property.

I guess even Democrats who live in DC are tired of activists coming and tearing up their city with performative vandalism. Maybe, after all the improvements, admit it or not, below the surface, they are starting to feel more patriotic. It feels like something might be shifting, something good.

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The Red State Renaissance is not over. It is picking up speed and thundering down the tracks. Headline from the Carolina Public Press, last week:

The bills, which were passed despite prior vetoes by Governor Josh Stein (D), included three strong anti-DEI laws and a law directing all state agencies and law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. So.

🔥 Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Florida’s Board of Education voted to bar all illegal immigrants from the state’s 28 public colleges. Headline from Inside Higher Ed, dateline Wednesday:

Laughably, the article focused its attention on the ‘crisis’ that “the policy could cost colleges millions of dollars in revenue from tuition and fees.” Please. According to the story, at least “49,000 undocumented students are enrolled in Florida colleges.”

This will be their last semester.

Florida’s 12 public universities were unaffected, but Higher Ed said the Board of Governors, which oversees them, is expected to finalize a similar policy soon. Florida joined Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, which have also passed similar rules.

The new policy escalated last year’s law, which banned illegals from receiving in-state tuition rates.

As a reminder for anyone who needs to know this, the “Self Deport” option, with its lucrative financial incentives and free one-way airfare, remains available on the CBP One app, which can be accessed right from illegals’ free cell phones.

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Uncle Sam is turning 250. It is a once-in-a-generation milestone: the (unpronounceable) Semiquincentennial of the United States, 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Our capital is enjoying the culmination of an extraordinary, multi-day program centered on the National Mall. Tomorrow, it goes really big. CSPAN will provide live coverage starting late this evening.

Corporate media utterly failed to describe the historic majesty and mind-blowing pageantry planned for tomorrow’s national birthday party. So I, a (mostly) humble lawyer-blogger, had to do it.

Tomorrow, the skies above the Mall will feature one of the most ambitious aerial displays ever assembled, including the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, U.S. Navy Blue Angels, F-22 Raptor Demo Team, F-35B Lightning II Demo Team, and MV-22 Osprey Demo Team, along with a Stealth Airpower Flyover and a Tri-Bomber Flyover representing all five branches of the armed forces.

The Freedom 250 group organized the evening’s storytelling around seven defining chapters of the American story: American Innovation & the Space Frontier; American Music Across Generations; American Sports & Athletic Excellence; Military Service & Sacrifice; Faith & National Character; Civil Rights & the Promise of America; and Native American Heritage & Original Voices. The Joint Armed Forces Orchestra and Chorus will perform throughout.

The Washington Monument has been illuminated nightly from July 1–5, with projection-mapped red, white, and blue video displays —including a giant “250”— designed to glow as the world’s tallest birthday candle.

But the centerpiece of the entire 250th celebration will be the fireworks show. Pyrotecnico, the company putting on the display, will launch more than 850,000 pyrotechnic effects from 10 launch sites — spanning the National Mall, West Potomac Park, and eight barges floating in the Potomac River — in a show lasting about 40 minutes. (Only 20,000 shells are normally launched in previous 4th of July shows.)

40 minutes is double the length of a typical National Mall show and 50 times the usual shell count. Freedom 250 is aiming for a Guinness World Record (the current record was set in 2016 by a Christian megachurch in the Philippines that fired 810,904 fireworks in an hour). Tomorrow’s show will be visible across the entire D.C. region, and you can watch it on Freedom250.org’s livestream.

In sum, tomorrow’s celebration in Washington is designed to be the most elaborate Fourth of July in American history — a full-day program of parades, military aviation, patriotic music, presidential remarks, and a fireworks show that organizers intend to literally set a world record, all set against the dramatic backdrop of the nation’s most iconic monuments.

🇺🇸 That’s just in the Capital. Most states also have big events planned. And our 250th is being celebrated all over the world. Here are a few examples.

The U.S. State Department has coordinated a Global 250 program, working through American embassies and consulates to light up foreign landmarks in the colors of the American flag across the whole July 4th weekend. The history-making effort spans dozens of countries and is one of the most geographically broad diplomatic gestures in recent memory. Maybe ever.

France is delivering two of the most visually striking tributes. The Eiffel Tower will be lit in U.S. flag colors tonight, kicking off the America 250 celebrations in Paris. And in New York Harbor, France’s consulate is staging what it calls a “monumental artistic creation”—an elaborate light show projected onto the Statue of Liberty (broadcast live on ABC).

French Consul General Cédrik Fouriscot said, “Our friendship goes back 250 years… that is why we wanted to do something memorable.”

In Tokyo, the U.S. Embassy —which has been running 70+ America 250-themed cultural, educational, and sporting events across Japan all year— coordinated the illumination of three landmarks: Tokyo Tower, the Rainbow Bridge, and the Tokyo Aqua Symphony fountain, all glowing red, white, and blue.

Down under, 27 landmarks across Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, and Darwin will be lit up, including Flinders Street Station, Melbourne Town Hall, the Story Bridge and City Hall in Brisbane, and Darwin’s Parliament House and Convention Centre. The Sydney Opera House declined to participate.

Speaking of declining to participate, one of the most glaring omissions is that no major British government landmark —not the Houses of Parliament, not Buckingham Palace, not the Tower of London, not Tower Bridge— will be illuminated in American colors. The BBC said the UK will celebrate the occasion with “quiet reflection.” Draw your own conclusions. Paging the Promethean ladies.

There’s much, much more. Some of us remember the 200th Anniversary Celebration, fifty years ago. This year’s gala shoots far beyond anything Americans witnessed in 1976. Go big or go home.

⛵ The single most spectacular international event might be Sail4th 250— the largest peacetime maritime gathering in American history, unfolding in New York Harbor today through July 8th. Its highlight is tomorrow’s eye-popping International Parade of Sail— a 16-mile procession of 48 tall shipsfrom 20 foreign nations, including Argentina, the Netherlands, Peru, Monaco, Italy, Portugal, and Germany, sailing from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, up the Hudson River to the George Washington Bridge, saluting the Statue of Liberty along the way.

Alongside the tall ships parade will be an International Naval Review, including over 50 U.S. and allied warships anchored along the Hudson —only the seventh such review in American history— and an International Aerial Review in which the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels lead a flyover of more than 100 American and international aircraft from 46 nations.

NBC is broadcasting the whole event live starting at 7:00 a.m. ET, hosted by Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin, with a highlights special at 7:00 p.m. leading into the Macy’s fireworks show. From July 5–8, the tall ships will dock at piers across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey for free public tours.

Meanwhile, France, believe it or not, has mounted one of the most visually striking foreign tributes. The Patrouille de France, the French Air and Space Force’s elite aerobatic team, has been conducting a monthlong tour of flyovers over major U.S. East Coast cities, culminating tomorrow.

Dubbed Liberté 250, the French mission features aircraft painted red, white, and blue in honor of both the American and French flags, bearing the names of Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and George Washington— a nod to France’s pivotal role in the American Revolution. The French pilots are flying in joint formation alongside the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels and the U.S. Air Force’s Thunderbirds.

Japan gifted the United States with 250 new cherry blossom trees for the anniversary, replacing aging specimens from the original 1912 gift of 3,020 trees. The National Park Service has already planted them in Washington. President Trump praised the trees as a “living symbol of the cherished friendships” between the two nations.

🇺🇸 What President Trump has done —and make no mistake, it’s all because of the 47th president— is plant the U.S. flag astride history.

The contrast with 1976 is helpful. Then-President Gerald Ford, a decent and humble man presiding over the recent wreckage of Watergate and the wounds of Vietnam, deliberately decentralized the Bicentennial. He sent the budget money to the states. He “let a thousand flowers bloom.” He kept himself and the Capital quietly in the background.

The result was warm, genuine, and diffuse. Nobody planted a flag. There were no record-setting fireworks over the Potomac. Nobody argued America was ascendant. One could be forgiven for assuming America’s decline.

Trump did the opposite: he centralized, amplified, and even personalized the celebration to such an extent that it will be inseparable from his presidency in the historical record.

This year’s international dimension proves the point. The Global Illumination Initiative, the foreign naval vessels in New York Harbor, the Eiffel Tower lit in American colors, Tokyo Tower glowing red, white, and blue— these do not happen because a State Department bureaucrat sent a polite cable. They happen because the sitting president made it clear that America’s 250th birthday was going to be an event the world would notice, and that participation was a signal of where you stood.

The irony — and it is rich— is that the very allies who are most anxious about Trump’s America, the Europeans who poll at 75-80% unfavorable toward our President, are the ones whose landmarks are lit in our birthday colors. Trump has planted the flag across Europe. This celebration will outlast the politics.

Fifty years from now, when Americans look back at the Semiquincentennial, what they will see is a fireworks show that shattered world records, a harbor bursting with tall ships from twenty+ nations, and a Washington Monument glowing as the world’s tallest birthday candle.

Happy Birthday, America! You keep beating the odds. May you enjoy many more.

Enjoy a fantastic Friday and a joyful and patriotic 250th Independence Day! C&C will be off tomorrow, but will return on Monday, with a whole new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary (including the hyper-woke story I teased).

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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