Taped in the act. CNN’s obtained audio of Donald Trump seemingly freely sharing secret documents that he concedes he hadn’t declassified when he could.
■ The money shot: “This is secret information. … These are the papers. ... This was done by the military and given to me. … As president, I could have declassified. Now I can’t.”
■ Hear here.
■ A Watergate historian: “There’s nowhere on thousands of hours of Nixon tapes … as clearly illegal, and as clearly self-aware, as this Trump tape.”
■ Conservative lawyer and Trump critic George Conway: “To actually hear a former president of the United States committing a felony … while laughing about it ... it’s just stunning.”
■ University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade: “As a former prosecutor, it makes my hair stand on end. … Prosecutors try to keep this stuff safeguarded so that you can’t have witness tampering and crowdsourcing of defenses—now people can because this is in the public domain—but … this is … incredible evidence.”
‘There won’t be more about the crash until the end of next week at the soonest.’ Aspen, Colorado, police have little to say about the racetrack accident that took the life of Chicago billionaire and civic leader Jim Crown on his 70th birthday Sunday.
■ Politico’s Shia Kapos: Crown’s “recent efforts battling Chicago’s crime problem … may be his true legacy.”
11,000 complaints. A Tribune analysis counts that many allegations of Chicago cop misconduct in the 4 1/2 years since the city entered a federal consent decree to rein in officer misconduct.
■ Cook County prosecutors have dropped murder charges against a woman and her son, whom she’d allegedly ordered to shoot and kill a man at a South Side restaurant June 18.
Behind the heatwave. One expert tells The Guardian the record weather frying parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mexico was made at least five times more likely by human-caused climate change.
■ Chicago’s recent rains haven’t done much to dent an ongoing drought here …
■ … and those Canadian wildfires are contributing to crappy air quality here. (Update, 11:02 a.m.: The world’s worst today.)
■ Amid an alarming increase in orcas’ ramming of boats off the Iberian coast, researchers are testing “noise deterrents.” (Cartoon: Brian McFadden brings you orcas’ demands.)
■ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina: Harassment against scientists is out of control.
■ The environmental newsletter Heated: “No, climate activists are not coming for NYC pizza.”
Supreme Court twists. In a series of rulings that might surprise progressive critics, justices today …
■ … handed North Carolina Republicans a defeat, rejecting the broadest view of a case that, in the words of The Associated Press, “could have left state legislatures virtually unchecked … in making rules for federal elections.”
■ … unfroze a Louisiana redistricting case, clearing the way for increased Black voting power in the 2024 election.
■ … rebuffed a public charter school’s effort to require that girls wear skirts to school.
Give ’em shelter. Struggling to care for asylum seekers, Chicago’s planning to open as many as five new migrant refuges—capable of accommodating as many as 2,500 people.
■ The Sun-Times: If Chicago’s Greyhound bus station gets sold, travelers could be stuck waiting outside in extreme weather.
■ Reviewing Lori Lightfoot’s final raft of executive orders, the Better Government Association perceives “the first time in Chicago’s modern history a lame-duck mayor has wielded the executive pen to shape policy on their way out the door.”
‘The technology … is a black box.’ The Lever: Landlords using artificial intelligence to screen their tenants are heightening discrimination.
‘His inventions … touched every person’s life on the planet.’ Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough, whose work brought us the modern lithium-ion battery, is dead at 100.
■ In 2019, he recalled the guidance his University of Chicago thesis adviser gave him in their first meeting: “You’ve got two problems. The first is to find a problem, and the second is to solve it. Good day.”
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■ Tim Steil made this edition better.
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