Rep. Mike Levin

There are 1,000 missiles loaded, aimed, and ready to fire at Iran, according to Trump. That’s the latest update on Trump’s unauthorized war, which, in case you weren’t keeping count, he has said he’s won at least 32 different times. Just this week alone, he announced the ceasefire is over, agreed to more talks with Iran anyway, then threatened to “completely decimate” the entire country. I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t sound like a war that’s over to me.

What keeps me up at night is watching corruption get normalized in real time. The scandals come so fast, so shamelessly, and in such volume that they are betting you will stop paying attention. That is the point. They want to exhaust you, desensitize the country, and make corruption feel inevitable. Flooding the zone is their strategy. Calling it out is ours.

Destroying the home an animal needs to survive is harming that animal. That’s just common sense, and for 50 years, federal law agreed.     The Trump Administration is trying to trick us all into thinking otherwise.      Under the Trump Administration’s new rule, drilling and mining through an endangered species’ habitat no longer counts as harming that animal and therefore isn’t against the law.    This is the broadest rollback of endangered species protections in half a century, and it was written for the mining and oil industries that asked for it.    Let’s be clear: nobody with a half-decent conscience wants this. And yet, the Administration did it anyway, without a single new piece of scientific research to justify it.    You do not have to kill an animal to wipe it out. You just have to take away everywhere it has left to live.  nytimes.com/2026/07/10/cli…

Federal agents don’t usually show up at a journalist’s front door to serve a subpoena just for reporting the truth. But that’s what just happened. The DOJ subpoenaed four New York Times journalists after they reported that Trump’s new Qatar Force One appears to be missing security features the old plane had, including antimissile defenses. This is a $400 million jet donated by a foreign government, raising serious ethical and constitutional concerns, with taxpayers footing hundreds of millions more to retrofit and secure it. We need a full accounting of how those dollars were spent, and we must not permit Trump to keep the plane after he leaves office. Silencing critics is a tactic dictators and authoritarians have used for centuries. Anyone who has opened a history book knows how this story goes. Now is not the time to give in. nytimes.com/2026/07/11/bus…

Calling all middle and high school students in CA-49: have you ever had an idea for an app and thought, “someone should really build that?”    Build it! Enter the Congressional App Challenge, and if you win, you’ll get flown to Washington, D.C. to show it off at the U.S. Capitol.    The deadline is October 26, 2026, and I encourage students across San Diego County and Orange County to apply. For more information about the competition, visit 📱  levin.house.gov/services/congr…

🚨 BREAKING: A federal judge just threw out Trump’s entire IRS settlement, including the $1.8 billion slush fund AND the audit immunity for him, his family, and his businesses. You cannot sue yourself and call it a lawsuit. A judge just said so, in writing, and even ordered sanctions for the attorneys involved. A real lawsuit needs two sides. This never had one.

The Supreme Court just made it even easier for big dark money to flood our elections.     That means more billionaires, more corporate special interests, and more outside money trying to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.     That is the fight we are up against.    We are going to keep fighting on the issues that actually matter: costs, care, and corruption.    Because no amount of dark money changes the fact that Americans want leaders who will fight for them, not the billionaires trying to buy our politics.

If a stock trading ban for Members of Congress came to the floor tomorrow, it would pass.     Everyone knows it’s corrupt. Everyone knows it destroys trust. And everyone knows Congress has no business letting Members profit off information the public does not have.     So why hasn’t it happened? Because Speaker Johnson refuses to bring it up for a vote.

Is your representative holding town halls?       I’ve held 136 since entering Congress. That’s at least one for every month on the job.       Not because it’s easy — sometimes the questions are tough, the room is frustrated, and the issues are hard. But I show up anyway, every single time.       Because that’s the job.       Some of my colleagues haven’t held a single public town hall. They are too scared to face the very people who sent them to Washington.       They will ask for your vote. But they won’t answer your questions.          If your rep is dodging town halls, they’re dodging YOU, and you deserve better than that.

My thoughts are with Senator Graham’s family, his friends, his staff, and the people of South Carolina. He devoted much of his life to public service, first in uniform with the Air Force and then over nearly three decades in Congress representing South Carolina. Public service asks a great deal of a person and his family, and my condolences to them are sincere.

If any other president accepted a $400 million jet from a foreign government, made taxpayers spend hundreds of millions more to secure it, and then had it transferred to his own foundation after leaving office, it would be a full-blown national scandal.    This is NOT NORMAL.    Neither are the billions he is making while in office, the deals his family is profiting from, or the companies connected to his sons benefiting from massive federal support.    We cannot normalize a president making billions in office. We cannot normalize his family cashing in on federal deals. And we cannot normalize corruption just because Trump does it every week.

I’m one of about sixty members of Congress who take zero money from corporate PACs. That shouldn’t be rare. It should be the standard.     Too much of our politics runs on money you can never see. We need full disclosure, we need to end the secret money, and we need to overturn Citizens United – the decision that opened the floodgates in the first place.

Add it to the list. Partying in the Olympic hockey locker room, personalized whiskey bottles, a VIP snorkeling trip, and now a secret six-figure crypto bet that Kash Patel hid from the public for six months.    Kash Patel runs the FBI, the agency that investigates crypto fraud. In November, he bought up to $250,000 in stock in MicroStrategy, a company built on accumulating bitcoin that has done millions of dollars in business with the Justice Department he answers to.     Yes, the man who decides which crypto cases get pursued bet six figures of his own money on crypto.    Federal law gave him 45 days to disclose that trade. He took six months, then called it an “inadvertent” omission. A nonpartisan government watchdog put it plainly: he violated the law.    So what happens to the nation’s top cop when he breaks the law? The penalty is a $200 fine. That’s a parking ticket, and the people responsible for issuing it are his own colleagues at the Justice Department, and they haven’t even done that.    And this isn’t the first time that Patel’s stock trades have raised eyebrows. Last year, Patel bought Krispy Kreme stock while the company was drowning in lawsuits over a massive data breach. Weeks later, his own FBI announced it was investigating the ransomware group behind that breach.     Patel signed an ethics agreement promising to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. This whole thing stinks of exactly that.    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Kash Patel must resign or be fired. And no one at the FBI, in the Cabinet, in Congress, or in the White House should be trading individual stocks. Period.