This Week in Tyranny: Pool Coverup, Rushed Radioactive Mine, Trump Blames Iran Water Hack on MN

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were getting whiplash watching Trump call off the Iran strikes again, he’s called this war over so many times since February that it has reruns, his Interior Department got caught hiding evidence from federal prosecutors over the reflecting pool, his Agriculture Under Secretary took away your right to fight a radioactive mine next to the first national monument in America, he blamed Minnesota for getting hacked by Iran, and he offered to trade away his own attorney general to keep the IRS off his tax returns. Plus a slush fund, and a map of Africa that a chatbot made up.Jeanine Pirro dropped the felony vandalism case against David Hearn on Friday and accused Doug Burgum’s Interior Department of hiding evidence from her own prosecutors. Hearn is the 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist who touched the water in the reflecting pool, and for that he got arrested and indicted by a grand jury.Here’s what Interior had in writing the whole time. May 14, the new sealant failed. June 11, the contractor emailed to say the peeling came from overspray during installation, not knives. The liner failed on its own. On July 1, Interior officials walked Pirro’s prosecutors around that pool and, in her words, “not one of them mentioned it.” Hearn was indicted the next day.Four days later Burgum went on CNN and said there were box cutters and there was, quote, “no possible way” this was anything but vandalism. So either he never read his own department’s emails, or he read them and went on television and lied. Pick one.And Trump started all this. He ordered the work in April, said it would take a week, set the deadline at the Fourth of July, and skipped the bidding to hand it to a Virginia company whose qualification was doing the pools at his golf club. First federal job they’d ever had. It’s now over sixteen million dollars. The rush job peeled, and a 67-year-old got the indictment for it.Then Saturday, after his own U.S. attorney put all of this in writing, Trump posted that he disagrees with Pirro “100%.” He doesn’t care about the evidence, he cares about never being wrong. This is a narcissistic man baby who’s spent his whole life believing that if he says a thing loudly enough it becomes true.Michael Boren, Trump’s Under Secretary of Agriculture, is fast-tracking a four hundred foot deep radioactive open pit mine in northeastern Wyoming, fourteen air miles from Devils Tower. That’s the rock from Close Encounters. It’s also Bear Lodge, sacred to more than twenty Northern Plains nations, and the first national monument Teddy Roosevelt ever created.You get thirty days to comment, closing August 28, and that’s it. No draft study. No objections process. Normally you’d read the agency’s findings, argue with them, and formally object, and somebody would have to answer you in writing. Boren is signing this one himself so none of that applies. Fourteen counties and agencies got a formal seat at the review. Not one tribal nation did. Will Pattiz at More Than Just Parks broke this and built the comment tool.Thirty Minnesota water systems were hit by a cyberattack this week, one of at least seven states the FBI warned about Thursday. Trump, in front of his cabinet: “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, oh, is Iran? Iran should be so lucky.” He didn’t mention the governor of a single one of the other six states. Walz’s response: “Trump can’t beat Iran because he’s too busy waging war with Minnesota.” DOGE also gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose entire job is stopping exactly this.And Todd Blanche still isn’t attorney general. He was supposed to be confirmed this week. He wasn’t, because Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are holding him over the anti-weaponization fund. That’s one point seven seven six billion dollars of your money, set aside to pay people who say they were political targets, and it came out of a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against a government he runs. That same settlement permanently barred the IRS from auditing him, his sons, and his companies.Blanche testified the fund is dead. Cornyn asked him to put it in writing. He won’t, and Friday showed why. Trump appealed the ruling that called the whole lawsuit an attempt “to manipulate the judicial process.” He’ll say the fund is dead all day, but he’s in court fighting to keep the settlement, and the settlement is what keeps the IRS away.Then Trump posted that he’d happily pull Blanche’s name and put him back once Cornyn and Tillis are gone in January. Blanche runs the department as acting attorney general either way. The only thing two Republican senators can actually withhold from the man is a job title.Rapid fire. The State Department showed a map at an international AIDS conference in Rio that mislabeled every country on it. Nigeria, which has a coastline, landlocked in the Sahara. Mozambique relocated to the Horn of Africa. Reuters found an AI watermark on it, so a chatbot drew Africa for a room full of African health ministers and nobody at State looked before it went up. The machine that ate the entire internet still can’t find Nigeria. New filings in the James Comey seashell case allege federal officials misled judges and withheld evidence. And the White House ordered 250 Cadillac Escalades because, quote, “we look sharp in those Escalades.”That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.Sources:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/1/trump-administration-to-dismiss-reflecting-pool-charges-against-david-hearnhttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5932337-lincoln-memorial-reflecting-pool-algae/https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6002858-trump-blames-minnesota-for-cyberattacks-iran/https://thehill.com/newsletters/morning-report/5998751-todd-blanche-confirmation-delay-cornyn-tillis-gop-scorn/https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6003015-trump-appeals-irs-lawsuit-ruling/https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/31/us-government-mislabels-countries-on-map-of-africa-at-global-conferenceFollow More Than Just Parks and Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe