The Daily Brief — June 8, 2026
Iran and Israel fire missiles, Senate passes additional ICE funding, Trump ballroom donors got federal contracts
These are today’s top stories, delivered straight to your inbox. Catch up here on all the news.
Iran Latest
Israel struck Iran early today, hours after Iran fired missiles at Israel — the first such exchange since a ceasefire between the US and Iran took effect in early April. Both Iranian and Israeli officials said they have halted offensive operations for now.
President Trump called on both sides to stop, writing that Israel and Iran “must immediately stop ‘shooting.’”
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who is helping mediate the US–Iranian talks, urged restraint, writing on X that the negotiations were close to their “final objective.”
LA Mayor Race
Nithya Raman will likely face LA mayor Karen Bass in the general election in November. Former reality star Spencer Pratt came in third, which eliminated him as a candidate.
Pratt initially led on election night, but Raman closed the gap as the counting of the ballots continued. She overtook Pratt yesterday, and currently leads by about 3,100 votes.
About 83% of ballots have been counted, and a winner of the second spot has not been officially certified.
California’s count is slow by design. State law allows mail-in ballots to be counted if postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days, and officials process them in the order they arrive.
Some Republicans, including Trump, have called the count “rigged” without offering evidence.
Trump Nominates Blanche for AG
President Trump today formally nominated Todd Blanche to be attorney general. The Senate must confirm him.
Blanche has led the Justice Department in an acting capacity since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi. Before that, he served for more than a year as deputy attorney general, the department’s second-ranking official, overseeing federal criminal prosecutions and national security operations.
His nomination comes days after he told Congress and federal courts that the department’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” which would pay Trump allies who say they were targeted by the Biden administration, is not moving forward. Some GOP senators had objected to the fund and had said they looked forward to questioning Blanche after his formal nomination.
Blanche previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer in several criminal cases.
DOJ Goes to Court Over Fund
The Justice Department has urged a federal judge not to permanently block the “anti-weaponization fund,” despite Blanche’s statement that it would not go forward.
The plaintiffs in the case — including a former federal prosecutor and a prominent government watchdog group — argue the fund is unconstitutional because it is a taxpayer-funded payout Congress never approved, open only to people who say a Democratic administration wronged them. The judge froze the money so none could be spent before she rules, and set a June 12 hearing on whether to extend the block.
The fund came out of a “settlement” between Trump, two of his sons, the Trump Organization, and the IRS — which Trump oversees in his capacity as president — after Trump dropped a $10 billion lawsuit claiming the IRS failed to stop leaks of his tax records in his first term.
In a filing last week to the federal district court in Virginia, DOJ lawyers said no money had been moved to the fund and no members of its five-person decision panel had been named, which made the case “moot and premature.”
Senate Passes Immigration Bill
The Senate has approved roughly $70 billion to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through the end of Trump’s term.
Republicans used the budget reconciliation process, which needs only a simple majority in the Senate and bypasses the filibuster. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (AK) was the only Republican to vote against it.
The bill faced bipartisan challenges. It took a marathon 18-hour session because Democrats — joined by some Republicans — kept trying to attach language barring the “anti-weaponization fund.” None of those amendments passed.
The package now goes to the House, which could take it up as early as this week.
Newsbreak
Books often expand our minds and foster empathy by introducing us to people, places, cultures, and perspectives we haven’t encountered or considered before. This 500-piece banned books puzzle from Uncommon Goods features a curated collection of titles written by underrepresented voices in literature, many of whom have been impacted by book bans. It highlights more than 60 titles, including Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, There There by Tommy Orange, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and more. Piece the puzzle together, and then add the books to your reading list!
Trump Ballroom Donors Won Billions in Federal Contracts
President Trump has promised his new White House ballroom will not cost taxpayers anything and that private donors are paying for it. But many of the same donors have benefitted from the Trump administration.
More than half of the private donors who have helped fund President Trump’s White House ballroom project won new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion in the past six months, according to a report by Public Citizen, a nonprofit watchdog.
The report looked at the 21 donors the White House has disclosed plus six identified by news outlets, and found that 14 received contracts. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin won the most, about $43.8 billion. Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton received $4.2 billion, and data company Palantir got just over $1 billion. Other donors awarded contracts include Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Parsons, a defense and technology firm.
The White House has not said how much each donated to the $400 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom project being built where the East Wing stood before Trump demolished it last year.
Judge Blocks Trump Limits on Immigrants from 39 Countries
A federal judge in Rhode Island has blocked Trump administration policies that denied asylum and other immigration benefits to people from 39 countries.
The policies, set late last year, did four things: they paused all asylum decisions nationwide, halted other immigration benefits — work permits, green cards, citizenship — for people from the 39 countries, reopened benefits already granted to people from those countries for possible reconsideration, and told officers to treat coming from one of those countries as a “significant negative factor.”
A coalition of immigrant service groups and labor unions sued in March.
In a 135-page opinion, Chief Judge John McConnell wrote that the administration violated federal law and left immigrants in “indeterminate legal limbo.”
Trump Walks Out of Interview
Trump walked out of an interview with NBC News anchor Kristen Welker after she pressed him for evidence of his false claims about the 2020 presidential election. The interview aired on Meet the Press yesterday. In it, Trump repeated the debunked claims about the 2020 vote and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
During the tense exchange, Trump also claimed there was fraud in the ongoing vote count for California’s primary elections, pointing to races still uncounted days later. Asked for evidence, he said, “All I have to do is look.” After Welker asked what evidence he had for saying that, he shot back, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” When Welker kept pressing, Trump, annoyed with Welker’s persistence in asking for evidence, abruptly told his aides in attendance (not seen in the clip), “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling,” and left.
States Try to Block Merger
California, New York, and other states are preparing a lawsuit to block Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros., Reuters reported last week. The states are expected to argue that the deal would be anticompetitive and combine two of Hollywood’s major remaining studios into one company with outsized market control.
Paramount Skydance already owns Paramount Pictures, the Paramount+ streaming service, and CBS News. If regulators approve the deal, it would also own Warner Bros. studio, CNN, and HBO. Thousands of actors, writers and directors have signed a letter opposing the deal, warning it would shrink jobs and the number of films made in an already contracting industry. The merger would cut the number of major US film studios to four.
The company is controlled by the Ellison family, which includes billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has led the effort to block the purchase, and has also opened an investigation into the proposed merger. His office said last week that the state’s investigation remains active but declined to comment further.