KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Sunday, May thirty-first. The time is six a.m. Central. I'm Keli, with Hast.
HAST Good morning. We're leading on a tax story that moved fast last week — one announcement that actually closed a long-running dispute, and one that didn't.
KELI On May twentieth, the DOJ waived all pending IRS claims against the former president on pre-settlement filings going back years. Same day, in a gaggle, he said he might release his current returns. The press split the story in two. Most outlets ran the maybe-release as the news — framed it as a transparency question, a potential shift in his long-standing position. But there's a structural read underneath that one. From our Ground News desk: the waiver actually ended something concrete. For years, the standard excuse for not releasing returns was that they were under audit. That audit block is gone now — the DOJ won't pursue those old claims. The maybe-release is speculation about what he might do next. One of those actually moves the needle. Watch the coming days to see how this settles: if he does release current returns, newsrooms will frame it as a choice he made. If he doesn't, and the old audit argument stays in play — because current returns could always be under audit — then the real story was the immunity, not the transparency. That's the structural gap.
HAST Staying on regulation, the FDA missed its own deadline last week on something more urgent. The agency had set a self-imposed date to ban electrical shock devices used on people with intellectual disabilities — devices that are still in use at a handful of institutions across the country. That deadline passed. Disability advocates are speaking out now about the delay. This one's been covered before — the FDA promised movement on this, and it hasn't landed yet. We'll track where the ban stands as we move into June.
KELI Different footing here. Indiana law enforcement lost track of more than thirty thousand dollars in cash seized during massage parlor raids. The money was taken after a detective with the state's human trafficking task force received services at those businesses. Now the cash is missing — the department can't account for it. The raids were framed as a trafficking investigation. The lost funds raise questions about how that money was being tracked and secured. We'll be watching how the department responds to that accounting gap.
HAST On trade policy now — a new analysis in Reason magazine walks through the math on tariff wars. The piece pulls from recent scholarship and suggests that if countries are going to trade war, the only real winning move is to lose less than your opponent. It's a slower-moving story, more framework than news peg, but worth the read if you're tracking where this administration's trade moves might land economically.
KELI Before we close, one date marker. May thirty-first, 2005 — Vanity Fair revealed that Mark Felt, the former FBI associate director, was Deep Throat, the anonymous source who fed Bob Woodward information during the Watergate investigation. The revelation ended decades of speculation about the leak's identity.
HAST That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening. From Inkwell.