Independent News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. I'm Keli, with Hast.

HAST Heavy hour. We're leading on a seven-year misquote that shaped a presidential campaign — then we'll move through White House pressure on a Senate confirmation and what federal science funding looks like under this administration.

KELI From our Ground News desk: In August of 2017, Donald Trump stood at a presser in Trump Tower and said, quote, "You had very fine people on both sides," referring to the Charlottesville protests. He then immediately added, "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — they should be condemned totally." That second sentence was deleted from virtually every news citation that followed. For seven years, the "fine people" line ran without the condemnation. Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign on that truncated quote. Even Snopes didn't flag the inaccuracy until 2024. Here's what the misquote protected: any sustained reporting on whether FBI informants were embedded in both the white nationalist groups and the counter-protest movements at Charlottesville became radioactive the moment the false frame took hold. The real question — which side had what law enforcement presence, and what did that presence do — disappeared under the weight of the misquote.

HAST The counter-read here is structural. Most newsrooms will use the correction as a chance to show Trump was misunderstood. Some will use it to say the press was unfair. Neither addresses why the deletion happened — or why it held. The incentive structure in 2017 was to report the soundbite that fit the existing narrative, not the full sentence that complicated it. Watch the next 48 hours: if the reset is "Trump was right all along," that's the same erasure in reverse. The question stays buried. A real reckoning would name specific outlets that ran the truncated quote and ask why.

KELI Sticking with the White House. Trump told reporters yesterday that he may pull Todd Blanche's attorney general nomination until Senator John Cornyn leaves office. Trump suggested Cornyn is holding up the Blanche confirmation in retaliation because Cornyn endorsed Ken Paxton for Texas attorney general instead of endorsing Trump's preferred candidate. Cornyn denied it. The mechanism here is direct: the president is using a cabinet nomination as leverage against a Senate Republican over a Texas primary endorsement from two years ago. Blanche's nomination has been pending. Cornyn's office said the holdup has nothing to do with their political history.

HAST On the science side, there's a continuing story that landed harder this week. ProPublica reported that Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under this administration, is positioning the White House to reshape federal science grants through what's called "America First" framing. The mechanism: OMB controls the budget authority for NIH, NSF, and NOAA research dollars. Under current proposals, grants would be re-evaluated for domestic economic return ahead of scientific merit. Vought's office hasn't published final rules yet, but the signal is clear. This is separate from any single policy — it's a structural reordering of how $150 billion in annual research funding gets allocated. The National Academy of Sciences has already warned that this approach could lock out U.S. scientists from international research consortiums and Nobel-track discoveries that require cross-border collaboration.

KELI Moving overseas. The UK Supreme Court has granted Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori permission to challenge an organization-wide ban at the highest court level. Palestine Action has been designated as a threat to national security under UK law. Ammori's legal team argued the ban violated her right to freedom of association. The decision means the Supreme Court will now hear arguments on whether the ban itself — not just Ammori's individual case — can stand. No hearing date is set. This is the first substantive legal challenge to the designation since it was imposed.

HAST Different scale here. UEFA, the European football governing body, voted to boycott future World Cups if FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino don't back down on an investment proposal that would change the tournament structure and ownership model. UEFA's 55 member associations voted unanimously. The statement was direct: "The World Cup is not for sale." Infantino has floated plans to expand the tournament and bring in new investment partners. UEFA sees it as a threat to the tournament's independence and the balance of power among continental confederations.

KELI Before we close, a history note.

HAST On this day in 1971, an All Nippon Airways Boeing 727 and a Japanese Air Force F-86 collided over Morioka, Iwate, Japan. One hundred sixty-two people died.

KELI That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening. From Inkwell.

KELI Before we close, a word from Inkwell. The same workshop behind this drop just published the Magnificat — the song Mary sings in Luke, where the powerful are pulled down from their thrones and the hungry are filled.

HAST It reads less like a carol than a manifesto. Find it at inkwell dot wiki, slash giv.