Letters from an American - Taking It to the States

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

March 25, 2026Trump allies express concern that he is not aware of what is actually happening in the Iran War, Story of administration corruption widens, DOJ has evidence that Trump misused classified documents, Rep Raskin asks DOJ to answer questions about classified documents and who had access to them, Stephen Miller urges Republicans to pass extremist legislation at the state level, Democrats are working at the state level to protect interests of ordinary Americans, Current actions at the state level recall New York State’s response after the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911. Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

March 25th, 26. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that Iran gave us a present, and the present arrived today. It was a very big present, worth a tremendous amount of money, he said. It wasn't nuclear-related, it was oil and gas related, he added. Today, Catherine Doyle, Courtney Kubay, and Dan DeLuce of NBC News reported that U.S. military officials have kept Trump up to date on events in the war on Iran by showing him a two-minute montage video of the biggest, most successful

strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, or, as one put it, stuff blowing up. Although Trump also receives briefings through conversations with military and intelligence officers, news reports, and foreign leaders, some of Trump's allies expressed concern to the reporters that he is not receiving or absorbing the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week. White House Press Secretary, Carolyn Levitt, called their observation an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room. But officials noted that briefings tend to focus on U.S. successes rather than Iranian actions. The story of corruption in the Trump administration broke,

open after Trump fired Secretary of Homeland Security Christy Knoem, as stories of contracting irregularities have leaked into the media. The suspicious timing of trades in S&P 500 and oil futures on Monday about 15 minutes before Trump announced his team had been negotiating with Iran, although it hadn't, has raised public accusations of insiders trading on national security information and thereby endangering Americans. Yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi

in response to a disclosure that the Department of Justice, or DOJ, had made, likely inadvertently. As part of the Republicans' attempt to smear special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump's retention of classified documents when he left office after his first term. On March 13th, the DOJ provided the House Judiciary Committee with documents related to Smith's investigation. Raskin noted that some of those documents

potentially violate the gag order Judge Eileen Cannon placed on that material as part of the attempt to keep it from public scrutiny. This suggests, he wrote, that the DOJ appears to take the position that it can violate Judge Cannon's order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith. The documents also include damning evidence against Trump.

The materials show that highly classified documents from his time in office were mingled with material from after he left, suggesting he illegally retained documents. The documents the DOJs, provided to the committee, Raskin wrote, suggests that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Trump's Super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane.

This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the cover-up reveals a president of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself. A prosecutor's memorandum provided to the committee by the DOJ suggested that the disclosure of these documents represented an aggravated potential harm to national security. The prosecutors also wrote that these were, highly sensitive documents, the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have. One particularly sensitive document was accessible by only six people, including the president. Raskin noted that Trump took classified documents on a flight to his

golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, possibly showing people on that flight, including now White House Chief of Staff Wiles, a classified map. Raskin also pointed out that about the same time, Trump was entering into business partnerships with Saudi-backed, LiveGolf, and an estate-linked Saudi real estate company, and that Trump told a ghostwriter he had classified records relating to the bombing of Iran. Raskin wrote, it is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war. American lives are at stake,

and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing. Raskin asked the DOJ to answer questions about what was on the classified map Trump showed people on his plane, which documents Trump retained were important to his businesses, which family members knew what was in the classified documents, which document was so sensitive that only six people had access to it, whether any of the documents Trump stole or showed to others related to plans for war in the Middle East, and which, if any, foreign actors tried to access or succeeded in accessing the documents. He gave it a deadline of March 31st to answer these questions and a deadline of April 14th to produce all remaining investigative files from Smith's investigations.

Zach Everson of Public Citizens' Trump Accountability Project noted that when Trump-Lableness office in 2021, his businesses were mainly real estate and hospitality, and he had massive amounts of debt coming due. At the time, he had no interests in crypto, and Trump media didn't exist. Today, the DOJ announced a settlement with right-wing activist Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian operative and ambassador, Sergei Kisliak, before Trump took office. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn worked to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, to say Trump won. In 2023, Flynn sued the DOJ for $50 million in damages, claiming he was wrongly prosecuted

because of his association with Trump. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2024, but Flynn's lawyers renewed their case when Trump was re-elected, and the DOJ engaged in negotiations. Today's settlement notice did not specify a financial amount, but said there will be a payment of settlement funds. Alexander Mallon of ABC News reported this evening that the amount was approximately $1.2 million. dollars. In the New York Times yesterday, Lauren McGahey reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is urging Republicans in state legislatures to pass extremist legislation on issues like immigration that Congress cannot, especially if one or both of the chambers in Congress flipped to the Democrats in 26. Texas House Republican caucus chair Tom Oliverson told McGahey that

legislatures like that of Texas can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they're difficult to do at the federal level. Miller has called, for example, for Texas to pass a bill to end public education for undocumented children, despite the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down such a law. But Democrats are also working at the state level to expand their own vision of equality before the law and government protection of ordinary people, including in places like Minnesota, where officials yesterday sued the Trump administration

for access to information about shootings by federal officers, including the shootings that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Prettie. Those state-level efforts to defend everyday Americans resonate tonight, because today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory Fire in 1911, in which 147 workers, mostly girls and women, died either from smoke inhalation or from their fall

as they jumped from high factory windows after their employer had locked the fire escape to prevent them from stealing the blouses they were making. The horrors of that day led New Yorkers to demand the government stop such workplace abuses. I can't begin to, to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere, recalled Francis Perkins, a young social worker who witnessed the tragedy. It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn't have been.

We were sorry. We didn't want it that way. We hadn't intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the city of New York and the state of New York to face. Perkins joined a committee charged with investment. working conditions in New York, including long hours, low wages, the labor of children, and so on. It worked with a factory investigating commission set up by the New York State Legislature

that examined working conditions around the state. They found children working in factories, women bending over poisonous chemicals, and overcrowded factories that workers could not escape in case of emergency. New York City politicians, like Al Smith, Smith cheered on the do-gooders but remained convinced that only political changes could make the deep and lasting changes to society necessary to improve the lives of everyday Americans. He worked

to build a coalition to create those changes and managed to usher 36 new laws regulating factories through the state legislature in three years. Lawmakers and other states began to write similar measures of their own, and when voters elected New York's Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, the nation was ready to take such legislation national. Roosevelt brought Francis Perkins with him to Washington, whereas Secretary of Labor, she helped to usher in unemployment insurance, health insurance, old age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, an abolition of child labor. Perkins later mused that the state efforts that led to national changes might have helped in some way to pay the debt society owed to those whose suffering brought horrified awareness that something in the nation had gone horribly wrong. The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies towards social responsibility,

can scarcely be overrated, she said. It was, I am convinced, a turning point. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.