The Hound | Aug. 17

Hi there,

It’s Monday. The Trump Treasury Department has just permanently exempted American companies from disclosing who actually owns them — effectively gutting the Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan anti-money-laundering law passed with overwhelming support in 2020. The rule doesn't just halt enforcement; it deletes all beneficial ownership data already submitted.

🖊️ Sign the petition to call on the media to cover the gutting of the Corporate Transparency Act not as a regulatory footnote, but as what it is: a president making financial crime easier to commit — for oligarchs, cartels, and foreign adversaries — while simultaneously weaponizing the surveillance state against ordinary Americans who dissent.

The contrast could not be starker. This same week, court documents revealed the Trump administration had infiltrated and surveilled progressive organizations whose members protested immigration raids in Minneapolis. If you organize against Trump, federal agents are watching you. If you launder money through a shell company, the Treasury Department just deleted your paper trail. The public deserves reporting that names that double standard for exactly what it is.

In addition, Wall Street is using opaque logic to defund charities like the Southern Poverty Law Center, even those facing unproven indictments with few pathways to appeal or clear their names. And at a Mississippi ICE Camp, agents refused to give detainees medical treatment after a gas leak.

Read about these, and more, with today’s stories:

Trump Makes Crime Legal (The American Prospect)

Wall Street’s Nonprofits Use Selective, Opaque Logic to Defund Charities (ProPublica)

ICE Refused to Give Detainees Medical Treatment After Gas Leak (The New Republic)

ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He’s Approaching 300 Days Behind Bars With a Festering Wound. (The Intercept)

Flock is just the latest example of using surveillance to stalk women (The 19th News)

Thieves steal 4 Renaissance artworks in a Sicilian museum heist during an Italian holiday (PBS)

Until next time,

Harry from The Hound

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