Here we go again

Recently: How much do America’s biggest media platforms really change people’s minds? Michael Socolow on the challenges and limits of billionaire influence.

Today: Off the Iranian coast, three ships are burning, as the U.S. calls the truce finished. … In Russia, drivers queue for hours, while the government halts diesel exports. … &c.

For members: Why is the U.S. government going so easy on white-collar crime? John C. Coffee Jr. on how the White House is making corruption safe again. … & How far can an American president go? Richard W. Waterman, Constitutional Ambiguity and the Interpretation of Presidential Power.

+ New music from Phoebe Bridgers …

The trains to Mashhad

Mourners were riding east across Iran on Thursday morning to bury Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader an American–Israeli strike killed in February, in the shrine city of Mashhad. (See “In his absence.”) Their train stopped: a U.S. strike had cut the Tehran–Mashhad line hours earlier. Stranded, the passengers chanted that Iranians do not accept humiliation, even at the cost of their lives. Iran’s health ministry said 14 people died in the night’s raids. The day before, in the Turkish capital, the U.S. president had declared the ceasefire over, and U.S. Central Command, which runs American operations in the Middle East, said the strikes answered Iran’s attacks on “commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians.”

So why’s the U.S. bombing Iran again?

Not, it would seem, on account of the nuclear program. The “memorandum of understanding” the two sides signed in mid-June left that question to later talks. What the MoU settled was shipping and oil—and shipping and oil are by all appearances what the fighting has resumed over. Iran is attacking ships again, three this week in the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. has revoked the license that let Iran sell its crude.

Some of the strikes belong to a fight over the strait: air defenses, coastal radar, something like 60 Revolutionary Guard speedboats. The railway to Mashhad doesn’t. That’s a target you hit to squeeze a government toward terms. And those terms aren’t about passage; both governments want ships moving through Hormuz. They’re about who runs the strait, and who collects. In late June, the Iranians and the Omanis sat down to discuss what to charge which ships passing through, while U.S. President Donald Trump said neither of them would collect anything from anyone—only the U.S. would, for security. According to ship trackers, Thursday’s transits were back where they were before the MoU: no one much passing through, let alone paying for it.

Meanwhile

• Resist until the inauguration. Colombia’s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, froze the transition on Tuesday and called the outgoing government “a gang of coup-plotters.” He asked the armed forces not to obey any order from President Gustavo Petro that contradicts the constitution. Petro had spent days refusing to recognize the June 21 runoff he lost by about 250,000 votes; on Tuesday, he said he’ll leave office on August 6, as scheduled.
• Buying petrol from India. Ukrainian drones have hit Russia’s refineries hard enough that the government banned diesel exports on Wednesday through July 31, and industry sources say Indian gasoline is now arriving in Russian ports. Drivers wait hours to fill up. Vladimir Putin told a televised meeting that Ukraine wants “to create a sense of anxiety in society” but that it won’t work. European diesel margins hit a record US$60.17 a barrel.
• Watch what you upload, professor. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s opposition puts off protests to July 22 after the African Union offered to mediate. … A French appeals court clears Marine Le Pen to run for president, in an ankle monitor. … Trump orders all U.S. trade with Spain halted, after the Spanish refused him bases for the Iran war. … A Polish court jails a former Russian opposition activist for spying for Moscow. … & Researchers find passwords, home addresses, and private peer reviews in the source files of 2.7 million papers on arXiv, where scientists post work before publication.

Feature

‘Someone knew, and someone was trading’

Why is the U.S. government going so easy on white-collar crime? John C. Coffee Jr. on how the White House is making corruption safe again.

In April, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a U.S. Army soldier, alleging that he had made more than US$400,000 on the prediction market Polymarket, betting on the timing of an operation he had helped plan—the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who now awaits trial in a Brooklyn jail. In June, prosecutors opened an insider-trading investigation into George Santos, the former congressman whose fraud sentence the president commuted in October, over bets he had placed on Kalshi, another prediction market, about whether he would attend the State of the Union. As Gerda Reith says here in The Signal, “The scope for insider trading is horrendous, really. Someone with insider knowledge can use it to earn serious money on prediction markets.”

But surely U.S. prosecutors stand ready to enforce the law in white-collar cases? Perhaps sometimes. But perhaps sometimes not. The Justice Department has lost more than a fifth of its lawyers in 16 months. In 2024, it brought nine corporate cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American companies from bribing foreign officials, and collected US$1.1 billion; in 2025, it brought two—and collected $123 million. An executive order paused enforcement in February 2025; the deputy attorney general revived it that June, pointing it at bribes that serve the drug cartels. Yet the unit that enforces the law is down to about a dozen prosecutors, and the Securities and Exchange Commission hasn’t brought a case of its own since 2024. White-collar prosecutions have fallen further than at any time since TRAC, the group at Syracuse University that counts them, began keeping records in 1986.

Congress has repealed nothing—but prosecutors have stopped bringing the cases. So who called them off?

John C. Coffee Jr. is the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, the director of its Center on Corporate Governance, and the author of Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement. Coffee says the president called them off. Donald Trump has instructed the Justice Department not to bring criminal sanctions for regulatory offenses; he has taken insider trading and price fixing off the list of prosecutorial priorities. He’s convinced that U.S. prosecutors too often turn the criminal law on American businessmen, and he counts himself among their victims.

And the stakes are very real. No one grows up knowing that insider trading is wrong the way everyone knows that murder is wrong—where there’s money in it and little chance that anyone will catch you, people will take it. Already, share prices climb in the days before merger announcements. All of it, Coffee says, may confirm for many Americans what they already suspect—that the economy is rigged in favor of the rich …

Books

‘The prerogatives of a monarch’ 

How far can an American president go? Richard W. Waterman, Constitutional Ambiguity and the Interpretation of Presidential Power.

In the summer of 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. president is entitled to broad immunity from criminal prosecution.

“… the nature of Presidential power,” the Court said, “requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said the ruling was a “big win” for the Constitution, not least in that it would protect against politically motivated lawsuits. Former President Joe Biden warned that it would mean that there would be next to no limits on what the president may do, since such “limits will be self-imposed by the president alone.”

dRegardless of whether the ruling expanded or merely clarified American presidential power, the office puts extraordinary authority in one person’s hands. As Daniel Bessner has put it here in The Signal, “Power has become increasingly centralized—first in the executive branch, then in the White House itself, including the groups around the president.”

New music

‘Lost Boys’

Next stop, Los Angeles, for the return of Phoebe Bridgers. The singer-songwriter has kept good company—Boygenius, Better Oblivion Community Center—but her last proper solo record, Punisher, was six years ago. Good news: Lost Weekend comes out August 14.