Morning Brief: The Clinton Connection To Russiagate, Trump’s Tariff Deadline, Moms For Liberty Vs MA

Newly declassified documents from the Durham report suggest Hillary Clinton’s campaign approved the Russia-collusion narrative to distract from her email scandal. President Trump’s trade deadline arrives, hitting countries like India, Brazil, and Canada with steep new tariffs while South Korea secures a last-minute deal. A Daily Wire exclusive reveals that Massachusetts police are being trained to view the parental rights group Moms for Liberty as a “hate group,” based on SPLC designations.

It’s Friday, August 1, 2025, and this is the news you need to know to start your day.

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Russiagate Points to Hillary Clinton

Topline: Newly declassified documents from the Durham report, released by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Thursday, suggest the Obama-era FBI ignored intelligence that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign approved a plan to tie Donald Trump to Russia to distract from her email server scandal.

The declassified annex shows the Obama administration received intelligence in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to smear her rival Donald Trump by linking him to Russia. The goal was reportedly to derail the FBI’s investigation into her unauthorized use of a private email server. The plan allegedly involved Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, and the firm Fusion GPS hiring former British spy Christopher Steele to create the narrative.

According to the documents, high-ranking Obama officials were made aware of the Clinton plan. CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, DNI James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey on the matter in a White House meeting on August 3, 2016. The CIA later sent an investigative referral to the FBI about the “purported Clinton campaign plan.”

In a heavily redacted section, the annex reveals that the CIA prepared a written assessment in 2017 and “did not assess … the … memoranda … to be the product of Russian fabrications.” In other words, the agency found the intelligence regarding the Clinton plan to be credible. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said that he has made criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. In a statement, Senator Grassley called the affair “one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history.”

Trump’s Tariff Deadline Arrives

Topline: The White House updated its tariff plan on Thursday evening, hours before President Trump’s deadline for new trade agreements was set to kick in.

The new plan pushes the implementation of tariffs on most countries back a week from August 1 to August 7 to give Customs and Border Patrol officials time to adjust to the new levies leveled at dozens of countries. The new plan also reveals a host of tariff rates that are set to kick in.

India will now be hit with a 25% tariff, plus an additional secondary tariff for continuing to buy Russian oil. “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The move prompted Indian state refiners to pause all purchases of Russian oil.

Brazil was hit with sanctions and a 50% tariff, the largest of all, due to its large trade deficit and what Trump calls the political persecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Canada, America’s second-largest trading partner, now faces a 35% tariff that took effect at midnight on August 1. The president linked the failure to secure a deal with Canada’s recent announcement that it would back a Palestinian state.

There were also several deals made as Trump’s August 1 deadline approached. The U.S. finalized a major agreement with South Korea, which includes a 15% tariff on Korean imports in exchange for a $350 billion investment in American businesses and the purchase of an additional $100 billion in natural gas. A deal was also reached with Pakistan.

Mexico was the only country granted an extension as border security negotiations continue.

 

Massachusetts Police Trained That ‘Moms for Liberty’ Is a Hate Group

Topline: A Daily Wire exclusive reveals that police training materials in Massachusetts list the conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty as a “hate group,” citing the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center as a source.

Moms for Liberty obtained the training materials from the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee through a Freedom of Information request. The documents list the parental rights group in a section on hate groups alongside neo-Nazi organizations and “Antifa.” The training cites the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has labeled Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist” group, as its source.

“It’s crazy that we are in a time when Moms for Liberty is listed in this training … with neo-Nazi groups, with Antifa,” Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told Morning Wire. “Moms for Liberty is here to show up at school board meetings … Antifa is burning down whole cities. … These two are not equivalent.”

The training materials claim that Moms for Liberty uses “parents rights as a vehicle to attack public education and make schools less welcoming for minority and LGBTQ students.” The training links to biased PBS articles attacking the group, while simultaneously linking to an article that describes the violent extremist group “Antifa” as a “relatively small” threat. Descovich noted that despite the official training, local police officers often approach her members to quietly offer their support.

Republican Senate Candidate Deleted Environmentalist Tweets Before Launching Campaign

A Kentucky Republican running to replace Senator Mitch McConnell deleted multiple environmental-themed tweets just months before launching his campaign, a Daily Wire review found.

Businessman Nate Morris deleted a number of tweets promoting environmentalist concepts and celebrating “World Environment Day” in early 2025, just months before launching his Senate campaign. Morris, the CEO of Morris Industries, has pledged to fight diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment mandates if elected, saying his experience as a businessman showed him the need to “end this crap.” 

Morris is running an anti-establishment campaign to replace McConnell, accusing his opponents — Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) and former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) — of being the former Senate Majority Leader’s puppets. He has pledged to support mass deportations, opposing amnesty, banning doctors from doing transgender procedures on kids, cutting federal funding to woke schools, opposing gun control, and backing President Donald Trump’s tariff policies. 

The deleted tweets included multiple posts promoting the concept of a circular economy, a movement defined by the Environmental Protection Agency as a model that “keeps materials and products in circulation for as long as possible” and “an important part of slowing climate change.” The concept, promoted by organizations like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, frequently comes alongside government regulations and mandates. 

“A Circular economy generates no waste. To get to that point, we will need to change minds and change habits. #EnvironemntalInnovation,” Morris wrote in a May 8, 2020, tweet that has now been deleted. 

On June 5, 2020, Morris shared an article called “A Future Without Waste,” writing: “Changing habits. Changing minds. Changing the world in small and difficult – yet impactful – steps. There can be no alternative. #WorldEnvironmentDay #EnvironmentalInnovation.”

Two other tweets from around the same time were deleted related to the “circular economy,” include one from June 29, 2020, where he wrote “we must do everything in our power to create a truly circular, free market economy and make the planet a better place for future generations” and another from July 10, 2020 sharing an article from National Geographic that said that a circular economy could “save the world.” 

“I’m glad to see [National Geographic] raising awareness about the critical need to move toward a [circular economy]. It is a realistic goal and we can make it happen through [American innovation],” he wrote. 

The tweets were all deleted in early 2025, prior to the launching of the Senate campaign in June on Donald Trump Jr.’s “Triggered” podcast.

In a statement to The Daily Wire, Trump Jr. vouched for Morris’s anti-ESG credentials. 

“Few people have been more outspoken against ESG and woke capital than me over the past five years, and I can say with total certainty that Nate is 100% aligned with us on supporting the parallel economy, combating ESG, and destroying woke capital once and for all,” he said.

“Nate hasn’t just talked the talk on these issues either — he actually put his money where his mouth is and invested in Vivek Ramaswamy’s anti-ESG investment fund.”

In July 2024, Morris Industries invested in Strive, an anti-woke wealth management venture backed by Ramaswamy.

In recent months, Morris Holdings removed renewable drinking water company Source Global from its list of select holdings on its website. Source Global includes major investors like BlackRock, Bill Gates, and Duke Energy. 

“Nate does not have a meaningful position in Source Global, which is why it no longer appears on the Morris Holdings website,” Morris campaign spokesman Conor McGuinness told The Daily Wire. “At no point has Nate ever advocated for government-mandated anything.”

Previously deleted blog posts from Morris’ time as CEO of Rubicon, a large recycling company, have come under scrutiny for their promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and Environmental Social and Governance (ESG). For example, in one post from September 2020, Morris praised a new board member of Rubicon for helping the company remain “at the forefront of the ESG movement.”

In another deleted post from June 1, 2020, Morris wrote that he was “feeling profound sadness and anger at the tragic events of recent weeks” in the wake of the death of George Floyd. 

“The protests we are seeing are a manifestation of the pain and anger that so many are feeling,” he wrote. “While it is important that we understand that pain and anger, it cannot bring back the lives that have been lost or undo the past injustices that have plagued our nation for generations. That pain and anger must fuel real, measurable, and decisive action to light a better path forward.”

Another post highlighted Morris’ decision to sign a DEI commitment, which included pledges “to have complex discussions about diversity and inclusion, to implement and expand upon unconscious bias education, and to share best and unsuccessful diversity and inclusion practices.”

“I was at Rubicon when it got its first round of funding in 2011 and returned a decade later when it was a more mature business. Nate was always known to be a conservative Republican and a Trump supporter; it was no secret, really,” Graham Salazar, former employee of Rubicon, told The Daily Wire.

“While he wasn’t overtly political at work, he did push back against progressive employees who wanted to bring more activism into the company culture. That kind of pressure was common in startups, and it was obvious he didn’t go along with it.”

Barr and Cameron, Morris’s main opponents, have accused the businessman of exaggerating his conservative credentials, criticizing him in particular over the Rubicon DEI pledge. 

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