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June 28, 2026

3 entries on this date.

New York Times investigation revealed White House privately pressured Merit Systems Protection Board over federal-firing ruling

A June 28, 2026 New York Times investigation revealed that the Trump White House ran a private pressure campaign on the Merit Systems Protection Board, the agency that adjudicates federal-worker firing appeals, ahead of its March 2026 ruling on presidential removal power. A White House aide privately urged a board appointee to adopt the administration's unitary-executive position, conduct the Times likened to telling a federal judge how to rule. The board then dismissed the appeals of two immigration judges fired under Article II and held that statutory tenure protections could not constitutionally apply to them.

U.S. ambassador to Belgium accepted a jeweled gold ring for Trump from a diamond group that won U.S. tariff relief

On June 28, 2026, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White accepted an ornately jeweled gold ring — set with 321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 13 emeralds, and six rubies and appraised by independent jewelers at roughly $25,000 to $35,000 — presented by the Antwerp World Diamond Center as a gift for President Trump at an America 250 event in Brussels. The gift came months after the diamond group secured a zero-percent U.S. tariff on Antwerp's more than $2 billion in annual polished-diamond exports, a concession granted during the Trump administration's 2025 trade negotiations. Trump thanked the group in a prerecorded video, and White said the ring would be displayed in the Oval Office once formally presented to the president.

Trump bought $500,000 in Abbott Laboratories stock before his DOJ dropped its criminal probe of the baby-formula maker

During 2025, President Donald Trump purchased roughly $500,000 in Abbott Laboratories stock, beginning in late September, while the Justice Department's years-long criminal investigation into the company's contaminated Sturgis, Michigan infant-formula plant remained open. On June 28, 2026, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported that DOJ leadership had closed the criminal probe, which was tied to at least two infant deaths, in favor of civil clawbacks; Abbott had donated $500,000 to Trump's inauguration. Trump's stock purchases were disclosed in his annual financial disclosure released days later.