Good morning. It's Sunday, April the 29th. I'm Ali Valshi. We are taking stock this morning of the impact of thousands of no king's protests and the next fight for the new resistance. Donald Trump's single-minded obsession with a dangerous new voter suppression plan.

Plus, Trump is positioning ground troops in the Middle East, with three and a half thousand

arriving in the region, just as Israel is expanding its ground invasion into Lebanon, a story that

hasn't got as much coverage, but I want to tell you about in detail. And everything you want

to know about a bombshell legal ruling that could change social media

forever. But we begin this hour with an investigation into a Trump administration scandal that

is largely flown under the radar but appears ready to break open into a Watergate level

crisis for the president. Now, while it's tempting to recall Watergate having been triggered by a break-in,

it actually had its roots with an antitrust scandal and a thread that two lawmakers refused to

stop pulling on. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration stood accused of interfering in a

Justice Department case against ITT, International Telephone and Telegraph.

Now, you'll remember it if you're a person of a certain age, as I am.

ITT was a conglomerate that controlled telecom, hotels, defense contracts, and plenty of other

things.

The allegation is that the DOJ went easy on ITT's antitrust case in exchange for ITT funding

part of the 1972 Republican National Convention, corporate money in exchange for government favor

in a deal. A Texas Democrat named Wright Patman, then a chair of the House Banking Committee,

tried to investigate. But Patman was blocked by members of his own party, Democratic Party,

who called it too risky a thing to do in an election year. So Patman passed the info he had

to a Democratic Senator Sam Irvin. Irvin's committee, the Senate Watergate Committee, ran with it. Then the courts,

then the press, then more congressional probes. Piece by piece, the scandal came into focus. The

ITT antitrust case may seem obscure today, but it revealed the administration's willingness to bend

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