Catching Our Eye News Roundup, June 29, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

Please subscribe to our free daily newsletter to get all the Ohio news you need to know right to your inbox every weekday morning.

If you already subscribe, please share with your family and friends so they know about the Ohio Capital Journal too: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/subscribe/

Catching Our Eye

• Churches. Ideastream’s Gabriel Kramer reports, “Greater Cleveland church network demands Citizens Bank end funding for private prisons, ICE jails.”

A network of Cleveland area churches rallied in front of a Citizens Bank branch in University Heights Thursday to demand the corporation cut ties with immigration and customs enforcement jails.

Greater Cleveland Congregations wants Citizens Financial Group to end what the church network says is $2.5 billion in credit agreements with CoreCivic and the GEO Group — two companies that operate private prisons and ICE jails.

GCC said it will withdraw more than $1.7 million from Citizens Bank between 26 church and personal accounts in Cuyahoga County.

• Going nuclear. The Cleveland.com Editorial Board writes, “The troubling rush to build small Ohio nuke plants without talking about health and safety: editorial.”

As cleveland.com’s Anna Staver recently reported, Southern Ohio is about to become a test bed for a revival of America’s nuclear power industry via “a fleet of small reactors” there starting in 2030.

The reason: to meet skyrocketing electricity demand from the mammoth corporate data centers that flooded into Ohio thanks to the state’s disastrous and poorly considered data-center tax breaks.

Yet where is the parallel effort to ensure adequate health and safety protections for citizens?

• Injustice Department. The Toledo Blade Editorial Board writes, “Editorial: DOJ leadership alarmingly illegal.”

New leadership that is untethered from the retaliatory obsessions of the President is needed in the U.S. Department of Justice.

A U.S. District Court judge who was appointed by a Republican president has condemned the subpoenas issued against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as “blatantly unlawful.”

We have already opined that President Trump’s current nominee, Todd Blanche, is unqualified for the post of attorney general. It’s not because Mr. Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer. It’s because Mr. Blanche’s actions in office reveal a man motivated entirely by pleasing his boss, not by upholding the principles of U.S. justice.

The best example of Mr. Blanche’s inability to act in the best interests of the United States was his plan to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off Trump’s election-denying goons and position them to carry out another attack on democracy like their attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a date that will certainly live in infamy.