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@billspaced

@billspaced.com

Blogger, podcaster, independent media. I follow back - unless you're creepy. I'm probably woke, too. Progressive to the core. I write a daily "Morning Sixpack" of news here - https://www.mydailygrind.news.

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CDC’s deputy director to leave Trump administration after six months

washingtonpost.comCDC’s deputy director to leave Trump administration after six monthsJennifer Shuford, the CDC’s deputy director and chief medical officer, is leaving the administration after a short tenure, she confirmed to The Washington Post late Monday night. “I am leaving to spend more time with my family,” Shuford said in a statement. “I am so thankful to President Trump and Secretary Kennedy for giving me the opportunity to help lead CDC. It has been an amazing experience, and I will be forever grateful for it.” The Post had previously reported Shuford’s planned departure, according to three people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel matter. Shuford, an infectious-disease physician who had served as health commissioner of Texas, was hired in April as part of a new four-person leadership team tapped to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and restore confidence in the agency, Trump officials said at the time. Shuford is expected to leave the agency after next week’s midterm elections, according to two of the people familiar with the situation. Her departure comes after recent developments that have renewed questions about the Trump administration’s approach to vaccine policy, including delays in updating CDC’s measles database and President Donald Trump’s continuing push to change childhood vaccine recommendations. Last year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. clashed with CDC’s then-leader, Susan Monarez, over vaccine policy and forced her out after less than one month in the job. Monarez’s ouster sparked bipartisan backlash and questions about whether the agency could be trusted to shape vaccine policy and other U.S. public health efforts. Shuford and the administration’s other recent hires, including CDC Director Erica Schwartz, have worked to tamp down those concerns. Shuford had disagreed with the administration’s approach to vaccine policy, according to one of the people familiar with her departure. CDC scientists had been optimistic about Shuford’s hiring because of her public health background and her willingness to speak out about Texas’s measles outbreak last year — even as Kennedy, the nation’s top public health official, has played down measles outbreaks, career staff at the agency told The Post.

A $300 Billion ‘Debt Wall’ Is Looming Over Private-Equity Backed Companies

wsj.comA $300 Billion ‘Debt Wall’ Is Looming Over Private-Equity Backed CompaniesPrivate-equity firms are scrambling to avoid big losses from a potential wave of defaults by the companies they own. Fund managers are racing to negotiate loan extensions on much of a $300 billion wall of debt that is coming due starting in 2028. It is a pressing need that is intensifying because rising interest rates have made refinancing more expensive this year. And much of it is for software companies at risk of being eclipsed by artificial-intelligence companies such as Anthropic, which launched a giant IPO Monday. Buyout fund managers that fail to get loan extensions risk having the companies they own taken over by creditors and their investments wiped out. “There are going to be businesses that get the keys tossed back to the bank and don’t make it,” said Hugh MacArthur, chairman of Bain & Co.’s global private-equity practice. Most companies refinance large obligations 18 to 24 months in advance as a precaution, whittling down the amount of debt coming due in that time frame. Companies owned by private equity have found that harder to do, creating an unusually high “maturity wall” in coming years. About $140 billion in risky corporate loans are scheduled to mature in 2028 and another $160 billion in 2029. By comparison, from 2023 to 2025, there was an average of about $60 billion due in two years, according to data from PitchBook. Software companies account for about one-third of the loans coming due in 2028 and 2029, in large part because private-equity funds binged on buyouts of the technology companies over the past decade. Private-credit firms that made many of the loans are also under pressure from default risk. Private-equity firms built the foundations of the debt wall in 2021, when low interest rates during the pandemic fueled a record year for megadeals like the $11.8 billion takeover of cybersecurity company McAfee. Much of the money the firms borrowed for their buyouts came in the form of seven-year loans, since fund managers typically aim to flip their purchases in that time frame. That calculus hit a snag after the Federal Reserve started hiking rates in 2022, then grew even tougher this year as Treasury bond yields skyrocketed. When borrowing costs rise, it becomes harder for the firms to profitably sell their companies. The longer the companies go unsold, the more urgent it becomes to refinance their debt. But higher rates can make new loans prohibitively expensive, especially for the weakest companies. About one quarter of loans still due in 2028 and 2029 have junk ratings of CCC-plus or below, one of the lowest rungs of the ratings ladder, according to data from PitchBook. “The difference this time versus what we’ve seen for the past 15 years is that interest rates are higher,” said Mark Jenkins, head of global credit at Carlyle Group. “You had an incredible market to refinance in, but we don’t anymore and there’s nothing in my mind that says rates are going down for the foreseeable future.” Solera, a maker of software for vehicle maintenance, has about $8 billion in loans coming due in 2028 and 2029. Vista Equity Partners, which acquired the company in 2016, had planned an initial public offering in 2024 that would have repaid or extinguished the debt, but the deal failed to launch. S&P Global Ratings last year downgraded Solera loans to CCC-plus, citing weak earnings and a heavy debt load. If the company were to default, it isn’t just Vista that would take a hit. A broad mix of investors owned Solera’s debt, including private-credit players such as Apollo Global Management and Ares Management and mutual-fund titans like Fidelity Investments and Pimco. Prices of the loans plunged at the start of the year, then rebounded, but they still trade at discounts ranging from 93 to 77 cents on the dollar, according to data from Solve, reflecting uncertainty about how they will be repaid. Bank of America said in a report Friday that near-term maturity walls have risen sharply to the highest levels since 2013. It forecasts that the default rate for below-investment-grade corporate loans will double next year to 4% and that creditors will recover less on those bad loans. Private-equity firms typically expect some of their investments to flop. But if defaults exceed expectations, that will weigh down performance that has already been in decline for years, slashing returns paid out to investors like pensions, insurers and wealthy individuals. Returns for private-equity funds have dropped below 10% in recent years from around 15% when interest rates were nearly zero, PitchBook data show. “Private-equity firms are going to need to reposition their companies’ balance sheets and make often very tough calls on what they want to do with those companies,” said Alexander Edlich, a senior leader in McKinsey’s private-capital practice. To stave off creditors, some firms are using cash from other funds to invest in ailing companies as a sweetener to extend due dates on loans. Late last year, Clearlake tried to refinance $2.2 billion in loans coming due in December 2027 and 2028 for symplr, a healthcare software company it bought in 2018. The largest loan holders, including Ares Management and Sixth Street Partners, balked. Some had marked the loans down to about 66 cents on the dollar, and they demanded Clearlake increase its investment in symplr first. Clearlake had just raised a $15 billion fund and had money available from a continuation fund, which specializes in recapitalizing portfolio companies the firm wants to hold on to for longer. The continuation fund gave symplr $175 million in exchange for preferred shares. Lenders extended due dates for the debt to 2030 and 2031, made an additional loan of roughly $100 million and agreed that symplr could defer some interest payments. The compromise ensures Clearlake’s control for a few more years and allows lenders to increase their valuations of symplr’s loan.

Appeals court declines to block California from counting 20,000 disputed ballots

apnews.comAppeals court declines to block California from counting 20,000 disputed ballotsLOS ANGELES (AP) — An appeals court on Monday declined to rule on whether California elections officials can count roughly 20,000 ballots that the Justice Department alleges likely belong to noncitizen voters. The 2-1 decision sets the Trump administration and state officials up for another legal showdown on the matter on Tuesday in front of a federal district judge, giving the federal government a very short window to compel California to sequester votes before the Nov. 3 elections. The decision marks the latest in a string of legal setbacks for President Donald Trump’s administration as it seeks to assert greater federal control over state-run elections. Noncitizen voting has been a central focus of Trump’s political messaging for years, although available data indicates it is exceedingly rare. Although the panel primarily ruled it was premature for an appeals court to get involved, two of the three judges also wrote separate concurrences making it clear they wouldn’t support setting aside ballots at this late date. They questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s list of alleged noncitizen voters and argued that to set aside votes risks disenfranchising citizens. One judge dissented, arguing that federal law bars noncitizens from voting and compels California to vet the potentially illegal ballots before they are counted. The failure to do so, he wrote, would cause irreparable harm to the election.Trump administration sued California officials over list of 20,000 names The Republican administration sued election officials in the heavily Democratic state in mid-October, accusing them of failing to meet a 48-hour deadline to review a list of 20,000 people it alleged were likely noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The administration asked the judge to stop the state from counting those ballots until immigration status checks could be completed. The Justice Department made similar demands Monday in Washington, another state with races that will help determine control of the U.S. Senate and House. Both state and federal law prohibit noncitizens from voting. But California officials say it’s not even clear the administration’s purported 20,000 noncitizen voters are actually not U.S. citizens. In court papers, Los Angeles election officials said the majority of a random sample of voters that the Department of Justice identified as immigrants seemed to have been born in the United States. The Justice Department, for its part, has said there is as much to lose from keeping the potentially illegal ballots in the count. After a district judge had scheduled an Oct. 27 hearing on the issue, the federal government appealed to the 9th Circuit Court, arguing that a faster decision was needed to prevent the further counting of votes. But two of the three 9th Circuit Court judges rejected that argument on Monday, writing that the federal government “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” their initial request to sequester the ballots in question. The time-sensitive emergency that the federal government used to justify the appeal, wrote Gabriel Sanchez, a circuit judge appointed by President Joe Biden, was at least in part “the product of the United States’s own decisions” to file so close to the elections, after votes had already started to get counted. The federal government was delayed “in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief,” Sanchez wrote. One judge wrote that setting ballots aside would invite ‘electoral chaos’ He wrote that setting aside the ballots at this stage “would transform California’s election rules for an election that is already underway” and “usher in electoral chaos.” Judge Mark J. Bennett, who was nominated by Trump, also said that the federal government’s arguments weren’t supported by the law, writing that it appeared the administration had no power under the Constitution to force California to separate the ballots. Judge Patrick Bumatay, who was appointed by Trump, forcefully dissented against the ruling. He argued that federal law precludes “California from commingling ballots likely cast by aliens with legitimate ballots, because it encourages and induces illegal voting. Stopping that practice for those identified as likely noncitizens is the bare minimum.” Bumatay also affirmed the federal government’s arguments about the need for an urgent ruling to sequester the ballots. While he conceded that the federal government could potentially prosecute fraudulent voters after the election, Bumatay said that the federal government “has an interest in stopping the illegal voting in the first place.” California’s attorney general called ruling a ‘welcome speed bump’ against Trump’s attacks California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, hailed Monday’s ruling against the Republican administration as a “welcome speed bump to Trump’s disgusting attacks on the Constitution and our country’s democracy.” In a statement, he urged voters to cast ballots early and “participate in democracy, don’t become disillusioned.” The 9th Circuit decision sends the case back to a federal judge in Southern California, who will hear arguments from both sides on Tuesday at 1 pm. Neither the Justice Department nor the Office of the U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California immediately responded to an emailed inquiry asking for comment.

Israel Votes: Netanyahu's Political Survival Hangs in the Balance as Record Turnout Floods the Polls | The Morning Sixpack - 10/27/2026 Israel votes, SoCal floods, measles surges, Comey charged again, a ballot fight, and a PE debt wall. #MorningSixpack

mydailygrind.newsIsrael Votes: Netanyahu's Political Survival Hangs in the Balance as Record Turnout Floods the PollsThe Morning Sixpack - 10/27/2026 Israel votes, SoCal floods, measles surges, Comey charged again, a ballot fight, and a PE debt wall. #MorningSixpack

A ‘canary in the coal mine’: Measles resurgence exposes weaknesses in U.S. public health, experts say

cnbc.comA ‘canary in the coal mine’: Measles resurgence exposes weaknesses in U.S. public health, experts sayFor nearly two years, the U.S. has had to swallow an uncomfortable reality: A highly infectious disease it once eliminated is spreading again. More than 4,400 measles cases and at least three deaths have been reported nationwide this year, marking the country’s worst outbreak in more than three decades. The spike followed nearly 2,300 cases in 2025. But many public health experts argue that the return of measles isn’t the only concerning development — it’s also what the resurgence signals about America that’s causing alarm. Measles is often described as one of the most contagious viruses, and it is uniquely unforgiving of weaknesses in public health defenses. A safe and highly effective vaccine has existed for decades. But the virus’s spread exposes declining vaccination rates, eroding trust in health institutions and growing challenges in persuading people to protect themselves, their children and their communities, experts said. Together, those vulnerabilities have made measles a revealing test of the country’s public health defenses. For some experts, the resurgence of a disease the U.S. eliminated more than two decades ago is a warning sign of its ability to contain future threats, from other vaccine-preventable diseases to emerging pathogens. “Measles is the canary in the coal mine for so many different reasons,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiology professor and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. “It’s the canary in the coal mine for other vaccine-preventable illnesses, where we could see a return of things that used to harm kids, but also for very acute, no-notice dangerous infectious disease emergencies.” The U.S. is on track to lose its official measles elimination status during an upcoming review by the Pan American Health Organization, which will meet in Washington, D.C., in mid-November. “It says a lot about a country if it is unable to control measles,” said Nuzzo, who is one of 10 experts CNBC spoke with about the ongoing outbreak and its implications. A measles advisory is shown tacked to a bulletin board outside Gaines County Courthouse in Seminole, Texas, April 9, 2025. The U.S. has the tools to prevent measles from spreading. But pockets of low vaccination coverage are leaving the country vulnerable. The measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine is about 97% effective against measles after two doses, while a single dose is 93% effective, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet data aggregated by the CDC shows that vaccination coverage for that shot among U.S. kindergarteners fell to 92.4% in the 2025-2026 school year, which is below the 95% threshold public health officials generally recommend to prevent sustained transmission. That translates to 280,000 kindergarteners who did not complete their MMR vaccination series, according to the CDC. Childhood vaccination exemptions in the U.S. also reached a record high 4.2% for incoming kindergartners during the 2025-2026 school year, up from 3.6% the previous year, the agency says. “The bottom line is that not enough people are vaccinating their kids,” said Brown’s Nuzzo. While some cases stem from international travel, much of the recent spread has been driven by local transmission in “too many” communities where vaccination coverage falls below 95%, she added. Among states across the U.S. collecting MMR vaccine data, 67% of counties and jurisdictions now have immunization rates below 95%, according to a September investigation by NBC News. Recent U.S. outbreaks have often occurred in “closely knit communities” where people have frequent contact and low vaccination coverage, said Dr. William Moss, an epidemiology professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But declining vaccination rates do not mean most Americans have turned against immunization. Polling suggests broad support for childhood vaccines. A July KFF survey found that many Americans sit in a more uncertain middle ground about the shots, leaving room for conflicting information to influence their decisions. “This is not an edge-case issue,” Nuzzo said, adding that the vast majority of parents still vaccinate their children. Even if outbreaks are concentrated in a minority of communities, it can create a “dangerous situation” far from those areas, she said. Infants too young to be vaccinated and people who cannot receive immunizations for medical reasons can be particularly vulnerable when the virus spreads into communities with high vaccination rates. Those risks come as the Trump administration reshapes federal vaccine policy. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August suggesting that the combined MMR vaccine be split into separate shots, while repeating false claims about its safety. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also overhauled a key federal advisory committee responsible for recommending childhood immunizations, though the changes are frozen amid ongoing litigation. Several experts told CNBC that such moves risk further eroding confidence in vaccines and weakening efforts to protect children. Public health infrastructure was also “really decimated by Covid,” and the CDC in particular lost many experienced scientists and physicians “who had spent their lives working on vaccine-preventable diseases,” said Scott Weaver, a virologist who is the research director of Galveston National Laboratory. He added that the CDC, as of September, is also no longer immediately incorporating state-reported “measles-associated” deaths into its national published tally, making it harder to track outbreaks in real time. The agency lists three measles-related deaths in 2026, but Pennsylvania has reported at least five deaths. “We have folks in federal health leadership right now that are throwing gasoline on the fire, and that is not helping the situation,” said Jess Steier, a public health scientist and founder and CEO of Unbiased Science, an organization that aims to make complex scientific concepts understandable.A medical assistant draws a measles, mumps and rubella vaccination to be administered to a young person at the pediatric office of Dr. Gary M. Kramer in Coral Gables, Florida, August 13, 2026. If the U.S. fails to materially improve vaccination rates, the measles resurgence could extend beyond ongoing outbreaks. At “current” state-level vaccination rates, measles could become endemic again in the U.S., resulting in an estimated 851,300 cases over 25 years, according to a large-scale epidemiological model published in JAMA in April 2025 by researchers at Stanford and other institutions. Under that scenario, the model predicts the measles cases could lead to 170,200 hospitalizations and 2,550 deaths over that period. The model, which simulated infectious disease spread in the U.S. at various childhood vaccination levels, relies on immunization data from 2004 to 2023 for that baseline scenario. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said he views the measles situation in Canada as a direct warning for the U.S. Canada lost its official measles elimination status in November after a multi-province outbreak that generated more than 5,400 cases across 10 jurisdictions in 2025. Canada has a population of more than 40 million people. “We have a population of 350 million. If you extrapolate, if we had the very same experience that Canada had over the next year or two, that would be up to 50,000 cases of measles in the U.S.,” Osterholm said. “I think that’s a potential future we have to be mindful of.” An even larger measles outbreak isn’t the only potential problem. Vaccination coverage for other childhood diseases has similarly declined. The share of U.S. kindergartners vaccinated against polio fell to 92.4% in the 2025-2026 school year, while coverage for diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis, or DTaP, dropped to 92%, according to CDC data. The U.S. has already seen a sharp rise in pertussis, or whooping cough. U.S. reported cases reached roughly 43,300 in 2024 and nearly 28,000 in 2025, up substantially from pandemic-era levels, according to the CDC. Brown’s Nuzzo said the resurgence reflects, in part, fewer people getting vaccinated and the fact that protection from the pertussis vaccine wanes over time. The simulation model published in JAMA also examined how falling childhood immunization rates could affect the future spread of several diseases previously eliminated from the U.S. through vaccines. Under current vaccination levels, the researchers found that diseases including rubella and polio were unlikely to become endemic in the U.S. But in a hypothetical scenario in which childhood vaccination rates fell by 50%, the model projected 9.9 million cases of rubella, 4.3 million cases of polio and 197 cases of diphtheria over 25 years. Rubella can cause devastating complications when an infection during pregnancy passes to a developing fetus, while polio can cause paralysis and death, said Dr. Nathan Lo, assistant professor of infectious diseases at Stanford Medicine. The projections are not predictions that these outbreaks will occur, but they illustrate how much risks could grow if vaccination coverage deteriorates. “What vaccines often buy you is not just the protection, but also less uncertainty,” said Mathew Kiang, an assistant professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford Medicine who also worked on the simulation model. “I think even more frightening is just the really wide uncertainty that we just wouldn’t be sure of what could happen.” The measles resurgence is also raising questions about how effective the U.S. can be at detecting and responding to emerging public health threats before they spread. “Public health is all about prevention,” said Dr. Manisha Juthani, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Health. She said the country must maintain its ability to detect threats, invest in surveillance, and recognize that infectious diseases do not respect national borders. Those capabilities are crucial for curbing emerging pathogens, especially when scientists initially know little about how a new disease spreads, how severe it is or how to treat it. A pathogen could spread before vaccines or treatments are available, making early detection, clear public communication and coordination especially important. Other experts argue that weaknesses in those capabilities could also have implications for the country’s defenses against deliberate biological attacks. In an April 2025 op-ed, Steph Batalis, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, argued that the measles outbreak exposed a broader vulnerability in the U.S.′ biodefense strategy and, specifically, a weakened ability to deter potential biological attacks. She argued that the country’s struggle to contain a known, vaccine-preventable disease “might only embolden those who see our public health vulnerabilities as an opportunity.” But Osterholm, who works extensively on bioterrorism, said low MMR immunization rates and rising measles cases do not necessarily indicate that Americans would refuse a vaccine or antibiotic during a biological emergency. The shots and drugs used to counter biological threats can differ from those routinely administered to the public, he said, and the prospect of a severe outbreak could prompt urgency among the public to seek protection. That point highlights an important limitation: The measles resurgence by itself does not establish whether the U.S. could withstand entirely different or novel public health threats. But as a disease the U.S. knows how to prevent spreads, experts say the stakes of addressing those vulnerabilities extend to whatever might come next.

Fastest turnout for half a century as Israelis pass wartime judgment on Netanyahu

reuters.comFastest turnout for half a century as Israelis pass wartime judgment on NetanyahuJERUSALEM, Oct 27 (Reuters) - Israelis surged to the polls at the fastest rate in nearly half a century on Tuesday to pass wartime judgment on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in what voters described as the most consequential election in the nation's history. Long lines formed outside polling stations for the first election since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks, with voters passionately engaged over the trauma of the country's deadliest day and the ensuing wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. The Reuters Iran Briefing newsletter keeps you informed with the latest developments and analysis of the Iran war. Sign up here. Policies of Netanyahu's right-wing coalition have been divisive at home and have deepened Israel's international isolation, while he has defended his record, calling himself the only leader with the mettle to face down Israel's foes. Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving leader with 19 years in office, is an unmatched political survivor, and his nationalist politics are increasingly entrenched. Israel's fragmented system makes it difficult for an array of opponents to force out his coalition of right-wing, far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.His main rival Gadi Eisenkot, a military ex-chief of staff and security hawk, aims to unseat him with the support of parties on the right and centre, as well as the rump of an increasingly marginalised left. Opinion polls show a close race, with neither leader facing an easy path to power. In a message to supporters more than five hours after polls opened, Netanyahu urged them to vote, saying turnout was high among his opponents on the left and among Israelis of Arab heritage, around a fifth of the country. "We need it to be high too. You all need to stream to the polls," he said. "This is a fateful moment." Voters began casting ballots after polling stations opened at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT). The polls close at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT). The Central Elections Committee reported that 31.5% of eligible voters had cast their ballots within the first five hours. It was the fastest turnout since a legendary 1977 election that came to be known as "the upheaval", which brought the right to power for the first time in Israeli history. "I think these elections are the most important of all the ones I’ve known," said Ruth Epstein, an 81-year-old longtime left-wing voter in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv, who voted for the opposition Democrats. "I’m really scared about what will be here."Netanyahu has campaigned on an endorsement from US President Donald Trump, his ally in war against Iran, who has said they should "finish the job". If neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot can form a governing coalition in the 120-seat parliament, Netanyahu could stay on as caretaker until another election is held. His opponents have managed to wrest him from the premiership only once since 2009, and that took four inconclusive elections in two years. He was back 18 months later. Item 1 of 15 An Israeli man votes at a polling station during the national election, in Bnei Brak, Israel, October 27, 2026. REUTERS/Nir Elias [1/15]An Israeli man votes at a polling station during the national election, in Bnei Brak, Israel, October 27, 2026. REUTERS/Nir Elias Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tabFor many of Netanyahu's opponents, the election turns on accountability for the security failures of October 7, Israel's deadliest day. Opposition groups have promised to hold a national inquiry, which Netanyahu's government has resisted. "I am convinced that by the end of today, we will see a change — a new spirit for the State of Israel — that will serve as a rectification for the past three years and for that terrible day," Eisenkot said during a visit to kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, targeted in the October 7 attacks. He walked to the polls with Gadi Mozes, one of 251 people kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza during the attack that killed 1,200 people. Eisenkot says Israel's response — a war which health authorities say killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — was a failure because Hamas remains in charge. He repeated his commitment to dismantle or destroy Hamas' military and governing power in Gaza within 18 months of forming a government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of a far-right party in Netanyahu's coalition, cast his vote in the Kiryat Arba settlement in the occupied West Bank early on Tuesday. He predicted Netanyahu would return as prime minister and his own party would serve as the right-wing anchor of the government.Voters from Israel's Arab minority, Israeli by citizenship but Palestinian by heritage, were voting in "unprecedented" numbers, Palestinian candidate Ahmed Tibi said. Netanyahu had repeatedly warned supporters of the prospect of high turnout among Arab Israelis ahead of the vote, seeking to mobilise his base under the slogan "Right or Palestine". Eisenkot has ruled out partnering with Arab parties, citing a lack of shared values, although some possible scenarios envision them propping up a minority government to ensure Netanyahu is removed from office. Eisenkot joined Netanyahu's war cabinet after the October 7 attacks but quit after eight months, criticising his leadership. Israel flattened much of Gaza in the offensive launched after October 7, and now occupies around two-thirds of the enclave under a year-old US-brokered ceasefire. Negotiations for Hamas to disarm and Israel to withdraw have stalled. Israel also dealt heavy blows to Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it now occupies a swathe of territory, and traded strikes with Iran, leading to a 12-day air campaign in 2025 and this year's joint US-Israeli war. Like nearly all Jewish party leaders in Israel, Eisenkot opposes the two-state solution that once underpinned decades of peace negotiations with the Palestinians. But he has criticised Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which has surged since 2023 and strained Israel's ties with Western states. And he opposes Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners. Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell and Rami Ayyub in Jerusalem, Lili Bayer and Alexander Cornwell in Tel Aviv Writing by Tom Perry Editing by Howard Goller, Joe Bavier, Peter Graff Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Justice Dept. charges James Comey, ex-FBI director, for a third time

washingtonpost.comJustice Dept. charges James Comey, ex-FBI director, for a third timeThe Justice Department has again charged James B. Comey, the third time the Trump administration has mounted a criminal case against the former FBI director — a prominent political foe of the president — since last year. This time, federal prosecutors charged Comey with two counts alleging that he leaked sensitive government material to the media in 2016 when he was FBI director. Comey was fired by President Donald Trump the following year. He has since become a staunch critic of Trump and the Justice Department’s actions during his second term. According to federal prosecutors, Comey directed his staff to talk to a New York Times reporter about U.S. email surveillance in October 2016. The information relayed to the reporter was sensitive government material that should not have been disclosed, prosecutors allege. Prosecutors did not obtain an indictment through a grand jury to charge Comey, but rather charged him in D.C. with a criminal information. This means that the document charging Comey is solely based on allegations from a prosecutor rather than a grand jury. The charges were originally filed under seal earlier this month, but a federal judge in D.C. sided with Comey’s request to unseal the allegations against him. Comey, who is also facing an unrelated criminal case in North Carolina, denied the latest allegations on Monday and said he would keep fighting in court. “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice — one that we cannot become numb to,” Comey said in a video statement posted online. “Nothing’s changed with me. I’m still innocent.” This is a breaking news article that will be updated. Catch up quickly with a rundown of the 7 most important and interesting stories.

Lula Wins Fourth Term: The Biggest Comeback in Modern Brazilian Politics The Morning Sixpack Podcast - 10/26/2026: Lula’s comeback, Anthropic’s $80B loss, Machado’s return, Israel’s vote, Audi, border politics #MorningSixpackPodcast

mydailygrind.newsLula Wins Fourth Term: The Biggest Comeback in Modern Brazilian PoliticsThe Morning Sixpack Podcast - 10/26/2026: Lula’s comeback, Anthropic’s $80B loss, Machado’s return, Israel’s vote, Audi, border politics #MorningSixpackPodcast

Lula's Historic Comeback: How He Beat Bolsonaro, Won a Fourth Term, and Left Brazil's Right Scrambling The Morning Sixpack - 10/26/2026: Lula's comeback, Anthropic's $80B loss, Machado's return, Israel's vote, Audi's U.S. plant, border politics #MorningSixpack

mydailygrind.newsLula's Historic Comeback: How He Beat Bolsonaro, Won a Fourth Term, and Left Brazil's Right ScramblingThe Morning Sixpack - 10/26/2026: Lula's comeback, Anthropic's $80B loss, Machado's return, Israel's vote, Audi's U.S. plant, border politics #MorningSixpack

The Small-Town Cop Who Helped ICE Deport His Neighbors

propublica.orgThe Small-Town Cop Who Helped ICE Deport His NeighborsThe Shadow Surge: In January 2025, President Donald Trump revived a troubled ICE program that deputizes cops as deportation officers. Over 29,000 local officers nationwide have enlisted. After the Flood: Ingram, Texas, was rebuilding from a historic flood when its Police Department signed on with ICE. Within a year, cops would hand over the equivalent of 10% of the town. Cop on the Ground: The local face of the national immigration crackdown became Officer Jaron Alexander. After suggesting ICE’s program to his chief, he grapples daily with the consequences. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outside a house off Main Street and approached on foot. A Mexican ballad was playing. Someone had called in a noise complaint, claiming it sounded as if people were fighting. But as the officer, Jaron Alexander, got closer, he found nothing of the sort. A middle-aged woman greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, looked on. “What kind of party are you all having?” she remembers him asking. Behind her were three generations of an extended family. They were celebrating a 3-month-old’s baptism over pozole verde, horchata and beers. Alexander ran some IDs and found no issues. The music wasn’t even that loud, he thought. He told them to have a good night, and then he left. That encounter, in early October last year, was the first of many that Alexander and Martinez would have in tiny Ingram, Texas, a 1.5-square-mile town of 1,900 people beside the Guadalupe River. But it was the only one before Ingram signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would roil the town and tear Martinez’s family apart. “Her and I, at the beginning, I felt like we were running into each other all the time,” Alexander told us, in one of eight conversations over four months that offer a rare window into the thoughts of one of the local police officers on the front lines of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. In a town as small as Ingram, drivable in five minutes end to end, more run-ins were probably inevitable. Later that October, Alexander pulled over a work truck for rolling through a stop sign, and soon there Martinez was, demanding that he let her friends go rather than let immigration take them. He didn’t. He pulled over another driver in November who turned out to be her cousin, the father of the baby they celebrated at the baptism party. Alexander handed him over to immigration agents as well. Ingram, a town of under 2,000 people, is — or was — 45% Latino. The police helped deport the equivalent of 10% of Ingram’s population. He pulled over Martinez herself a few weeks before she was due to give birth, she says, surprising her when he knew her name and the type of car she typically drove. He warned her that the car’s window tint was illegal and let her go. After that, he says, he caught a glimpse of her and her husband and their newborn daughter in the toy aisle at Walmart. Martinez told us she doesn’t think it was even her that day — her baby girl was then just days old, and she couldn’t imagine running errands with her so soon. But in Alexander’s memory, she was shopping for Christmas presents, just like him. Alexander, who is in his mid-30s, with dirty blond hair already turning gray, says he didn’t come back to Ingram to help deport his neighbors. In his telling, he just ended up making it part of his job. The town was where he started his law-enforcement career years earlier, before he took a better-paying position with the county, as a sheriff’s deputy. But things recently started to fall apart, first in his marriage, next at the sheriff’s office: A 185-page internal investigation found that he had an affair before his divorce was final and used a county vehicle to carry it out, then lied about it all. He says the investigator called him an “embarrassment to the profession.” The sheriff’s office fired him. (Alexander said at the time, and again to us, that he did not have the affair.) Ingram’s Police Department took him back just when its new chief — its eighth in five years — was under pressure from the City Council to do more: more traffic stops, more citations, more arrests, more numbers. Alexander says he told the chief that the sheriff’s office had a deal with ICE and that Ingram should look into it; maybe it could help the department grow. “Blame me,” he eventually told people. “It’s my fault in a way.” Donald Trump had retaken the presidency with a promise to carry out “the largest deportation in the history of our country.” America was still figuring out what that meant. Finding and expelling up to 4% of the U.S. population — the 14 million residents who are estimated to be undocumented — wasn’t something a few thousand ICE agents could do on their own. Underway in Chicago that fall, and soon in Minneapolis, was one version of how the administration could try to do it: masked agents from across the federal government surging into a liberal city to round up immigrants, beating back — even killing — the citizens who tried to stand in their path. But a quieter kind of surge was spreading across the country at the same time. In September 2025, ICE announced new incentives for a partnership program known as 287(g). The program’s most aggressive form, the so-called task force model, which Ingram opted in to, enlists local police officers as deputy immigration agents, and the new incentives included a $100,000 vehicle stipend, a $7,500 equipment stipend for every participating officer, quarterly performance bonuses and funding to help cover officer salaries and overtime. “By joining forces with ICE,” the announcement read, “you’re not just gaining access to these unprecedented reimbursement opportunities — you’re becoming part of a national effort to ensure the safety of every American family.” Alexander completed an online course with ICE a few weeks after the baptism party, qualifying him for time-and-a-half pay whenever he helped the agency pick up immigrants. Here in the Texas Hill Country, he soon became the local face of the national crackdown. “I’m friendly with the people that I meet,” Alexander says, “especially when they’re friendly to me.” Ingram was just starting to recover from its worst natural disaster in a century, the flood that summer that killed at least 139 people up and down the Guadalupe River, including 25 girls at Camp Mystic. In the riverbed, towering bald cypress trees now stood at a lean, their branches swept back by a 30-foot surge of water and mud, their trunks still plastered with debris. As construction workers rebuilding the community traveled to their jobsites via Junction Highway, Ingram’s five-lane main thoroughfare, a black Charger began stopping them before they could get there. Within three months of the baptism party, Alexander and Ingram’s other patrol officer had delivered at least 70 people to immigration agents, picking off what the police chief called a “dumbfounding” number of undocumented drivers. Within a year, they would hand over the equivalent of 10% of Ingram to ICE. The weight of what Alexander was doing started to settle on him after Christmas. He says he was out patrolling as one of his new ICE handlers, a man in a ball cap and dark glasses, hovered nearby in an unmarked SUV. Around lunchtime, Alexander followed two Latino men in a 2008 GMC truck for several blocks before stopping them, they recall him saying, for failing to signal a turn. A young man sat in the passenger seat. Alexander checked his papers along with the driver’s and determined that both were undocumented. The agent in the unmarked SUV rolled up behind them. Alexander realized who the man in the passenger seat was only after Martinez arrived in tears. It was her husband, Ulices Macias, the father of her newborn daughter. “I don’t normally do this,” Martinez recalls Alexander telling her, “but I’m going to open up the car. I’m going to take the handcuffs off him.” He let the family have a moment together. In a video taken by Martinez’s younger sister, Alexander stood by, expressionless, as Martinez embraced Macias by the rear door of the Charger. He watched Macias cradle his 2-week-old baby girl, swaddled in a white blanket, and hug Martinez’s 4-year-old son, his stepson. Then the ICE agent put the handcuffs back on Martinez’s husband, wrapped a chain around his waist and led him away. Alexander says Martinez threw herself to the ground and sobbed. Images of the family he broke up shortly after Christmas would intrude on Alexander’s thoughts for months, he told us. But it didn’t keep him from doing his job. His next shift came a few days after he handed over Macias, and he was back in the Charger, back to stopping cars on Junction Highway. Joanna Martinez’s husband, Ulices Macias, is detained by Alexander on Dec. 28, 2025, in this video taken by Martinez’s younger sister. Courtesy of the Martinez family Alexander says he didn’t always want to be a police officer. He describes himself as “kind of a chameleon.” He grew up in nearby Harper, tried a few different colleges without graduating and spent his 20s cycling though jobs in freight logistics, pest control and insurance. Still seeking his calling, he arranged a ride-along with a police officer outside Austin. What sold him on policing was the suburban officer’s power to enforce the law as he saw fit. That day, they pulled over a woman who had a warrant out for her arrest. She was coming back from the store with children and groceries in the back seat. “You can use your discretion,” Alexander recalls the officer telling him. Wouldn’t they be doing more harm if they took her? What would the kids do without their mother? And wouldn’t it all create more paperwork? The officer let her go. Alexander imagined himself making the same kinds of judgment calls. In 2021, he enrolled in the police academy. Even before the floods, tensions were rising in Ingram. Hundreds of Mexican immigrants and their families had settled there in recent decades as an increasingly militarized border made it harder for seasonal ranch hands and other workers to cross back and forth. Latinos would come to make up 45% of its population, and some residents began affectionately calling Ingram “mini Guanajuato,” after the central Mexican state where many have roots. Yet when Alexander returned, Ingram’s City Council still consisted of six white men. Mayor Claud Jordan (in shorts and cap), Chief Dustin Breshears (center) and Mayor Pro Tem Rocky Hawkins (seated second from right) attend an Ingram City Council meeting in August. A council faction led by Claud Jordan, now the town’s mayor, and Rocky Hawkins, now the mayor pro tem, came to power in November 2020, in a revolt against a new sewer project. They abolished Ingram’s city administrator position and took direct control of the Police Department, cycling through chief after chief. Five former city employees say Hawkins regularly used racist slurs for Mexicans. Four say that he pressured the city to go after Latinos through code enforcement or targeted patrols, and two say that Jordan did, too. One of the employees recalls Hawkins complaining that Mexicans were “taking over Ingram.” (Hawkins and Jordan each declined to speak on the record or address detailed questions we sent them by email. In a brief text-message exchange, Hawkins said that none of it was right but declined to offer any specific concerns.) These were the men the new chief, Dustin Breshears, had to answer to as ICE revived the task force program, which had been shut down for a dozen years until the day Trump returned to office in January 2025. ICE, under President Barack Obama, had phased out the program after some of the first sheriffs to participate in it, including Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, used it to disproportionately target Latinos in their communities. Investigations by the Department of Justice found that deputies in the task force program pulled over Latino drivers at up to nine times the rate of other drivers and that some retaliated violently against people who accused them of racial profiling. But now, under Trump, any law-enforcement agency, no matter how troubled or small, was encouraged to sign up. Breshears began appearing at City Council meetings armed with statistics: number of arrests since the last meeting, number of traffic stops, number of cleared cases from the backlog of hundreds he inherited — and number of what he called “deportations.” (He later explained this was his imprecise shorthand for “immigration-related enforcement activities.”) At the council’s October 2025 meeting, held a couple of weeks after Alexander showed up at the Martinez family’s baptism party, Breshears reported a remarkable 162 traffic stops by Ingram’s two patrol officers — Alexander and Christian Perez, who was 25 — in just 20 days. (Perez declined to comment.) The officers made more stops in two months than the department had made in the entire previous year. The City Council gave Breshears an $18,000 raise. Christian Perez, one of the other Ingram police officers, at a traffic stop. He and Alexander made more stops in two months than the department had made in the entire previous year. Before Breshears arrived and Alexander returned in August 2025, the weekly blotter in The West Kerr Current, the local newspaper, documented the humdrum of community policing: loose dogs, neighborhood disputes, code violations. Then, suddenly, it was filled with drivers stopped for defective brake lights, damaged license plates, cracked windshields, illegal window tints or other unspecified “equipment violations.” Breshears and Alexander strongly deny targeting Latinos. “It’s honestly not what’s happening,” Breshears says, noting that his half brother, wife and daughters have Mexican heritage. Ingram’s traffic stops were simply up across the board, he says, so more Latinos were getting stopped. He shared statistics showing that stops of Latinos were proportional to their share of the population. Alexander, who on top of his roughly $70,000 base salary was now logging dozens of hours per month for ICE, told us the same. “I don’t care who’s in the car,” he says. “I really don’t.” As the ICE program took hold in Ingram, warnings about Alexander and his black Charger — the department has several — spread through the Hill Country and far beyond. Groups on Facebook and WhatsApp seemed to track his every move. The Charger was outside Rita’s taco shop. The Charger was near Dollar General. The Charger was parked by the church. A member of one particularly active Facebook group texted him screenshots, and he scrolled through blurry photos of himself looming behind work trucks or leaning over car windows. Many Latino motorists trying to reach worksites up the Guadalupe began driving an extra 90 minutes each day to avoid the section of Junction Highway that Alexander patrolled. Ranch hands began sleeping at their employers’ properties in nearby Hunt, coming to town only when they knew — or hoped — that Ingram’s officers would be off duty. Residents were rattled the day a Customs and Border Protection helicopter hovered above town and the elementary school went into lockdown as the police hunted for a Mexican man who had run from one of Alexander’s traffic stops. High number of traffic stops 55-mile route to avoid downtown Ingram 55-mile route to avoid downtown Ingram High number of traffic stops Lucas Waldron/ProPublica One family notarized guardianship papers, in case the parents were detained and the children left behind. One woman swore Alexander showed up outside a memorial service and asked people for IDs. Another woman said he detained her and her husband when they returned home from church. Parties dwindled. Invite lists shrank. People began to move away, to Kerrville and San Antonio, and Alexander’s reputation reached as far as La Ceja, a village in the mountains of central Mexico, where an elderly resident said he and his neighbors were familiar with the Texas town’s police. “El Charger negro,” he said, with a knowing nod. He estimated that some 20 or 30 people in the village were recent deportees from Ingram. Alexander’s fortunes seemed to rise as the Martinez family’s fell. With her husband gone, Joanna Martinez couldn’t afford payments on the trailer they shared. She and their infant and her 4-year-old son moved back into her childhood bedroom in her mother’s crowded home, where several relatives and their children also lived. She tried to stay connected with her husband, Macias, via WhatsApp calls while working as much as she could as a house cleaner to keep afloat. “I can’t lock myself up in my room and just cry,” Martinez says. Winter for Martinez and her family brought a string of dark incidents. The January arrest of her cousin near the carwash as she drove to pick up her children from school. A canceled baby shower for her older sister, Jazmin, over a rumor that the Charger planned to show up. Another cousin, himself the father of a newborn, stopped and taken right in front of her mother’s house as Martinez watched. A half dozen of the attendees from the October baptism party would soon be gone from Ingram, after being detained and deported or leaving to join relatives who had been. Some people had gotten wind that Alexander was making money off his enforcement. When a Spanish-language Facebook page shared a photo of him questioning the passenger of a beige Ford pickup, someone posted an animated image in the comments: a stack of green dollar bills growing taller and taller in an endless loop. A view of the stretch of Junction Highway where many people are detained Sean Cronen for The New York Times A view of the stretch of Junction Highway where many people are detained Sean Cronen for The New York Times Alexander received his first ICE payments in early December. In January, as the country’s attention turned to the violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, he was often spending three or four hours a day and sometimes entire shifts working on behalf of the federal agency. By the time federal authorities announced a drawdown in Minneapolis on Feb. 12, Alexander had already made $3,264.46 from his task force hours, according to his pay stubs. Ingram was by then one of more than 750 task force model partners around the country, up from not quite 500 when it signed up in October. At least 43 million U.S. residents, according to an analysis of ICE records by the legal data firm Titus Consulting, already lived in a county with an active task force agreement. Alexander was one of thousands of deputized officers in Texas alone. Agencies With 287(g) Task Force Model Agreements State-level County-level Local-level Ariz.La.IdahoMinn.N.D.S.D.N.Y.Ga.Ind.Mich.Miss.OhioTexasNeb.Colo.Md.Kan.Ill.Wis.Calif.IowaPa.Mont.Mo.Fla.Ky.MaineUtahOkla.Tenn.Ore.W.Va.Ark.Wash.N.C.Va.Wyo.Ala.S.C.N.M.Vt.Nev.Mass.N.J.Conn.N.H.R.I.Del.AlaskaHawaii Note: Though Pinal County, Arizona, is listed as having an active agreement in data maintained by ICE, the agreement is under permanent injunction, so it does not appear in this map. Source: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Initial data analysis by Andrew Thrasher of the legal data firm Titus Consulting. Additional analysis by ProPublica. Lucas Waldron/ProPublica In interviews, Alexander described the immigration system he was enforcing as “skewed” and “weird,” but he saw himself as largely separate from these concerns. “If you’re taking federal money to do a job,” he says, “I think you should do the job.” Still, he seemed to struggle with the contradictions of his role. He told us he sometimes shared his lunch with the people he detained and that he let them hold on to their phones to call loved ones from the rear seat of the Charger. He handcuffed them with their hands in the front rather than the back so they could use their hands. Martinez told us about a moment when she watched him detain one of her cousins. He allowed the man’s wife and children to hug him goodbye and waited until his 7-year-old daughter wasn’t looking to handcuff him. To Martinez, it seemed as if Alexander was trying to prove to her that he wasn’t a bad person. “But I’m not going to fall for it,” she says. There was a protest in Ingram the following day against Trump’s mass deportations. Martinez decided to go. As she stood among a few dozen protesters waving a handmade sign with the name “J. Alexander” circled and crossed out, she saw him drive by again and again. Alexander responding to a call. “If I’m being 100% honest,” he says, “I don’t enjoy when families are separated.” A few weeks later, Katie Winer, the leader of the group that staged the protest, was following the Charger after Alexander detained another immigrant in a traffic stop. He approached her car and threatened to arrest her if she followed him in the future, on charges of interfering with public duties. But he also seemed to want to talk, and she recorded him as they discussed what was going on in Ingram. “I think you guys are making a bigger deal of it than they are,” he said of the people he handed over to ICE. The only outliers were “loudmouths” like Martinez and “her little crew.” Winer interjected that Martinez’s husband was the family’s breadwinner, and it was Alexander’s actions that tore them apart. “My actions did not,” Alexander said. “His actions did. I made a traffic stop. He was here illegally. That’s not my fault.” Still, Alexander’s uncertainty seemed to be growing. In March, another of Martinez’s cousins confronted him outside the taco shop, pressing him about Macias as she filmed with her phone. “If I’m being 100% honest,” he said, “I don’t enjoy when families are separated, like with the Joanna situation. That kind of fucked me up.” A month later, as Ingram’s handoffs to ICE surpassed 100 people, another video of Alexander circulated among a small group of community members. It showed an evening traffic stop, at least the fifth stop Alexander made that day. He had followed a silver Ford F-250 from the highway until it pulled into the gravel driveway of a mobile home. There, the man in the passenger seat, a landscaper named Victor Ramirez Hernandez, tried to hurry inside. Alexander grabbed him before he could get there. The truck’s driver pulled out his phone and began filming. “Why are you arresting him?” he asked. “I’m not,” Alexander answered, struggling to place handcuffs on Ramirez as he squirmed. “I’m detaining him.” Then he wrapped his hands around the laborer’s chest, lifted him off the ground and slammed him down on the driveway. “I played nice with you, and now I’m done,” he said. He straddled Ramirez and cuffed his hands behind his back. “He’s bleeding because you hit him,” the driver said evenly. They argued back and forth. “You’re an idiot,” Alexander said, his face reddening. “Shut up. The more you talk it’s just making you look stupider.” (Alexander declined to comment on this incident. Breshears, who reviewed body-camera footage, says Alexander’s use of force was justified to control a potentially dangerous situation.) Acrimony pulsed through Ingram that spring. In the Latino community, family members and neighbors accused one another of snitching, which Alexander says did happen. Young women accused one another of having affairs with him, which he denies, insisting that people just misinterpreted his attempts to be kind. “I’m friendly with the people that I meet,” he says, “especially when they’re friendly to me.” One subject of these rumors was Martinez. She and her older sister scoffed at them. “He’s taken our whole family at this point,” Jazmin says. “And she’s going to sleep with him? It’s really annoying.” But some in the community, even cousins, stopped speaking with her. “It’s like ‘Hunger Games,’” Martinez says. As Latinos fled and avoided Ingram, the daily takeout orders at one Mexican restaurant on the edge of town dropped to 50 from 200. A corner store catering to immigrants lost around half its revenue and most of its Latino regulars. Landlords in a mobile-home park just outside town struggled to find tenants. As Latinos fled and avoided Ingram, many businesses suffered. At Los Altos de Jalisco, a local restaurant, daily takeout orders dropped to 50 from 200. But it wasn’t just Ingram’s Latino community that was reeling. For Ingram’s non-Hispanic business owners, including many Republicans in a county that voted 77% for Trump in the 2024 election, the immigration crackdown was becoming an outrage. It was taking people they worked with and knew well. It was interfering with flood reconstruction. It was hurting the local economy. The owner of a heavily damaged strip mall on the western edge of town, Steve Edelstein, lamented the loss of two workers who were helping him rebuild. “Technically local law enforcement is doing their job,” he told a reporter for The West Kerr Current, emphasizing that he supported Trump. “But it isn’t helping the community.” A manager overseeing the rebuilding of Ingram’s Little League field, which was washed away in the flood, made an angry call to the city after two of his workers were picked up, Breshears says. A contractor helping rebuild Hunt’s destroyed post office had his crew reduced to eight workers from 30 — causing what should have been a four-day job to stretch to two weeks. Among the people who called Jordan, the mayor, to complain was his onetime high school classmate Neal Secor, who describes himself as “one of the most conservative guys you’ll ever meet.” His family business, a cluster of rental cabins called Waltonia on the River, was nearly destroyed by the flood. He was struggling to rebuild. He says that in the spring, in two separate stops, the Ingram police detained four of his workers and handed them over to ICE — the second set as they returned from a job repairing the docks at a nearby youth camp, a favor Secor was trying to do for a neighbor. Secor says Jordan’s defense was simple: You voted for this. They’d all voted for this. “Let me tell you something,” Secor says he told Jordan. “I didn’t vote for this. I voted to get the bad guys out.” The two employees detained coming back from the youth camp were like family, his friends and co-workers for over a decade. “There’s still a lot of bad guys here,” he continued. “These guys aren’t them.” Many local construction workers have been deported or have left Ingram, slowing down work, including recovery from the floods in 2025 and 2026. Secor recalls Jordan saying that Ingram’s officers were just following the law. But, Secor wondered, why was it that he could drive 85 every day on the 75-mile-an-hour interstate and police officers just let him pass? He told Jordan he’d put 175,000 miles on his truck and never been pulled over. “It’s a matter of what laws you want to pick and choose,” he recalls telling the mayor. “We all break laws every day if you really want to get down to it.” On an unpaved side street in the Ingram hills in April, Alexander again faced a decision over whether to separate a young family. This time he had more of a choice; ICE had yet to arrive. A woman named Norma Luján took his hand and said she was praying for him. Luján, 61, runs a successful housecleaning company based in Ingram. She had heard of Alexander long before she confronted him. She had seen him in the Charger, too: on the side of Junction Highway as she made her way to jobs at vacation homes or youth camps up in Hunt. On the side of the highway on the way back. In her rearview mirror for four excruciating minutes one afternoon as her “girls,” as she called her crew, held their breath and sank into their seats, protected by the tint of her car’s windows and the fact that a license-plate reader would show it was registered to her, a Texas-born U.S. citizen. Norma Luján confronted Alexander after he detained the husband of a woman who worked for her housecleaning company. “I need you to look inside your heart,” she said, “and let him go.” In January, at the carwash, Alexander had helped a sheriff’s deputy take one of Luján’s best employees into custody. The woman, Cinthya Carranza, was a single mother and asylum seeker from Guanajuato — and Joanna Martinez’s cousin. Carranza was on her way to get her children from school after she and Luján spent the day cleaning houses. Later that day, Luján saw a Facebook post showing a familiar face in a mug shot: Carranza’s. Luján broke into tears. To her, the arrest was a signal event. The Charger had mostly stopped men up to that point. This was the moment she understood that no one was safe. Luján started losing workers in droves after Carranza was taken — some to traffic stops, most for fear of having to drive through Ingram. Her crew of 30 people dropped to fewer than 10. She worried for her business, but she worried more, she said, for her workers, the lives they had made in Ingram and the relationships she had built with them. They invited her to parties and baptisms, surprised her with presents on her birthday. She often led them in prayer. “I love them,” she says. She promised she would try to protect them. When Luján’s employee Maria called that April afternoon to say the officer in the Charger was outside her house, detaining her husband as he returned from work, Luján jumped into action. Maria (who asked to be identified by her middle name because she is undocumented) was eight months pregnant and already terrified that she would have to give birth alone. Alexander had taken her brother a week earlier. Now Maria was hiding behind the curtains of her home, sneaking peeks outside, hoping Alexander would let her husband go. One of Luján’s cleaning company employees, who is from Guatemala, cleaning a home in Kerrville, Texas. She asked that her name and face not be used to protect her privacy. “Cálmate” — calm down — Luján told herself as she approached the Charger. “Cálmate.” She took a deep breath. She says Alexander was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door propped open, staring at a tablet computer. “Look, his wife has had a complicated pregnancy,” she told him. (This was true.) “She’s in the hospital.” (For that lie, Luján says, she later prayed for forgiveness.) Then Luján reached out and grabbed Alexander’s hand. “I pray for your being, for your soul,” she recalls telling him as she cried. “I want you to think about what you’re doing. Feel it. Feel it, please.” She squeezed his hand. “I need you to look inside your heart,” she continued, “and let him go.” Alexander didn’t react at first, in Luján’s telling. “God wanted me to meet you,” she said. He met her gaze. “I’m that guy that everyone talks about on Facebook,” she recalls him finally saying. “If you think I don’t lose any sleep, you’re wrong.” Luján pushed through the lump in her throat to speak. “I’m going to pray for you every night,” she promised him. She says Alexander squeezed her hand back, then pulled away. He walked off to make a call. She couldn’t make out much of what he said. It was quiet, save for the sound of Luján’s sobs and the pebbles from the unpaved road crunching beneath the officer’s feet. Then he returned to the Charger. “Get him out of the car,” Luján recalls him saying. “Hurry up.” “God bless you,” Luján said. “God will repay you for this.” Alexander says he doesn’t remember the details of his interaction with Luján, but he confirms that he let Maria’s husband go, calling it a matter of “human decency.” He knew how hard it was to raise children. “A woman needs rest,” he says. “She needs help.” Maria’s husband “needs to be there helping out.” The night shift at a meat-processing plant in Ingram, two days before two employees driving to work there were detained and handed over to ICE. All the other male workers quit shortly after. At first, nothing seemed to change. Over the next two months, as the Hill Country prepared to welcome summer tourists and campers back after the devastation of the floods, Alexander worked around 100 task force hours, earning close to $5,000 from ICE. But the next time he ran into Joanna Martinez, he seemed to be having misgivings. It was early June, and he was eight months into the ICE program. He had pulled over another of her family friends on Junction Highway, a person she had known since childhood. Martinez got a phone call and rushed to the scene, as she had so many times before. “I don’t feel good about this,” she recalls him saying when she arrived. “I signed up to be a cop, not an ICE agent.” (Alexander says he remembers that they talked and that he could have said something like that.) Later that month, he pulled over a young man from Honduras who was on his way to a soccer game with his cousin, a 12-year-old with developmental disabilities. The boy’s father says he and his wife hid across the street watching it all happen, too terrified to step out and claim their son. The parents sent a friend from church, but she was not a legal guardian. Alexander says he had no choice but to hand the boy over to ICE, adding though that if he was one of the parents, he would see it differently. “If I’m in that position, there’s no way I’m letting my kid go,” he told us. “I’m probably fighting someone.” Within a couple of weeks, Alexander’s task force hours dropped by about 40%, according to his pay stubs. It remains unclear if he tried to step back from immigration work or whether the number of undocumented drivers in Ingram had simply dwindled because of all he had already done. According to Chief Breshears, Ingram had logged 194 “immigration-related incidents” as of this August. Whether every handover led to a deportation, Breshears couldn’t say. Alexander says he doesn’t know how many of the 194 are people he stopped. But he says he has now let at least 10 people go — many, though not all of them, mothers of young children. Alexander sees this, and his relationship to the Martinez family, as evidence of his humanity, despite what people say about him. “For context, I’ve deported like six of their family members, and they’re still friendly to me,” he says. “So I’m not the monster they make me out to be.” On July 16, the skies over Ingram opened again, dropping nearly 19 inches of rain in a single day, and the Guadalupe again overtopped its banks, again destroying businesses and homes. In the predawn darkness in the early hours of the emergency, Alexander began racing toward Ingram in his black Charger to help. He had barely left his house when surging floodwaters consumed the vehicle, destroying the Charger’s engine block. A driver in a pickup truck took him back home, and that’s where he stayed until the storm receded. Alexander remains only one cog in a deportation machine for which the federal government has now earmarked $240 billion. Today more than 1,900 agencies in at least 30 states have signed up for ICE’s task force model, with more than 29,000 deputized officers. With their help, ICE recently hit a record of immigration arrests, totaling more than 50,000 in August. On Sept. 11, Alexander met one of us at a taco spot on Junction Highway. Ingram had changed in the year since his return. Whole neighborhoods had emptied out, and residents noticed fewer drivers on the streets. In part because of the money from ICE, the Police Department had hired two additional officers. As a Mexican ballad played over the speakers, Alexander warned against making too much of the leniency he showed to families like Maria’s. “It’s like one free pass, I guess,” he said: If he encountered her husband again during a traffic stop, he would probably hand him over to ICE. He just thought letting the father-to-be go was the right call at the time. “I mean, don’t you?” he asked. He said he hadn’t made all that much money working with ICE. But city records show that his earnings from the agency already totaled $18,793.25 in nine months, more than a quarter of his base salary. “I think it’s skewed a little bit,” he said, looking at the pay stubs we had gathered. Alexander said it was hard for him to be out in public anymore. He can’t escape being recognized in Ingram and Kerrville. Sometimes he catches Latinos staring at him, then walking away, visibly uncomfortable. So he tries to do his shopping and errands in another town 30 minutes away. A driver passing one of the Ingram Police Department’s black Chargers along Junction Highway. He blamed the Facebook groups. They had created a climate of “unreasonable fear” in Ingram. “What do they think I’m going to do right now?” he asked, seated at his table in the taco shop. A steady stream of customers, many of them white, approached a counter staffed by two young Mexican sisters. He said their father used to hide out in Hunt to avoid being pulled over in town. Some of their co-workers had quit months before, too uncomfortable to serve Alexander when he came in for breakfast. But when the taco shop owner sees him, he said, she hugs him. “I know the status of everybody in this room,” he said. He suggested everyone who worked there was undocumented. Whether they disappeared or were allowed to stay was up to him. And today, at least, he was just there for breakfast. “They’re fine, right?”

Trump closed down the border — and ended it as a campaign issue

washingtonpost.comTrump closed down the border — and ended it as a campaign issueRIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — In 2022, when Claudia Alcazar served as the chairwoman of the Starr County Republican Party, the most successful Republican organizers were not the volunteers knocking on doors; they were the migrants knocking on windows. Alcazar lived on the southern edge of this border town, where homes back up into the tangle of mesquite and huisache that line the Rio Grande. Starting in 2021, thousands of migrants began emerging from this thorny brush, walking through the neighborhoods, asking people for water or directions. “I wanted it to stop,” Alcazar said. “I mean, I’m in America and I got people knocking on my windows — I don’t know where they’re from.” The chaos turned many along the border against the Biden administration. In 2016, Donald Trump only won 18.9 percent of the vote here in Starr County, which is 97.1 percent Latino. In 2024, Trump carried the county with 57.8 percent, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win in Starr County in over a century. This year, Republicans no longer benefit from migrants unwittingly turning out the vote for conservatives. In early 2025, when Trump reentered the White House, the border crossings stopped almost overnight, Alcazar said. “I was shocked; I honestly didn’t think that, down here, it would be that much of a difference,” she said. “But it really did. I barely had anyone coming across anymore.” That means that Republicans have lost one of their greatest advantages in the last election: the border is quiet, and the fear and insecurity people once felt in South Texas has dissipated. As crossings drop to record lows, the border has been neutralized as a political issue. While border security was a major priority for voters here in 2024, in the current midterms many locals say it no longer ranks as the top concern. Voters reason that Trump will still be president in 2027, no matter which party wins Congress, and so they expect the situation on the border to remain unchanged, at least for the next two years. A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that voters disapproved of Trump’s policy on immigration, and, for the first time in years, a greater percent of voters said they trusted Democrats to do a better job than Republicans handling immigration. State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a long-term Democratic legislator on the border, was deported to Mexico as a young child, when authorities under the Eisenhower administration arrested him along with his mother, dumping them across the border that same day. That gives Hinojosa, a native-born U.S. citizen, uncommon sympathy for migrants. Yet when it comes to the border, Hinojosa said that Biden failed. “Part of the reason that many Hispanics voted for Trump is that President Joe Biden really messed up on border security,” Hinojosa said. During the Biden years, Hinojosa warned other Democratic elected officials that communities on the border were overwhelmed — shelters and bus stations were overflowing with asylum seekers. “They were telling us, ‘Well, we want to be humanitarian,’” Hinojosa said. “I said, ‘Well, that’s fine. Nobody’s against being humanitarian. But everybody’s coming across the border, and we cannot even handle them here locally.’” Hinojosa credits Trump for stopping crossings. But he said that the president’s success on the border has now turned into a liability, as it dissolves as a consensus issue here. “You’ve got to give the Trump administration credit: he’s done a good job of shutting down the border,” Hinojosa said. “But he overreached.” Locals are no longer nervous about migrants arriving in their neighborhoods. Instead, they’re worried about U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement showing up. Earlier this year, Alcazar noticed a crew of construction workers fixing the roof of the house across the street from her, and she intended to ask them if they could do some work on her own home. A few days later, Alcazar walked outside and saw a phalanx of Border Patrol agents arresting the workers. “They picked up the whole crew. They had a helicopter and everything,” Alcazar said. “I’m like, these dudes were just fixing a roof. They weren’t bothering anybody.” In 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 2.2 million migrant encounters over the course of the year, a record high. In the 2025 financial year, that number dropped to 237,538, the lowest of any year since 1970. Yet even as crossings dropped, Border Patrol funding and hiring has surged, freeing up local agents to join ICE in arresting longer-term undocumented immigrants living across the borderlands. These arrests have led to painful worker shortages, turning some Trump-voting employers against the president. In the Rio Grande Valley, agents have mistakenly detained at least one U.S. citizen. Nationwide, that figure rises to more than 500, according to ProPublica. Alcazar said she’s no longer affiliating directly with the party. “Right now, I’m more in the middle; I can’t 100 percent support either party,” she said. That’s in part because she does not support how the president is carrying out his mass-deportation agenda. Other local Republicans also report feeling alienated. Over the last six years, Starr made national headlines as the county that shifted further right than anywhere else in the country. Today that momentum feels dulled. Alexis García, a middle school teacher from Rio Grande City, enthusiastically campaigned for Trump in 2024, in part because of the president’s promises to end illegal immigration. That year, García saw many of his friends and neighbors vote for Trump, believing that the president’s mass-deportation program would target criminals, as well as the recently arrived migrants filling the bus stations in South Texas. Now, the impact of the arrests has felt personal to many locals here. “When it actually happens to your cousin’s wife or your tío’s neighbor, it affects home, right? So a lot of people did not agree with that,” García said, using the Spanish word for uncle. García supported Trump’s border crackdown, and he’s seen it work. “The border has been the most secure it’s ever been. You don’t see mass groups of grown men crossing,” García said. He’s happy about that. But the reality of Trump’s new enforcement has unsettled García, as he sees it change the physical face of his home. When García drives along Highway 83, he can see miles and miles of border barriers going up, rusty bollards towering over the mesquite. “A lot of people weren’t happy, because now when they wake up in the morning, they see that rusty, ugly steel fence,” he said. He supports the wall, but he doesn’t like looking at it. “When they put it into words, into ideas, it sounds like, ‘Whoa, good idea,’” García said. “But when it’s actually put into place, it’s like, ‘Whoa. He got it done.’”

Five Things to Know About Audi’s First U.S. Factory

wsj.comFive Things to Know About Audi’s First U.S. Factory0:54President Trump said Audi’s factory will create about 4,500 jobs and produce 200,000 cars annually. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images Audi sells thousands of luxury cars in the U.S. without building a single one here. That is about to change. On Saturday evening, Audi Chief Executive Gernot Döllner joined President Trump on stage at a midterms rally in Georgia to announce Audi’s first-ever U.S. factory. The $4 billion project in Macon, Ga., is expected to create around 4,500 jobs. Here’s what Döllner had to say about Audi’s American plans in an interview Sunday. The plant will give Audi greater flexibility to navigate trade barriers like Trump’s tariffs, which clipped about 1.2 billion euros—or, $1.3 billion—from its profits last year. But Döllner said the new factory is also meant to fix Audi’s broader “structural competitive problem in America.” “The tariff situation was not the only issue,” he said. Local auto production has several advantages, including lower vehicle-transportation costs and the ability to better mitigate supply chain disruptions. Döllner said a plant in the U.S. could also help address complications from currency fluctuations. “It’s a long-term investment for decades, and will make Audi a different company in the future,” Döllner said. Audi officials declined to comment on whether the company would get tariff relief before the plant begins production in the early 2030s. German rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz, as well as Audi’s corporate cousin Volkswagen VOW3 -0.09%, have produced cars in the South for decades. Döllner confirmed that the plant will make Audi’s largest current SUVs: the Q7, Q8 and recently announced Q9. When automakers commit to U.S. production, they typically prioritize full-size SUVs, trucks, and premium vehicles that tend to be more profitable. Higher labor costs in the U.S. make smaller, budget-oriented vehicles far less profitable to build. The Georgia plant will focus on vehicles for the U.S. market, but will also make cars for export globally. It is expected to produce 200,000 cars annually. Audi recently unveiled its Q9 SUV, which was displayed Saturday outside President Trump’s political rally in Perry, Ga. Bo Erickson/Reuters Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen, is retrenching from its aggressive global electric-vehicle plans. While its EVs have taken off in several markets, adoption has been slower in the U.S., leading the company to cancel or delay several battery-powered models. Audi’s Macon plant will emphasize gas-powered vehicles, which the company says have more prominence in the U.S. Plug-in hybrids, which aren’t part of Audi’s current U.S. lineup, are also part of the plan, Döllner said. Hybrids have become more popular as gas prices have climbed. Eventually, the plant could also build other types of vehicles. “One of the main criteria in building that factory will be flexibility,” Döllner said. Audi began searching for a plant site almost three years ago, and evaluated more than 70 locations, Döllner said. Georgia was selected for reasons including energy supplies and proximity to Volkswagen’s supply-chain network across the South. The company considered integrating production with Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., as well as the planned Scout Motors plant in Blythewood, S.C. But it ultimately decided a new site best suited its long-term goals. Döllner was careful to note that “this is not a decision against Germany,” and won’t come at the expense of any German production. The Volkswagen group faces a massive labor and restructuring crisis in its home country as it seeks to cut 100,000 jobs and potentially close plants in Europe. Audi considered integrating production with Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., but ultimately decided against it. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images Vito Paladino, president of Audi of America, said the company had been working to finalize its plans on its own timeline before the White House invited it to announce the project at the Trump rally. “We were invited by the president of the United States. Of course, that’s an invitation that we respect,” he said.

Who are the leading candidates in Israel's election?

reuters.comWho are the leading candidates in Israel's election?JERUSALEM, October 26 - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long looked on course to lose power in Israel's election, but the race has narrowed as the vote approaches and his rivals have no clear path to power. Votes will be cast on Tuesday for parties, and seats in parliament will be allocated to individuals on party lists according to proportional representation. The Reuters Iran Briefing newsletter keeps you informed with the latest developments and analysis of the Iran war. Sign up here. Here are details of some of the leading candidates in Israel's first parliamentary election since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 that plunged the Middle East into turmoil, with Israel going to war in Lebanon and Gaza and launching airstrikes against Iran. In power for much of the time since 2009, after a first stint as prime minister in the 1990s, Netanyahu has become the face of Israel abroad and a polarising figure at home. Supporters hail Netanyahu as "King Bibi" and see him as the strong leader Israel needs to defend itself in a hostile region. But, wanted by the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes in Gaza which he rejects and on trial in Israel on corruption charges which he denies, he is fighting for his political life. Opinion polls have pointed to a sharp drop for his Likud party since the October 7 attack, which shattered Netanyahu's security credentials. His government's policies on matters of religion and state have also been unpopular among many Israelis. But Netanyahu, 77, is a consummate political survivor. He has said he wants to form a "broad national" government after the election, if he wins. In the event of a stalemate, he could remain a caretaker prime minister for many months. * Former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who lost a son in Gaza combat. Eisenkot, 66, has projected an image as a political outsider, soldier and security hawk whose humble background and family sacrifices stand in vivid contrast to Netanyahu's decades in high office and lingering corruption cases. He heads a new centrist party called Yashar, Hebrew for "straight" or "honest". * Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, 54, a right-wing former commando, former Netanyahu aide and high-tech millionaire who has joined forces with centrist former premier Yair Lapid. Their new party is called Together and its messages have focused on healing a traumatised nation and getting the country back on track. Their alliance, despite being on opposite ends of the political spectrum, ousted Netanyahu in a 2021 election. * Former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, 68, was once a close ally of Netanyahu. Even more hawkish than his former boss, Lieberman quit Netanyahu's government in 2018, accusing the prime minister of being too soft on Palestinian militants in Gaza, and has become one of Netanyahu's sharpest critics. His party, Israel Our Home, draws much of its support from the country's ex-Soviet immigrant community. * Former general Yair Golan, 64, hailed for his rescue of people from one of the Hamas October 7 attack sites, leads the Democrats, founded on the moribund remnants of Israel's historical Labour party and smaller left-wing Meretz. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, 46, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, 50, have both drawn intense international scrutiny for their far-right policies toward the Palestinians. Smotrich has spearheaded Israel's rapid expansion of West Bank settlements, voicing his hope that it would 'bury' the idea of a Palestinian state. Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in 2007 of racist incitement against Arabs, has promoted capital punishment for convicted Palestinian militants, toughened prison conditions for jailed Palestinians and easier gun ownership for Israelis. Both men have advocated for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and Israel resettling the enclave. Netanyahu has relied on two ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties, United Torah Judaism and Shas, for his political survival for years. Their demands for their community to be mostly exempt from compulsory military service, along with their low participation in the work force and reliance on state benefits, have angered many Israelis, all the more so at a time of war. Parties which are not clearly aligned with either side could tip the balance in favour of Netanyahu or his rivals. They include Raam and the Joint List, the two parties that represent Israel's 20% Arab minority. Along with them are a new right-wing party called People of Israel and a centre-right party called The Reservists, both of which have been wavering in opinion polls. Reporting by Maayan Lubell, Editing by Timothy Heritage Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Lula's Historic Comeback: How He Beat Bolsonaro, Won a Fourth Term, and Left Brazil's Right Scrambling | The Morning Sixpack - 10/26/2026: Lula's comeback, Anthropic's $80B loss, Machado's return, Israel's vote, Audi's U.S. plant, border politics #MorningSixpack

mydailygrind.newsLula's Historic Comeback: How He Beat Bolsonaro, Won a Fourth Term, and Left Brazil's Right ScramblingThe Morning Sixpack - 10/26/2026: Lula's comeback, Anthropic's $80B loss, Machado's return, Israel's vote, Audi's U.S. plant, border politics #MorningSixpack

Venezuela's opposition leader María Corina Machado returns after months in exile

npr.orgVenezuela's opposition leader María Corina Machado returns after months in exileVenezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado has returned to Venezuela after ten months abroad, announcing her arrival in a social media post. In a post on X, Machado declared: "I'm here, with you all." Machado made her first public appearance among worshippers at the Church of Santa Rosa in Lara state, western Venezuela, where she was quickly surrounded by an ecstatic congregation. She then travelled on to Caracas, where hundreds of cheering supporters swarmed her car. "Here" she tweeted, when she arrived in the capital. Her return poses a challenge to interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who took over after U.S. forces captured former leader Nicolás Maduro in January. The Trump administration has repeatedly sidelined Machado, despite her prominence in the opposition. She has called for elections to be held soon, but Washington says Venezuela must first stabilize. In January 2025, Machado went into hiding in Venezuela after being briefly detained following a protest. Later that year, she left the country in a clandestine escape, and reappeared in December in Norway, where she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful challenge to Maduro's authoritarian government. Opposition figure Edmundo González, who ran against Maduro in the disputed 2024 presidential election, confirmed Machado's return in a post on X, describing it as "a very important day for Venezuelans." He wrote: "Our sovereign voice returns with her to lead and guide this process." González Urrutia, who is currently in exile in Spain, also said he expected to join Machado soon so the country could "truly advance towards freedom," concluding: "You know it, this is until the end." Speaking to reporters as he left the White House on Sunday afternoon, President Trump said he knew nothing about Machado's return, describing her as "a very nice woman" and adding that she had given him her Nobel Prize. "And I hope she's safe," he said, adding that "we're doing really well in Venezuela." Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a statement claiming that Machado's return was a "direct result" of U.S. supported reconciliation talks. "The United States expects the freedoms of all sectors of Venezuelan politics to continue to be respected," he wrote. "Likewise, we expect all political actors to support these talks which represent the best chance Venezuela has had in thirty years to peacefully achieve not just a free and fair election but an enduring democracy."

Anthropic reveals $80 billion loss, surging revenue as it prepares to go public

washingtonpost.comAnthropic reveals $80 billion loss, surging revenue as it prepares to go publicSAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic publicly disclosed its financials for the first time, revealing staggering losses and rapidly growing revenue as it seeks to list on the stock market in what could be the largest-ever initial public offering.Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI. Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, lost $80 billion in the first half of 2026 as it poured its investment funding into training new AI models and securing access to data centers to run its chatbot and the coding agents it sells to businesses. The start-up’s revenue also grew at a staggering pace, from $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025 to $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, the company said in a Monday filing. Anthropic and its rival OpenAI are among the fastest-growing businesses in history and have rocketed from small research-focused start-ups to being valued among the world’s largest companies in just a few years. Both have received hundreds of billions of dollars of investment funding. And both have confidentially filed to go public, in part to raise the capital needed to continue their quest to build superintelligent AI that company leaders say will upend the economy, accelerate scientific progress and improve life for people around the world. But not everyone is convinced. Some financial analysts have questioned the companies’ abilities to ever become profitable, given the huge costs involved in training AI and the close competition from open-weights AI models, which are nearly as capable as the high-end AI from Anthropic and OpenAI but are much cheaper to operate. Anthropic’s public offering is seen as a bellwether for the entire AI industry and the immense bet laid by investors and major tech firms that the technology can be highly profitable. If Anthropic’s valuation continues to climb, other companies including OpenAI probably will seek to go public soon as well. If the offering is met with a muted response, OpenAI and others probably would wait, and investors could reevaluate their view of other AI-related stocks.

How did Lula beat Bolsonaro after losing Brazil’s first-round election?

aljazeera.comHow did Lula beat Bolsonaro after losing Brazil’s first-round election?Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has achieved a stunning election victory, defeating far-right rival Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, despite trailing him by more than two million votes in the first round held earlier in October. The 80-year-old leftist secured an unprecedented fourth term on Sunday, becoming the first candidate since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 to win a presidential run-off after finishing second in the opening round.list of 3 itemsend of list “I just had to tell you that I love you. Tomorrow, the fight continues,” Lula told cheering fans at a victory parade in Sao Paulo. “No one is required to like the president-elect, but he must govern for everyone.” Lula’s victory is a significant setback for the right-wing political movement that has gained ground across Latin America, often with the backing of United States President Donald Trump. So how did Lula turn things around in just three weeks, and what challenges does he face?What was the result? Lula, who turns 81 on Tuesday, secured 51.79 percent of valid votes, or 64.26 million ballots, compared with Bolsonaro’s 48.21 percent, or 59.83 million votes, according to the final tally. The result marked a dramatic reversal from the October 4 first round, when Bolsonaro won 47.03 percent against Lula’s 45.16 percent, a lead of approximately 2.2 million votes. Turnout on Sunday was 80.8 percent, nearly 2 percent higher than the previous round, when 78.92 percent of the electorate cast their votes.Supporters of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil celebrate with ‘L’ hand gestures in his honour in Sao Paulo, Brazil [Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images] Bolsonaro refused to concede and called for the run-off result to be annulled after Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered voting to be extended by two hours. Both candidates had requested extensions, citing transport disruptions and severe weather. The controversy echoes the aftermath of the 2022 election, when Flavio’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, refused to accept his defeat. He was subsequently convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to 27 years in prison, which he is serving under house arrest.Get instant alerts and updates based on your interests. Be the first to know when big stories happen. However, experts say Flavio faces significant obstacles in overturning the result. Vinicius G. Rodrigues Vieira, an economics and international relations professor at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation, told Al Jazeera that Bolsonaro’s legal arguments were weak, particularly because his own campaign had requested an extension. “I don’t think that will resonate in the courts, but certainly will help Bolsonarismo, the far-right movement here in Brazil, to remain politically strong on the streets,” he said.How did Lula turn things around? Lula’s comeback was driven by a revitalised grassroots campaign, youth mobilisation and a shift towards digital campaigning, analysts said. Al Jazeera correspondent Monica Yanakiew, reporting from Sao Paulo, said young Brazilians spontaneously organised online after Bolsonaro’s first-round victory, creating what became known as “Lula’s army”. “It was this army that went to the streets, millions of people across Brazil, and young people just mobilised themselves, energised the campaign, which frankly was not very energised at all before the first round,” she said. Editor-in-chief of The Brazilian Report, Gustavo Ribeiro, told Al Jazeera that Lula’s campaign had initially appeared complacent. “Lula’s campaign also got its act together after a first round in which it acted as if this election was in the bag and essentially running an anachronistic, mostly offline campaign,” he said. “The campaign really pivoted towards a digital mentality and a grassroots effort,” Ribeiro said, adding that Lula had used “the power of incumbency very cleverly in his favour”. “I would say this is more the merit of Lula, even if Bolsonaro just worked to run off the clock.” Other experts agreed, saying Bolsonaro’s own mistakes were likely to have contributed to his defeat. Academic Vieira argued that the senator had become overconfident after winning the first round. “In the first week, he was already behaving as if he were already the president-elect. He was appointing ministers,” the economics professor pointed out. “If there is something Brazilian people don’t like [it’s] arrogance, so Mr. Flavio is paying a very high price for this,” he added. The Brazilian Report’s Ribeiro also questioned Bolsonaro’s political appeal. “He does not have his father’s charisma. He was essentially running on his father’s last name,” he said. Higher turnout was another important factor. An estimated 33.4 million Brazilians abstained in the first round, representing about 21 percent of the electorate. Abstention fell to approximately 19 percent in the run-off. Fernando Brancoli, an international relations professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said previously absent voters appeared to have participated in the second round.Lula secured 51.79 percent of the votes, while Flavio Bolsonaro took 48.21 percent [Rodrigo Paiva/Getty Images] “We already know that a large number of people who didn’t vote [in] the first round, they now showed up,” he told Al Jazeera. Brancoli also suggested some first-round Bolsonaro voters may have switched to Lula, although detailed voting patterns remain unclear. According to Vieira, the election was arguably one of the most consequential in Brazil’s history. After the 21-year dictatorship ended in 1985, he said Brazil built a “constitutional setting” which provided social rights to the population more than at any time in the South American nation’s history. “That’s so important for the Brazilian people because we still have high levels of inequality,” he said, noting that it was crucial to “keep a very high degree of political participation”. In contrast, the far-right Bolsonarismo movement had tried to “curtail voting rights” by employing “voting suppression tactics”, Vieira said.What challenges does Lula face? Despite his victory, Lula faces a conservative-dominated Congress that could severely restrict his legislative agenda. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party and its allies could control more than 280 seats out of 513 in the lower house, and up to 50 out of a total of 81 Senate seats, potentially giving the opposition majorities in both chambers. Brancoli warned that Lula would have limited room to manoeuvre. “We can definitely expect Lula’s government [is] not going to be able to push for a broad agenda. You’ll get small wins, and you’ll have to negotiate with those groups,” he said. Economic pressures pose another considerable challenge. Brazil’s public debt has exceeded 82 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to the World Bank, while the government forecasts growth of just 2.3 percent next year. Moreover, Brancoli asserted that Lula would also need to address security and household debt, two issues that helped make the election competitive. The president’s age raises further questions about the future of his Workers’ Party (PT), and who would replace the longtime leader, Brancoli noted. “There’s no one that could substitute him, and he’s older,” he said.

Breaking: An Epstein Story You Missed, and Our Midterm Predictions

rawamerica.comBreaking: An Epstein Story You Missed, and Our Midterm PredictionsHey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and — well — things are looking good. First, thank you to our paying subscribers. This was a huge week for Raw America. Our push to reach 10,000 paying subscribers before Election Day is working. Hundreds of you stepped up in the last seven days alone. Your investment keeps our reporter on Capitol Hill, Brian Karem outside the White House, and lets us publish without a billionaire looking over our shoulder. If you’re not yet a paying subscriber, make today the day. Annual subscriptions are 20 percent off for just a few more days — only until Election Day. That’s just 17 cents a day to support critical independent journalism. We’re beating back the billionaires, but we can only do it with your help. Step up to keep Raw America free Now, the map. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. Democrats must win back four. A month ago, that looked dubious. This weekend, prediction markets give Democrats roughly a two-in-three shot at the chamber — Kalshi in the mid-60s, Polymarket at 67 percent. (Kalshi is one of our sponsors.) Political modelers are more cautious. Decision Desk HQ puts the odds at 56 percent and projects Democrats will win 51 seats. But every serious forecaster now has Democrats favored. Here’s the Senate breakdown, for the races that matter. James Talarico has led most October polls. CBS has him up 51-49%, Houston’s Hobby School 48-46, UT 50-47, and Emerson 48-46. Fox has them tied at 49%, Rasmussen tied at 45, and InsiderAdvantage has Paxton up one. Paxton’s favorability is 17% underwater; Talarico is winning independents in polling nearly two to one. Harris County broke its early-voting record every day this week — more than half a million votes, the fastest midterm start on record. Kalshi puts a Talarico win at 63%. But no Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994. Democrat Mary Peltola has led Republican Dan Sullivan in nearly every poll since late September: PPP 48-47%, Rasmussen 44-42, and New York Times/Siena at 50-43. Betting market Kalshi has a Peltola win at around 74%. Forecasters recently moved the race to Leans Democratic. Here’s what shows Republicans are running scared: Trump’s Justice Department sued Thursday to block certification of the results if Peltola wins, blaming a second “Dan Sullivan” on the ballot. Trump says he personally ordered it. They’re drafting the excuse before the votes are counted. Probably the closest race is Maine. Troy Jackson, the logger who replaced Graham Platner, is running slightly ahead of Susan Collins, but by less than Collins’ challenger led before Collins won in 2020. The Washington Post has him up 50-46%, Suffolk 49-47, and InsiderAdvantage by two. Fox News calls it a 49-49 tie. The Times/Siena poll had Collins ahead 49-46 — her only lead since late September. Kalshi now prices Jackson in the mid-60s after a seven-point jump last week. Collins has beaten the polls before, and the Times/Siena poll is considered the gold standard. Former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown leads appointed Senator Jon Husted 52-47% in Fox News’ most recent poll. Brown is up 48-44% in Marist, and 49-43 in CNN’s. Two Republican-friendly pollsters show Husted up by a hair. Kalshi gives Brown about 67 percent odds to win. This is impressive: Trump carried Ohio by 11 points just two years ago. That’s how badly Trump is dragging down the GOP. Abdul El-Sayed is looking strong. Recent polling averages give him a steady two-point edge over Republican Mike Rogers. Kalshi puts his victory odds at 69 percent. This is a seat we have to keep. Excited for the election? So are we. But we need your help to get us across the finish line and hit 10,000 paying subscribers. To make it easy, we’re offering full-year subscriptions for 20% off. That’s just 17 cents a day. Will you step up and join today? Join today for 20% off In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek and Republican Ashley Hinson are separated by about a point, the newest polls tilting toward Hinson. Markets put Hinson in the high 50s, but the early vote is now 18 points more Democratic than 2024. In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton is within a point of Republican Roger Marshall, the obstetrician who sued his own patients. Markets predict a Marshall win at about 60 percent. A Democratic win would be huge: Kansas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. The truth is we don’t need either state to take the Senate, but the fact they’re close reveals how unpopular Trump is. Two races in the South where Democrats have typically struggled look nearly certain; in both Georgia and North Carolina, prediction markets have Democrats as overwhelming favorites. Dem Roy Cooper leads Republican Michael Whatley by 13% in Elon’s final poll. Jon Ossoff, once the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate, leads Mike Collins by eight in polling conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Georgia shattered its day-one early-voting record with 188,000 votes. Want to know what this all means? If we keep Georgia and Michigan, flip North Carolina, and take three of Texas, Alaska, Maine or Ohio, we control the chamber. 51 is a majority. Kansas and Iowa would be gravy. To win the House, Democrats need to pick up three to five seats. Decision Desk HQ gives us an 80 percent chance and projects 237 Democratic victories. Poliwave gives us 88 percent and projects 231, with a range of 216 to 248. Markets favor Democrats by better than 90 percent. My read: a Democratic House is close to certain. Democrats will likely win 231 to 237 seats, with a floor in the low 220s. They need 218. Before I go, I want to update you on one crucial story everyone missed this week. Remember the July 2025 memo where Trump’s Justice Department declared there was no Epstein client list, no co-conspirators worth investigating, and nothing else to release? Raw Story’s Jordan Green just obtained FBI emails showing the White House helped write it. Two weeks before the memo dropped, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich emailed FBI Director Kash Patel. “Have something I can edit?” he asked. Patel sent over the draft, and Budowich came back with “some suggested edits.” The FBI then redacted them before releasing the emails. And when Trump AG Todd Blanche tried to send a “final version” with no letterhead, Budowich snapped: “Someone needs to own this. I can’t give a doc to a reporter that could easily be confused with a high school term paper.” The memo clearing Trump was forced onto DOJ letterhead by a White House political operative shopping it to a reporter. The Justice Department didn’t want its name on it. The emails surfaced because Democracy Defenders Fund sued under FOIA. Rep. Madeleine Dean told Raw Story she was “alarmed but not surprised.” The White House regurgitated its old chestnut that Trump has been “totally exonerated” — a word no court has ever used. Also this week, a TMZ documentary aired a former cellmate’s account of Epstein bragging about flying “me and Donald and a French girl” to Miami. Trump swears he was never on Epstein’s plane, but the DOJ’s own records list him on at least eight flights. This is why Raw America exists. The Times had the memo and left Trump’s top aide out of it. We didn’t. A 66 percent chance of victory means Republicans keep the Senate one time in three. Odds aren’t results. That’s why they’re called odds. Collins has beaten her polls before, and Texas has crushed Democratic dreams (and pocketbooks) for thirty years. Quick message before we go. We’re running out of October and we are well behind our paid subscriber goal for the month, which matters more than usual right now because Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution and Elon Musk’s X is doing the same thing on his side. Meta made that choice after we called Mark Zuckerberg out for cozying up to this president, and Musk is squeezing us while pouring money into Republican campaigns, so the only reliable way this reporting reaches you is the one they cannot touch, which is your inbox. A paid subscription runs 17 cents a day, less than a dollar and change each week — and it funds a newsroom that answers to readers instead of owners. So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With two of the biggest platforms in the country working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they cannot silence. Join us here: Subscribe today Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. I’ll see you next week. —John Byrne, Founder, Raw America & Raw Story

JD Vance says he hasn’t seen evidence Trump is enriching himself. I brought receipts.

chrismurphyct.comJD Vance says he hasn’t seen evidence Trump is enriching himself. I brought receipts.JD Vance says he hasn’t seen “a single shred of evidence” that Donald Trump is enriching himself in office. Yes, he just said that. Really? Let me help him out. I wrote out some of Trump’s top enrichment schemes below in the 15 minutes before my son’s hockey practice ended. First, the stock trades. Trump has made tens of thousands of stock trades, including trades that have raised serious questions about whether he’s profiting from information available to him as president. Take Nvidia: Trump disclosed up to $1.6 million in stock purchases in August, just before announcing a policy change that stood to benefit the company’s stock price. This is a major conflict of interest. We can’t just shrug it off. Read more. Then there’s crypto. Trump has made over $1.4 billion from his crypto ventures. His family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, depends heavily on Binance, another crypto company whose founder, Changpeng Zhao, pled guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws and went to prison. Trump gave Zhao a presidential pardon as Zhao’s company helped Trump amass his crypto fortune. JD, you really haven’t seen anything concerning there? Read more. How about suspicious bets on the Iran war? Just 15 minutes before Trump announced a major reversal in Iran policy, billions of dollars in oil-related contracts were placed in a way that stood to profit from falling prices. Federal regulators reportedly began looking into the trades, only for the investigation to hit resistance. Read more If someone had advance knowledge of a major presidential announcement, they could make a fortune. We deserve to know whether that happened here. Or the family business. Trump’s sons have pursued a mining deal in Kazakhstan, and the administration subsequently approved $1.6 billion in taxpayer-backed financing tied to the project. That is an extraordinary amount of public money flowing into a deal that could benefit the president’s own family. This isn’t some minor ethics question. It’s a fundamental question about whether the presidency is being used to serve the public or enrich one family. Read more. And then there’s the merchandise. Trump’s political products have reportedly been sold on military bases, turning spaces meant to serve our troops into another opportunity to promote his personal brand. Read more. JD, military bases? Really? These are just a few examples. We haven’t even gotten into the broader web of business interests, political favors, and conflicts of interest surrounding this administration. Here’s the thing: I understand why JD Vance doesn’t want to talk about any of this. His job is to defend Donald Trump, even when that means asking Americans to ignore what’s right in front of them. But Americans aren’t buying it. Two-thirds of voters now say Trump is enriching himself in office. And corruption is emerging as a major issue for voters heading into the midterms. People work hard, pay their taxes, and expect their government to work for them. They don’t expect a president to use the most powerful office in the world to pad his own bank account. JD Vance can keep pretending he hasn’t seen the evidence. The rest of us aren’t going to look away. Voters are going to remember this and those who enabled him when they go to vote this election.

Trump Thirsts Over Male Bodies at Florida Rally

archive.phTrump Thirsts Over Male Bodies at Florida RallyThe 80-year-old president was giddy about the male physique at his latest rally. Your browser does not support HTML5 video. Trump Thirsts Over RFK Jr.’s Body By Erkki ForsterPublished Oct 24, 2026 10:43AM EDT President Donald Trump found himself repeatedly distracted by male bodies at his latest rally, turning it into a bizarre appreciation session for the male form. Trump’s fascination with the male physique has become a running joke, drawing ridicule from late-night hosts and even on Fox News shows. Yet the 80-year-old president was back to serving up more muscle commentary Friday at his rally in Fort Myers, Florida. Trump’s first object of affection was Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom he welcomed onstage with the eyebrow-raising admission that he had “watched him for half an hour on the plane.” The president’s obsession with MAGA men’s bodies has drawn widespread mockery. Kennedy stuck to his MAHA talking points in his remarks, only for Trump to take the mic back and promptly gush over the 72-year-old health secretary’s body. “Thank you, Bobby. By the way, seriously, did anybody ever see the build? The body on Bob—did anybody ever see?” Trump swooned. “He’s got the body, he’s got the body of a 30-year-old.” “He’s—” the president began, before seemingly catching himself and pivoting. “But he has done an amazing job. He’s actually just like an amazing guy. Think of it, think of it. He’s a Republican, and he’s the most important Kennedy in the Kennedy family by far,” he marveled. Earlier this year, Kennedy posted a bizarre video of him working out topless alongside 55-year-old Kid Rock in bid to promote the Make America Healthy Again agenda.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on X Less than 10 minutes passed before Trump found more men to thirst over, this time while recounting conversations with generals about the $1,776 “warrior dividend” checks sent to U.S. service members last year. “And they came in, these three guys came in, handsome, big, strong guys, four stars, four stars, and three stars,” Trump recalled, gesturing animatedly as he reeled off the generals’ physical attributes. “‘Sir, I think we can do $1,775.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, $1,775? You mean if I add $1, it’s $1,776?’ That’s an important name. Important term, $1,776.” “These guys were so good-looking. I wanted to go out immediately and make a movie because now I have my secretary of the treasury, and I have my generals all proud,” he added, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Trump Gushes Over ‘So Good-Looking’ GeneralsThe president’s Florida thirst fest is the latest installment in a growing saga of his MAGA man-crushes. He previously thirsted after Ohio GOP Sen. Jon Husted’s physique in vulgar terms during an Oct. 17 rally in Kentucky and then again at a North Carolina rally on Tuesday. “I’m studying his body,” Trump, 80, told the North Carolina crowd. “I’ve never studied the body of a man before; it’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course... But I looked at his a--, and then I looked at his legs... and I said his ass, it’s like a pile of muscle.” The president’s fixation on the MAGA beefcake has drawn widespread mockery, with The Daily Show’s Michael Kosta, who called him “horny,” and frustration from Republicans who wish he would stay on message. Calling the president’s obsession with Husted’s rear “just weird,” Republican political consultant Karl Rove told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade on Friday, “He goes off and starts talking about the posterior of Sen. Jon Husted, and I’m thinking, what kind of a message is that?” Unlock a year of full access to The Daily Beast for $35. 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Trump says he doesn't 'give a damn' about gas prices as US making 'fortune'

newsweek.comTrump says he doesn't 'give a damn' about gas prices as US making 'fortune'President Donald Trump has said he does not "give a damn" about potential criticism of his remarks boasting that the United States is making a "fortune" from high oil prices, as American motorists continue to face elevated gasoline costs. Speaking at a rally in Georgia on Saturday, October 24, Trump said advisers had warned him against highlighting the financial gains associated with rising oil prices, suggesting the comments would invite criticism over the cost of fuel for ordinary Americans. In footage of the rally shared online, Trump claimed the US oil and gas industry was making billions of dollars amid the conflict in the Middle East, presenting higher oil prices as a source of financial gains for the country.President Donald Trump speaks during a midterm campaign rally at the Guardian Centers on October 24, 2026 in Perry, Georgia. | Alex Wong "Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what's happened in the Middle East, because they're coming to Texas and they're coming to Oklahoma and they're coming to Louisiana and they're taking that oil," Trump said. "My people say, please don't mention that, Sir, people are paying a little higher," Trump said, adding that he expected gas prices to fall. "I can just see the fake headlines," Trump said. "President Trump is talking about all the money they're making while people are suffering at the pump." "But I said, ‘I don't give a damn, I'm gonna say it: We're making a frickin fortune,’" he added. Trump went on to claim that Americans were "paying lower than Biden and Obama and they don't have nuclear weapons," apparently referring to Iran's nuclear capabilities. Under Obama, the U.S. national average gas price peaked at $3.93 per gallon in May 2011, and under Biden, it peaked at $5.06 in June 2022, according to govargus.com. There has been widespread backlash to Trump's comments online. California Governor Gavin Newsom reposted footage of Trump's remarks at the rally commenting: "Congratulations to Big Oil on their very successful, record-profits presidency." Newsweek contacted the White House via email Sunday for comment. The national average price of regular gasoline stood at approximately $4.29 per gallon on October 25, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). That was down from approximately $4.49 a month earlier but significantly higher than the $3.06 average recorded a year ago. The latest figures represent an increase of around $1.23 per gallon over 12 months, equivalent to roughly 40 percent. AAA's reported national averages for other fuel types were approximately $4.80 per gallon for midgrade gasoline, $5.20 for premium and $6.35 for diesel. Prices vary considerably across the country, with motorists in some states paying substantially more than the national average. The figures also illustrate the distinction between the financial benefits Trump attributes to the energy sector and the costs facing households at the pump. Although gas prices had eased from their September levels, the year-over-year increase meant drivers were still paying considerably more to fill their tanks than they had a year earlier. Trump has repeatedly pointed to the potential financial benefits of higher oil prices for American energy producers and oil-producing states. But higher crude oil prices can also put pressure on consumers by increasing the cost of gasoline, diesel and transportation. The extent to which domestic producers benefit depends on factors including production costs, market prices and the wider economic effects of more expensive energy. There have been numerous protests across the country protesting the Iran war and its impact on gas prices.Signs protesting the Iran war and its impact on gas prices are seen during a protest organized by VoteVets outside of the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2026... | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images As previously reported by Newsweek, nearly three-quarters of likely voters disapprove of how President Trump has handled gas prices, with the midterm elections days away and his overall approval rating at the lowest point of his second term. A New York Times/Siena poll found that 73 percent of likely voters disapprove of Trump's handling of gas prices, compared with 24 percent who approve. The poll surveyed 3,494 voters, October 12-19. No issue in the poll scored worse for the president, and the frustration runs well past Democrats: 77 percent of independents disapprove, along with 42 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of people who voted for him in 2024. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren posted on X on Friday: "I'd like to report a fraudster in the Oval Office. Trump promised to lower costs on Day 1. But instead he launched a war that increased the prices of everything from gas to groceries." Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Robinson and Trevor DaviesEnjoy ad-free access to our largest-ever collection of member exclusives & much more. Auto-renews at just $49.

Trump’s DOJ told a judge how to rule. Then it pulled her from court.

washingtonpost.comTrump’s DOJ told a judge how to rule. Then it pulled her from court.THE JUDGE HAD JUST CALLED COURT TO ORDER on that winter morning, and already, a dozen attorneys waited on her TV screen, each with an urgent request. Their clients, all locked up and facing deportation, needed hearing dates scheduled or bond requests considered. As always, the judge had prepared for every case days earlier, because almost nothing happened in Courtroom 15 that she didn’t anticipate. Then the door behind her swung open, thudding against the wall. In walked her supervisor. “Are you on the record?” he asked, questioning whether she was in session. Karen Donoso Stevens was in session, and she was certain he knew it. The judge held up a finger — wait — as she announced a recess inside the Annandale Immigration Court. A Homeland Security attorney at the prosecution table watched in silence, as did her legal assistant. She drew a long breath, then stood in the black robe she’d worn for nearly a decade, its cloth fraying at the elbow. Here we go, the judge thought, certain she was about to be fired. In the hallway, she recalled, her supervisor said he’d been instructed to pull her from court. “I don’t know,” he replied. It was Jan. 14, one year into the most tumultuous period in the U.S. immigration court’s history. President Donald Trump had inherited what was widely seen as a broken system. Exacerbated by an influx of migrants under President Joe Biden, its backlog exceeded 4 million unresolved cases, and Trump’s administration had vowed to address it. The public broadly supported tighter border security before his election, though the aggressive crackdown that followed alienated many voters, recent polls show. As the administration stripped protections from asylum seekers and dispatched thousands of ICE agents onto American streets, leading to more detentions and deportations, two U.S. citizens were killed by federal officers in Minneapolis, igniting a backlash. The sprawling system doesn’t operate like most courts. It exists within the Justice Department, which is overseen by the attorney general and, ultimately, the president. Nevertheless, it is obligated to afford migrants due process and manage cases according to the law, nothing else. And yet, in the first year of Trump’s second term, the Justice Department fired some 100 of the country’s roughly 700 immigration judges and began to replace them with what the administration called “deportation judges.” Donoso Stevens, 53, should have been insulated from the institutional chaos, according to fellow judges and attorneys whose cases she oversaw. Before joining the bench in 2016, she’d spent a decade at Homeland Security, earning a reputation as a formidable prosecutor. She was Annandale’s most tenured “detained judge,” one of three who decided what to do with migrants in custody, the court’s highest-stakes cases. Every year, Donoso Stevens had denied asylum in more than half the applications that came before her, a record consistently in line with national averages. She hadn’t resisted case quotas imposed by the first Trump administration and seldom took sick leave. She never fell behind on her docket. But on that morning in Northern Virginia, she feared none of it mattered. By then, Donoso Stevens said, another supervisor had already ordered her to reverse four rulings at the direction of unidentified “higher-ups,” a violation of judicial authority she once considered inconceivable. The interference, she said, had only escalated since. The allegations, which she’s sharing publicly for the first time because of her deep concern for the court’s integrity, were corroborated by her extensive contemporaneous notes as well as colleagues, family and private attorneys interviewed by The Washington Post. They contradict Trump officials’ insistence to the public and to The Post that — as required by law — immigration judges serve under the administration as independent arbiters of justice. Outside her courtroom, Donoso Stevens tried to make sense of what was happening. She would remain on the bench but no longer oversee cases for migrants in detention, she was told by Robert K. Lundberg, Annandale’s acting assistant chief immigration judge, a largely administrative role he’d been moved into a week earlier. Donoso Stevens asked if she could finish the hearing. He said no, she recalled: “You’re not allowed to go back and say what happened.” The judge returned to court and turned on her camera. “I’ve been told I’m no longer able to finish these hearings,” she said, her voice quavering. On the video call, she heard attorneys gasp. Then the judge walked out. Word spread through the legal community within minutes. Many assumed she’d been fired. Back in the hallway, Donoso Stevens saw Lundberg escorting her replacement, a man she’d trained and mentored, toward her courtroom. He immediately took over her docket, including a prominent case that legal experts had said could set a precedent with sweeping consequences for tens of thousands of Afghans seeking refuge in the United States. Donoso Stevens returned to her office and removed her robe. She wept. In the hours that followed, colleagues and friends tried to console her. At least, they said, she still had a job. But the judge, who so often preached that her only duty was to follow the law, asked herself: What would she have to do to keep it? DONOSO STEVENS BEGAN TO WORRY, she said, on the 26th day of Trump’s second term. She was in the car with her husband, headed home from a Valentine’s Day dinner, when her phone buzzed, then kept buzzing. “No way,” Donoso Stevens blurted as she read the texts. Her supervisor, Rebecca Walters, had been fired, one of seven assistant chief immigration judges dismissed that day. Appointed under Biden, Walters was credited with dramatically improving Annandale’s case-completion numbers, an achievement that colleagues hoped would ingratiate her with a Trump administration that had imposed quotas during his first term. Dozens of other terminations soon followed, spotlighting what many legal experts have called a systemic flaw in the court system: Unlike federal judges protected from political retaliation by lifetime tenures and the constitutional separation of powers, immigration judges work for the executive branch. No administration had ever carried out a purge at this scale. Trump officials asserted they had every right to banish, as the White House put it, “activist judges who slow-walked deportations and granted asylum at sky-high rates.” But even as the expulsions instilled what surviving judges in private conversation began to call a “culture of intimidation,” the Justice Department insisted it would not interfere with their rulings. “They are required to adjudicate cases independently and impartially without favor to either party,” Sirce E. Owen, appointed under Trump as acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, wrote in a memo last summer. Owen declared that no one in the executive office, the agency that oversees the entire immigration court system, can “direct any adjudicator to rule in a particular way” before appeals are settled. Donoso Stevens wanted that to be true, because the institution had become central to her identity. She’d endured a two-year application process before being appointed to the bench a decade earlier by Democratic Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch. The job was the zenith of her career and, she thought, its destination. She found purpose in studying the law and applying it, even if that meant ordering the deportation of people whose pleas for sanctuary devastated her. She’d believed in the sanctity of America’s legal system since well before she swore an oath to the Constitution. Donoso Stevens decided to become an attorney when she read “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a high school junior. The ideals of truth and justice appealed to her, as did getting paid to persuade people she was right. The middle child of Ecuadorian immigrants in the Chicago suburbs, she’d always served as her siblings’ advocate, negotiating punishments and bedtimes. When she turned 17, her dad ordered a vanity plate for the pickup they shared: “2 B LWYR.” She met her eventual husband, Damon Stevens, when they competed against each other in moot court at Michigan State University College of Law. She won. “She’s got an edge,” he said, recalling how her diminutive stature, at 5-foot-3, could mislead. “If you’re opposing her, she’s not a wallflower.” After graduation, Donoso Stevens prosecuted misdemeanor assaults and DUIs in a Chicago criminal court until she followed her husband to California, where he’d been stationed as a judge advocate in the Marine Corps. Amid cross-country moves, she had two kids and worked at a nonprofit to help children who’d arrived in the U.S. without their parents. In 2007, she joined Homeland Security as a prosecutor. “I remember how proud I was to be a federal employee,” said Donoso Stevens, whose parents had instilled a deep allegiance to the country that gave them citizenship. “I never saw myself doing the law for money.” She was especially tenacious in trying to deport immigrants accused of domestic violence or harming kids, according to defense lawyers, who noted they never found her unreasonable. “She was agreeable when there was room to agree,” said Anam Petit, then a private attorney who later served as a judge before being fired without cause last year. “She was always thoughtful.” In liberal Washington, Donoso Stevens knew that many people considered her job distasteful because it often meant fighting to deny immigrants a home in the United States. Weary of being asked how she could sleep at night, she stopped revealing what she did for a living. “I work for the government,” she’d say, and nothing more. Back then, she said, Homeland Security attorneys weren’t evaluated on wins and losses. If immigrants proved they deserved asylum, she didn’t fight them. Ricky Malik once represented an attorney from El Salvador whose family had been terrorized after the woman investigated gang members. In court, Donoso Stevens confirmed the story, then told the judge that Homeland Security did not oppose her application. “Justice, that was her main goal,” Malik said. “Not just, ‘I’m going to win every case, and I’m going to have a body count.’” Still, when she was appointed to the bench, at the time an uncommon transition for a Homeland Security attorney, Malik and other defense lawyers protested. How, they asked, could she rule with impartiality when former colleagues sat at the prosecution table? “This is unfair,” he said, before she began overseeing his cases. As the years passed, Malik said, he found in her what he wanted most from every judge: She followed the law. HOW TO FOLLOW THE LAW got more complicated on a Friday afternoon in September 2025. In a 14-page ruling, the Board of Immigration Appeals, stocked with members appointed under Trump, stripped judges of a power they had exercised for decades. Undocumented immigrants who weren’t apprehended until after they entered the country had long been allowed to request bond, leaving judges to decide whether it was safe to release them as their cases proceeded. Suddenly, the board decided that anyone who came unlawfully should remain jailed, even those with clean records and family ties. Donoso Stevens disagreed with the board’s legal interpretation, but her view, she said, made no difference. She treated its decisions as the mandates they are. Still, she and other judges quickly spotted a potentially critical omission: The opinion failed to account for children who came to the United States without a parent or guardian and had since reached adulthood, a group that, in their view, fell under distinct legal guidelines. Less than two weeks later, four such people asked Donoso Stevens to release them. She studied the law and consulted with colleagues, then decided the immigrants were eligible. She granted bonds. On Sept. 17, Annandale’s then-acting assistant chief, Eric Dillow, called her. “Dillow ... said bond is a hot topic. Wanted to discuss bond decisions,” Donoso Stevens jotted in a green steno pad reviewed by The Post. He told her he knew about the four cases and had just emailed her a separate ruling that, he believed, meant she could have denied bond. When Donoso Stevens pressed him, she said, Dillow acknowledged the four cases had been “elevated” to him. He didn’t say by whom, and she neglected to ask. Nevertheless, it was a stunning disclosure. As far as she knew, none of her rulings had ever been reported to a supervisor. She hung up and read the ruling Dillow had sent, then he called back. From her office, Donoso Stevens told him she could see the merits of the argument, even though it came from a federal court in New York that couldn’t require her or any other immigration judge in Virginia to follow it. “What should we do?” he asked. She told him Homeland Security should follow legal protocol: The department could either file a motion asking her to reconsider or request that the appellate board intervene. He agreed, according to her notes, but called back a few minutes later. Suspicious, she allowed another judge who had come to her office to listen in. “He said higher-ups said I had to vacate my decs sua sponte,” Donoso Stevens wrote in a note that abbreviated “decisions” and used a Latin phrase that refers to judges reversing their own rulings unprompted. Dillow did not name the “higher-ups.” Donoso Stevens pushed for an explanation: “Why can’t DHS file a motion to reconsider?” “Oh no,” he replied. “They’re not going to do that.” “Is this our red line?” Donoso Stevens asked the other judge. The colleague, to whom The Post granted anonymity because they fear professional retaliation, confirmed the details of the call. The Post described the allegation to three legal experts, and all of them condemned it as unacceptable. “It’s an example of direct interference in an immigration judge’s handling of a case,” said Jill E. Family, a professor at Widener University Commonwealth Law School. “That is a very disturbing affront on the basic norms of our legal system.” The Post sent a detailed list of questions to the Justice Department and Homeland Security as well as Dillow, Lundberg and every other government official Donoso Stevens named in her account of what happened. None responded to the allegations. “DOJ’s approach is to impartially adjudicate cases as efficiently as possible in accordance with the law and evidence,” an executive office spokesperson wrote in a statement. “It does not view adjudications in terms of outcomes and does not have a stake in any particular outcome.” Donoso Stevens said she considered refusing Dillow’s order to overturn her rulings. But because she conceded that the New York case offered a reasonable counterargument, the judge reluctantly agreed to reverse herself, she said, a choice she still debates. A week later, after backlash over a push to rapidly dismiss cases and expedite arrests, the executive office insisted again that the court had total independence. It issued a memo that appeared in conflict with Dillow’s edict: No one in its leadership “may direct an Immigration Judge to decide a case in a particular way.” But in private, leadership continued to undermine its public pronouncements. On Nov. 18, Teresa L. Riley, appointed under Trump to lead the country’s entire immigration court system, emailed Donoso Stevens, demanding justification for why she’d granted bond in six other cases. Donoso Stevens said she couldn’t provide the message to The Post because of pending litigation, but she described it. When Dillow called to discuss Riley’s email, Donoso Stevens told him she hadn’t acted unilaterally. Federal courts had ordered bond hearings in all six of her cases, in response to habeas corpus petitions challenging the government’s legal right to keep migrants locked up. Dillow told Donoso Stevens he understood, she said, and promised to convey her account to his bosses. Riley, who didn’t reply to a request for comment, never followed up with Donoso Stevens. The bond issue seemed to recede until early January, when Lundberg replaced Dillow as Annandale’s acting assistant chief. Within a day or two, Lundberg appeared in her office doorway. “Judge, just because habeas hearings are ordered doesn’t mean you have to grant bond,” she said he told her. Donoso Stevens interpreted that as an instruction to conduct “show” hearings, she said, where the outcomes for immigrants would be predetermined. “If bond is warranted — if they prove they’re not a danger or a flight risk — then I’m going to grant bond,” the judge said she told him. He looked at her, she said, and walked away, silent. Less than a week later, he opened the door to her courtroom and asked if she was on the record. NEWS OF DONOSO STEVENS’S DEMOTION stunned private lawyers and dismayed fellow judges, but the most immediate effects fell on the immigrants who would have appeared before her. Since the start of Trump’s second presidency, Donoso Stevens had denied about 85 percent of her asylum claims, according to a Post analysis of Justice Department data. She largely ascribed the highest rate of her career to how much more difficult the board’s mandates made it to approve applications. Her replacement, Richard VanVeldhuisen, who joined the bench in 2023 and had never overseen a docket of detained immigrants, denied about 95 percent in his new assignment. His rate mirrors the court’s soaring national averages in 2026. While the board’s decrees are limiting, legal experts say, judges have succumbed to immense pressure from the Trump administration to deny applications. “It is a hurricane-force wind against judicial independence,” said Dana Leigh Marks, a former immigration judge who, since retiring after 35 years, has become a fierce Trump critic. “Everybody has a different tolerance point.” The effects have been profound. The most high-profile asylum case VanVeldhuisen inherited from Donoso Stevens was that of an Afghan who, after supporting the United States’ cause in his home country, escaped with his wife on a U.S. military plane as American troops withdrew in 2021. In July of last year, ICE officers arrested the man, whom The Post is identifying as H out of concern for his safety, on his way to work at an accounting firm. In court, Homeland Security attorneys argued to Donoso Stevens that H, who has never been charged with a crime, could be safely sent back, despite the Taliban’s brutal regime. If the courts accepted that rationale, legal experts suspected it could help the agency expel thousands of other Afghans. Homeland Security later submitted surprise evidence: an unsigned FBI memo that accused H of no wrongdoing but described him as “a potential threat” because of distant relatives who were associated with terrorist groups. Donoso Stevens pressed the prosecutor for more details on the memo, but he provided none, saying his “chain of command” had given it to him. Donoso Stevens can’t share how she would have ruled, she said, but there were signs in court that she found the government’s case unconvincing, noting that H, who’d answered hundreds of questions under oath, had not “testified to anything that would make him a national security interest.” After Homeland Security announced the FBI had yet to finish his background check, a frustrated Donoso Stevens acknowledged that, by law, she didn’t have the option to grant the father of two asylum until he was cleared by the bureau, which the Justice Department also oversees. A prosecutor reminded the judge she could reject H’s application at any time. She declined. The clearance arrived three months later, in January — just nine days after Donoso Stevens was removed from the case. On Feb. 18, VanVeldhuisen, who had never consulted with her about it or held a hearing on H’s case, ordered him to be sent back to Afghanistan. The judge wrote that because of H’s relatives, he “may pose a danger to the national security.” In a footnote, VanVeldhuisen, who did not respond to a request for comment, mentioned that the judge “formerly assigned to this case is unavailable to complete” it. Donoso Stevens remained on the bench, in a courtroom not far from his own. H’s attorney filed a habeas corpus petition to the Eastern District of Virginia, but a Trump-appointed judge denied it, citing, among other things, VanVeldhuisen’s conclusion that H may be a danger, “which this Court cannot second-guess.” OVER AND OVER, TRUMP OFFICIALS have demanded more productivity from immigration judges. His first administration asserted that “efficient adjudication” served “the national interest” and instituted quotas. His second administration has set strict case-completion deadlines “to address the substantial backlog exacerbated by prior leadership.” “No more endless delays,” the White House declared. “Only results.” Donoso Stevens believed in results, too. That’s what so infuriated her one February morning after her demotion when she discovered seven white cardboard boxes outside her chambers. The executive office had instructed judges to rule on 95 percent of their motions within 30 days. Now, beside her door, she found more than 100 of VanVeldhuisen’s unresolved filings — all from Homeland Security and all at least six months old. Donoso Stevens struggled to understand how ignoring the government’s legal requests served its own goal of “efficient adjudication.” And she was suddenly responsible for every one of them. “This is f---ing unbelievable,” she said to herself. Donoso Stevens, who, in her new role, had already taken on about a thousand asylum applications from immigrants not in detention, demanded an explanation from Lundberg’s staff. When none came, she requested a meeting. The judge pitched him on ways to make Annandale more efficient, she said, but the discussion in early March, which included other administrators, quickly turned combative. “So you’re basically telling me all the things I’ve done wrong,” she recalled him snapping. Donoso Stevens left the meeting shaken and angry. On March 6, in an email she read parts of to The Post, the judge followed up on their discussion. “Annandale Immigration Court and the broader EOIR,” she wrote, “are understandably and correctly under significant pressure from DOJ and the American people to be as efficient as possible in significantly reducing the longstanding backlog of cases.” She created a spreadsheet for every outstanding motion and, over two months, cleared them all. On April 20, Lundberg signed her performance review, grading her “satisfactory,” the highest possible rating. In the accompanying email, she said, he thanked her for her work on the motions. The same day, she wrote in her notes, he stopped her in the hallway: “Said I was doing a great job completing cases.” On May 21, Donoso Stevens hurried out of the courthouse just after lunch for a doctor’s appointment. A mammogram had spotted a mass, and she needed another test to determine whether she had cancer. Regardless of the diagnosis, she intended to head back to court for an afternoon hearing. After the scan, she was sent to a waiting room while a doctor studied the result. There, in her gown, she noticed a text from Lundberg. “Good afternoon. The EOIR Director forwarded to me the Notice of Termination that you received this morning,” he wrote at 2:35 p.m. “I looked for you but you had left the court.” Donoso Stevens had never seen an email. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she replied. Then the doctor called her in: She didn’t have cancer. On her drive back to court, she realized the Trump administration had fired her nine months before she would have become eligible for her pension. Lundberg met her in the lobby. He refused to let her inside. ONE THURSDAY MORNING LAST MONTH, Donoso Stevens made a vanilla latte and settled onto her living room couch. Wearing a sweatshirt and yoga pants, she tried to talk her husband into a shopping trip, because she had little else to do. Her black robe sat folded in a bedroom dresser. Then her phone started to vibrate. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Annandale’s cases, had rejected the administration’s legal argument to deny bond hearings to every immigrant who entered the country unlawfully. It was the latest in a series of 11 federal appellate courts that had weighed in on the bond question, nine of them deciding against the government. The Supreme Court is expected to settle it by June, but as the appeals have plodded through the system, thousands of migrants have agreed to leave the country rather than wait behind bars. For Donoso Stevens, the September ruling affirmed her resolve to hold bona fide bond hearings, despite the pressure not to. As she read the 86-page decision, the texts popping up on her phone all delivered a version of the same message: You were right. Former colleagues praised the principled commitment they suspected had cost Donoso Stevens her career. Lundberg never provided a reason for her dismissal. Like most judges, her termination letter cited “Article II of the Constitution,” a reference to the executive branch’s powers. “EOIR continually evaluates all immigration judges, regardless of background, on factors such as conduct, impartiality/bias, adherence to the law, productivity/performance, and professionalism,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement that noted the executive office doesn’t comment on personnel matters, “to include a disgruntled former employee’s allegations against the agency.” Donoso Stevens wouldn’t speculate on her firing because she’s appealed it, making her one of at least a dozen former immigration judges across the country who argue they were unlawfully dismissed. A federal appeals court in D.C. will soon hear oral arguments on the central case hers could hinge on, but ultimately, the Supreme Court may settle that issue as well. In the meantime, legal experts say the Justice Department’s transformation of the immigration court has set a precedent that could upend the system each time a new president takes office: more mass firings, more ideological hirings, more pressure to appease whoever is in charge. Democrats in both the Senate and House have introduced bills that would remove the court from the executive branch, affording it true independence, but without Republican support, the legislation has little chance of passage. “We were public servants, and I feel like something was taken from me, something that I loved,” Donoso Stevens said. “The argument the administration is making is that, under Article II, we can be fired for any reason. And if we allow that, then we are basically becoming de facto political appointees.” FIVE WEEKS LATER, H, the Afghan denied asylum by Donoso Stevens’s replacement, returned to immigration court. The U.S. government — the same one that had worked for months to deny immigrants like him bond — had requested a hearing to decide whether he should be released. It didn’t say why. H’s attorney, Justice Haynes, suspected Homeland Security wanted to preempt any new habeas petitions prompted by the 4th Circuit’s bond decision. By then, H, 30, had lost faith in the American legal system. He couldn’t bear what would happen to his children in Afghanistan if he were sent back, but the stress of staying, and fighting, was so intense his hair had begun to fall out. His brother, a delivery driver who had served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army, struggled to cover a mortgage while he supported two families. H’s wife quit her English classes and had to visit local food banks every week. His daughter, 4, had stopped asking when her dad would come home. Now H, eyes bloodshot and baggy, watched on a video screen as one of his attorneys argued that, after 15 months in ICE detention, he should be released while his appeals proceed. The lawyer reviewed his clean record, professional résumé, community support, love for his kids and devotion to his new country. Then, from the prosecutor’s table, a Homeland Security attorney reminded the court of the ruling from VanVeldhuisen, who had decided in February that H was a national security risk. If not for that decision, the judge acknowledged, she would release him. “But I can’t undo what another judge already found,” she said. “My hands are really tied.” So she denied bond. As H returned to his cell, he once more imagined how differently his life might have unfolded if the case had been decided all those months ago by Donoso Stevens. “I think the first judge I had,” H said later, “she was a victim of this politics.” “She was fair,” he added, because she had listened to his story and scrutinized the facts and challenged the government, as he always thought judges in America were supposed to do. He’s been told it could take another year for the courts to decide whether to let him go back to his family, or send him to the Taliban. Emmanuel Martinez contributed to this report.

Anybody who thinks Trump isn't gay... just look at all that gold bullshit everywhere. Oh, and talking about Arnold Palmer's giant penis and some dude's ass and hand size. #TotallyGay

AnthropoceneMPG 🌊@anthropocenempg.bsky.social

The transformed Rose Garden looks like the entrance to Liberace’s bathroom.

Iran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials Say

nytimes.comIran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials SayThe U.S. government has put employees on heightened alert across the Middle East and moved to reduce personnel levels at embassies and consulates because of intelligence showing Iran is in the advanced stages of planning attacks against Americans, U.S. officials said on Friday. Intelligence officials raised alarms to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a memo on Friday that warned about the dangers to State Department employees in the Middle East and other regions, the officials said. The memo, from Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, said that agencies had “received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel. The lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries.”ImageThe U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which has been attacked by Iran.Credit...-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The Trump administration confirmed the memo on Friday night through a U.S. official. The move demonstrated the seriousness with which the U.S. government is taking the threat, officials said. Axios earlier reported on the memo. U.S. agencies assess that the threat against Americans in the Middle East and several other countries is at the highest level since the start of the war in February, U.S. officials said.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox. President Trump and top aides have received regular briefings on the rising threats, which go beyond the Middle East, one official said. Analysts have been examining the intelligence on the threats to U.S. officials, including ambassadors, in the past three weeks. Some material indicates Iran may have operatives in the United States, the official said. The Iranian plans also include potential targets in Europe, U.S. officials said. But another official cautioned that Iran’s ability to carry out attacks in the United States and other territories overseas is limited, and its ambitions to strike are greater than its capability to do so. The White House did not reply to a request for comment. Mr. Clayton’s office and the C.I.A. declined to comment. The State Department said through a U.S. official that “when it comes to our staffing at embassies, we constantly evaluate new information about the security environment.” The official said that the threat of attacks by Houthi forces in Yemen and of “Iranian terror plots targeting U.S. officials” were informing State Department decisions on staffing adjustments for embassies. The missions were already at reduced levels under what the department calls “restricted operating status,” often invoked in conflict zones, the official said.Sign up for the On Politics newsletter. It's a pivotal moment for American politics. Join us for 2026 and beyond. Get it sent to your inbox. The alerts over the new threats come after eight months of a war against Iran started by Mr. Trump and Israel that has sent energy prices soaring, roiling economies around the world and eroding Mr. Trump’s approval at home. The United States and Israel have drawn up plans for a new wave of strikes on Iran after the U.S. midterm elections, though Mr. Trump has not made a final decision to carry them out, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. Mr. Trump has refrained from ordering large-scale attacks on Iran in recent months, but the U.S. military has carried out a blockade of Iranian ports in an effort to keep Iran from selling oil and other energy products on the global market. Iranian officials have sought different ways to strike back at the United States and its allies, U.S. officials said. In early October, the U.S. military took the extraordinary step of withdrawing all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from a base in southern England because commanders had received information about Iranian threats to the installation, R.A.F. Fairford. Mr. Clayton said in his memo to Mr. Rubio on Friday that he was seeking to downgrade the classification around some intelligence so that more U.S. government employees could be informed about what the memo’s subject line called the “lethal plotting against Americans in the Middle East and certain other countries.” On Wednesday, the State Department ordered the departure of nonessential employees and their families from Saudi Arabia, Tommy Pigott, a department spokesman, said in a statement. The agency has also been quietly moving personnel in and out of many of the other diplomatic missions in the region. It has designated almost all U.S. missions in the Middle East as being on “restricted operating status,” which gives the department more leeway to adjust staffing levels without putting out notifications. The drawdown of diplomats and other U.S. government employees at the missions is a direct result of the recent intelligence about Iranian attack plans, U.S. officials said. After the United States and Israel struck Iran on Feb. 28, the Iranian military retaliated by firing drones and missiles at Arab nations across the Middle East, as well as at Israel. On March 2, the State Department issued a mandatory departure for nonessential employees at missions in Iraq, Jordan and Bahrain. Around that time, the department also ordered nonessential personnel and their families in the missions in Saudi Arabia to leave the country because Iran had carried out attacks against the embassy in Riyadh, and on nearby areas. In the run-up to the war, only two embassies said employees could go on so-called authorized departure, which meant nonessential personnel and family members could leave if they wanted to do so. Those were the embassy in Beirut, which issued the message four days before the war began, and the embassy in Jerusalem, which did so the day before the start of the war. During periods this summer when the violence ebbed, the State Department told some diplomats they could return to their posts. The State Department came under intense criticism for not urging the many thousands of U.S. citizens in the region to leave before the start of the war, and for providing limited help to evacuate them once the missiles began flying. The Trump administration and Israel had secretly been planning strikes for many weeks before the start of the assault.

Grift Becomes Bigger Issue for Voters in Final Days Before Midterms

wsj.comGrift Becomes Bigger Issue for Voters in Final Days Before MidtermsWhite House aides have privately expressed frustration about negative headlines in recent weeks. Alex Brandon/AP WASHINGTON—President Trump walked out of the White House on Thursday afternoon and delivered a warning to his political allies. “I want my people to be honest, and if they’re not going to be honest, they have to be prosecuted,” he said. “If people are not honest, they’re stealing from me as president.” Trump’s rebuke came in response to a question about his longtime adviser, Corey Lewandowski, who The Wall Street Journal earlier reported was facing a Justice Department inquiry into allegations that he profited off his top position at the Department of Homeland Security. It was the latest in a series of damaging stories that have contributed to growing voter concerns about alleged government corruption less than two weeks before the midterm elections. Trump and White House aides have privately expressed frustration about the negative headlines that have been plastered across newspaper front pages and on cable news in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The stories have prompted hand-wringing from Republican campaign operatives, who worry that the alleged self-dealing could make an already challenging midterm election even more difficult for GOP candidates. Among the headlines: Trump’s ambassador to Greece resigned after being accused of soliciting $100,000 from a donor; the family of a billionaire Venezuelan banker who was angling for a pardon offered the president’s former personal lawyer a deal worth $50 million; a Russian businessman funded a lavish wedding afterparty for one of Trump’s sons; and two of the president’s top political advisers flew abroad to consult for a Russia-aligned government. Democrats have put Trump at the center of their allegations of corruption, pointing to the extraordinary growth of his wealth since he took office, including earning $1.4 billion last year from crypto ventures. They have promised to launch investigations into his efforts to get large companies to cut checks for projects such as his White House ballroom, his decision to accept a gifted luxury jet from Qatar, and his pardon of Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the crypto exchange Binance. Government corruption has climbed the list of voter concerns in recent weeks. While the economy has long been the top issue for most Americans, a Fox News poll published last week found a remarkable shift: voters ranked government corruption as their top concern—above inflation and gasoline prices. Democrats are seeking to contrast the high costs everyday Americans are experiencing with allegations of grifting by the president, his family and his allies. Democrats have spent $182 million this year highlighting corruption as an issue in House and Senate races, more than the previous four election cycles combined, according to data from the firm AdImpact. The topic has also come up in voter focus groups and on political podcasts, where mentions of corruption ticked up 12% on right-leaning podcasts and 21% on left-leaning podcasts since September, according to a Journal analysis. Government corruption “has started to creep up toward the top of the most-important-problem list in recent weeks,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said, adding that voter concerns about the issue haven’t ranked this highly in recent memory. Democrats are most concerned about the corruption, but independents and some Republican voters are also raising red flags about the issue, according to Ayres. Trump isn’t on the ballot in November, but political strategists say Republican candidates’ prospects are closely tied to the way voters view the president. White House aides were especially stunned by the alleged actions of Trump’s ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and quickly concluded that she had to be ousted from her role, some of the people said. Guilfoyle has denied wrongdoing. Kimberly Guilfoyle in Washington in February. Nathan Howard/Bloomberg News The president’s team has also spent days trying to get to the bottom of a headline-grabbing feud between Alina Mildon, the president’s former personal lawyer, and longtime Trump adviser Richard Grenell. The New York Times recently reported that Mildon had negotiated a deal guaranteeing her more than $50 million over four years with the family of a Venezuelan billionaire, who received a presidential pardon weeks later. Mildon has denied playing any role in securing the pardon. But the story outraged top Republican donors, according to a GOP strategist. The president has also privately complained to aides that his son Donald Trump Jr. exhibited bad judgment for allowing Russian businessman Umar Kremlev to pay for his post-wedding party in the Bahamas. Trump has said his son paid back Kremlev. This week, two of the president’s top political advisers, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, said that they would donate their consulting fees to Trump’s presidential library, after they faced criticism for their recent trip to Republika Srpska—a self-governing entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The donation was made in part to alleviate the president’s anger about the trip, according to a person familiar with the matter. Inside the White House, top aides have expressed concern both about the political fallout of allegations of self-dealing and the slate of Democratic-led investigations they expect if Republicans lose their congressional majority in the midterms, administration officials and Trump advisers said. The president’s top aides and some Republicans in Congress have gently urged the president to stop talking about the ballroom, worrying that his intense focus on the project makes him look out of touch with voters. “President Trump has launched an all-out war on fraud across the entire federal government, holding criminals accountable and saving taxpayers billions of dollars,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said. “The Democrats in Congress have refused to do anything to stop waste, fraud, and abuse in our government.” Trump has accused Democrats of corruption, vowing on social media to defeat “corrupt anti-American Lunatics once and for all!” This week, the Justice Department announced charges against Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, a longtime Democratic lawmaker, for allegedly running a criminal enterprise that illegally bought and sold large amounts of marijuana and laundered the proceeds. Lucas called the criminal case an effort to intimidate and silence her. Longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin said corruption allegations against Republicans are gaining traction with voters who are already anti-Trump. “I don’t think it’s resonating out there with the voters who may be undecided, who are going to decide their race for Congress and Senate, because they’re voting on their pocketbooks,” McLaughlin said. Voters casting ballots during early voting recently in Arlington, Va. Olivier Douliery/Abaca/ZUMA Press Many Democratic midterm ads have targeted the president. “President Trump made $2.2 billion last year. He debuted a new Air Force One jet gifted to him by the government of Qatar. He made more than $600 million alone from the crypto meme coin. That’s not governing, it’s grifting. The corruption needs to stop,” a re-election ad for Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) says. The Fox News poll, which was conducted earlier this month, found that 88% of voters are concerned about corruption in government, with 60% of voters identifying as “extremely concerned.” But the issue was more prominent for Democrats, with 72% saying they were “extremely concerned” compared with 47% of Republicans. Government corruption is a particular concern for young voters, who Trump made gains with in 2024. A national poll released Thursday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University found that young voters list corruption in government as near the top of their midterm priorities, with 88% saying it is important to their vote. Voters in focus groups have expressed frustration that Trump’s wealth is increasing, while they are dipping into their savings, according to a former Trump administration official. They have also increasingly brought up corruption when asked open-ended questions about their top issue this midterm cycle, the official said. “There’s a large number of voters who wanted Trump to be the outsider who would come to Washington, fire everybody and drain the swamp,” said Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Mike Pence, the vice president in Trump’s first term. “Now it looks like they’re feeding on the swamp.”

Jon Ossoff’s films exposed corruption. Then his colleague was murdered.

washingtonpost.comJon Ossoff’s films exposed corruption. Then his colleague was murdered.In January 2019, Jon Ossoff’s cellphone lit up with a frenzy of calls and texts. The messages, streaming in from Ossoff’s colleagues at the small documentary film production company that he ran, carried grim news. The night before, one of Ossoff’s colleagues, the Ghanaian journalist Ahmed Hussein-Suale Divela, had been driving through the suburbs of Accra when two men on a motorbike pulled alongside his BMW and began shooting through the driver’s side window. Their bullets struck Divela in the neck and chest, killing him on the spot. Just a few months before, Ossoff had worked with Divela on a documentary about corruption and bribery in African soccer. The investigation, which captured FIFA’s second-highest official in Africa accepting a bribe on hidden camera, had sparked a political firestorm in Ghana. A prominent member of the Ghanaian Parliament responded by inciting violence against Divela on a public television broadcast. “If you meet him somewhere, slap him … beat him,” the MP had said on one broadcast. “Whatever happens, I’ll pay.” On the evening of Jan. 16, the two gunmen followed Divela to his neighborhood. No one has been convicted of a crime in connection to the killing. Ossoff, who had advised the team in Ghana on security, was crushed by the news of Divela’s death. “I’ve never been more devastated about anything in my professional life,” Ossoff recalled in a recent interview. “It was everything that I hate — corrupt people who were exposed for their corruption who retaliate by killing a journalist.” But the episode also carried a lesson for Ossoff. Exposing corruption drew attention — and attention was a form of power. Seven years later, Ossoff, now a U.S. senator, is putting that theory into practice as he runs for reelection in Georgia — and, some Democratic operatives suspect, tests the waters for a possible 2028 presidential bid. On the campaign trail, Ossoff has leaned into an aggressive anti-corruption message, touting his record of oversight investigation in the Senate and attacking President Donald Trump and his “Mar-a-Lago mafia” for profiting off the presidency. That message has galvanized voters in Georgia, where polls show Ossoff with a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent — a stark reversal from 2024, when the state voted by a slim margin for Trump. Online, meanwhile, clips of Ossoff’s jeremiads against “the crook president” have repeatedly gone viral, flooding social media feeds with cinematic, high-angle shots of Ossoff solemnly speechifying from behind a lectern. The viral clips have drawn favorable comparisons to the aesthetics of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, further fueling the buzz around Ossoff as a possible dark horse candidate for president. Yet Ossoff’s knack for turning anti-corruption messaging into viral content has come as no surprise to his former colleagues at Insight Film, the independent production company that he ran from 2013 to 2021. According to interviews with his colleagues and close collaborators from the time, Ossoff’s tenure at the production company served as a kind of unconventional apprenticeship in the workings of the modern attention economy. It was there, his colleagues say, that he first came to grasp the potency of corruption as a political issue and mastered the craft of turning anti-corruption investigations into effective political entertainment. “He understands communication as a medium,” said Clive Patterson, who joined Insight in 2008 and now serves as its CEO. “He can join the dots [into] a bigger picture and present it in a way that people really connect to.” On the campaign trail, Ossoff has pointed to his documentary career as one of his primary qualifications for tackling allegations of corruption and self-dealing within the Trump administration. In an interview, he pointed to his record of oversight in the Senate, where he has led investigations into abuse in federal prisons and Georgia’s foster care system, as an example of the chops he developed as a producer. “I’ve applied the skills in investigation that I learned leading Insight to produce really impactful Senate oversight,” he said. But the lessons of his filmmaking career extend beyond the mechanisms of anti-corruption investigations. At Insight, Ossoff began to hone the viral messaging techniques that have fueled his rise to national attention. “When I watch these videos, and I see that he is mentioning corruption and Trump, and I say, ‘Hey, this is not new,’” said Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian undercover journalist who frequently collaborated with Ossoff’s company. “This is the Jon I know.” Ossoff’s path to filmmaking began in 2003, in a plum orchard in southwestern France. Ossoff, then 16 years old, was on summer vacation with his family when they were invited to a dinner party at the home of a family friend. Seated across from Ossoff was Ron McCullagh, a British documentary filmmaker who had founded his own production company, Insight News Television, in London in 1991. The two tablemates chatted about documentaries and foreign affairs, and McCullagh came away impressed by Ossoff’s knowledge of global politics. They stayed in touch after Ossoff returned to the United States, and in the summer of 2008, while Ossoff was an undergraduate at Georgetown University, McCullagh invited him to spend a summer interning for the company at its headquarters in London. The budding professional relationship quickly proved useful to both men. In 2011, after Ossoff had gone to work as a senior foreign policy aide to Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia), McCullagh produced a film with the Sierra Leonean journalist Sorious Samura documenting corruption in the country’s timber industry. The film implicated the country’s vice president, sparking a major political scandal and prompting the government to threaten Samura with arrest. In an effort to protect his reporters, McCullagh called Ossoff to ask for assistance from Washington. Ossoff briefed Johnson, who in turn organized an open letter, signed by 18 of his colleagues in Congress, urging the State Department to investigate the situation in Sierra Leone. Shortly after the letter was published, Samura and his team were able to leave the country safely. Two years later, Ossoff was back in the United Kingdom, having left Capitol Hill to pursue a graduate degree at the London School of Economics. His decision to leave Washington, he has said, was driven in part by his disgust with the extent of corporate influence in Washington, which he witnessed while working on the annual defense appropriations process. “I couldn’t stand the corruption,” Ossoff said in a 2020 campaign ad. In London, Ossoff would occasionally meet McCullagh for lunch at the Frontline Club, a members’ club frequented by conflict journalists. At one meeting toward the end of Ossoff’s time at LSE, McCullagh approached him with a proposal: How would he like to take over as CEO of the company? Ossoff, who had once dreamed of becoming a diplomat, accepted the offer, despite having no background in journalism or filmmaking beyond his internship at Insight. “I wasn’t fearful of it,” Ossoff said. “I was excited by it.” Inside the company, McCullagh’s decision to promote a 26-year-old graduate student to the top position initially raised some eyebrows. The suspicions were fueled in part by the financial arrangement that Ossoff agreed to after joining: He and McCullagh would each invest $250,000 in the company, which was teetering on the brink of insolvency. Much of Ossoff’s share came out of money he had inherited in 2008 after the death of his grandfather, a successful leather manufacturer. Samura, who was a co-owner in the company at the time, said that Ossoff’s colleagues knew he was affluent but that his wealth wasn’t a decisive factor in his hiring. “We knew he had a little bit of money, but we knew that he had the skills to raise it for us,” Samura said. (McCullagh declined to be interviewed.) Once on the job, his colleagues say, Ossoff quickly earned the confidence of the small team. “He had a sort of a natural inclination for the kind of work we were doing,” said Patterson. “He was very switched on.” As CEO, Ossoff’s first move was to rebrand the company to “Insight TWI” — short for “The World Investigates” — to emphasize its collaborations with foreign journalists. His next task was to shore up the company’s finances. In his first year, he made inroads with the shrinking pool of broadcasters willing to invest in international investigative work, securing commissions from Al Jazeera English to produce two investigations — one about the Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame and another about China’s deepening influence in Africa. Diarmuid Jeffreys, a commissioning editor at Al Jazeera who collaborated with Ossoff on several films, recalled that Ossoff could be ruthless in negotiating the terms of deals. “Jon was just doggedly determined to make sure that he got every penny that they needed to make these films,” Jeffreys recalled. Ossoff also tapped into new sources of funds to support the company’s work. In January 2015, he secured a $350,000 grant from the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic foundation funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, to fund a training program for investigative journalists in Africa. Together with Ossoff’s and McCullagh’s investments, the moves put the company back on relatively stable financial ground: By the end of 2015, the company had just over $150,000 cash on hand, according to financial documents filed in the U.K. at the time. Ossoff involved himself in the various stages of Insight’s production process, including research and development, editing, and distribution. He also doubled the size of Insight’s small team, hiring four new researchers and junior producers. Among directors, he garnered a reputation as a particularly involved and hands-on producer. “At the end of every day [of shooting], we were having some sort of debrief,” said Joshua Baker, who directed a 2018 film that Ossoff produced about the Islamic State’s abuse of a Yazidi woman in Iraq. “There were a couple of times where I literally rang him at 3 o’clock in the morning to talk through the situation and game it out together.” Ossoff proved particularly cautious about risk planning and information security. One of his earliest reforms as CEO was to move all of the company’s communications to encrypted channels, and Baker recalled working on a 50-plus-page risk assessment document with him before shooting in Iraq. He also took an interest in the mechanics of filmmaking. Before the team started shooting the film about Kagame, Patterson recalled, Ossoff used some of the company’s limited budget to upgrade its camera to a higher-spec model. “He wanted to push the aesthetics of the film,” Patterson said. “He understood film language.” Ossoff’s fastidiousness could sometimes get on the nerves of his reporters. When working with the BBC, for instance, Ossoff was responsible for making sure that his reporters complied with the network’s complex policies on undercover filming. In disagreements between the network and reporters, he would often side with the network out of an abundance of caution. “I would get angry with him,” Anas recalled. “Like, the crime is happening right in front of me, and you want me to do all this paperwork?” Ossoff did most of his work from his home in Georgia and the company’s headquarters in London, but the job occasionally took him out into the field. In 2014 and 2015, he traveled to Kenya and Ghana with Jeffreys and his Insight colleagues for a series of workshops for African journalists. The trip gave Ossoff’s colleagues a rare glimpse of his more laid-back side. In the evenings after the workshops, Anas recalled, Ossoff liked to visit off-the-beaten path neighborhoods in Accra, where he would eat zongo rice with his fingers and sweat his way through spicy bowls of stew. On another evening, the team members gathered at their run-down hotel bar to play a drinking game called “top shelving,” in which they would compete to see who could drink the most exotic liquors from the bar’s top shelf. “I thought I was pretty good at this, but Jon beat me,” Jeffreys recalled. “It still slightly irks me.” In November 2016, Insight was preparing to release a series of investigations focused on Latin America when voters went to the polls in the United States. Ossoff’s colleagues say that Trump’s surprise victory deeply shook him. “A lot of his work has been focusing on oppression and human rights abuses,” said Helen Spooner, a researcher and producer whom Ossoff hired in 2015. “I think he saw what was coming down the tracks in America.” Some of Ossoff’s colleagues were nevertheless surprised when, in January 2017, he announced that he would be stepping away from the company’s day-to-day operations to run for a congressional seat in Georgia. “He certainly had never spoken about politics before in that way,” Spooner said. Other colleagues were less surprised by the move. Samura recalled a discussion he had had with Ossoff early in his tenure at Insight about the persistence of racism in the American South. Impressed by Ossoff’s take on the issue, Samura joked that he and McCullagh sometimes mused about Ossoff one day occupying the White House. Ossoff, he recalled, had just smiled and offered a noncommittal response. “He almost gave the answer of a politician,” Samura said. “There was that sense that this young man was thinking big.” Ossoff returned to Insight in July 2017, shortly after losing in a close runoff election. He jumped back into the company’s work, launching an investigation into a string of unsolved murders in Malawi and a behind-the-scenes look at Anas’s investigation of corruption in African soccer. Both productions ran into trouble. In February 2018, a team of reporters led by Anas was on the ground in Malawi to investigate the murders, which they had traced back to a group of hired killers who were selling human body parts for ritual purposes. Posing undercover as a local businessman, Anas had arranged a meeting with one of the killers, but the operation went awry: The meeting was delayed until after dark, when a group of villagers mistook Anas and his crew for the killers, holding them at machete-point and bludgeoning them with stones. The team eventually escaped with the help of local police, but only after blowing their cover and exposing the investigation. The incident, which prompted recriminations between the crew and McCullagh, who was overseeing the production, unnerved the security-conscious Ossoff. “He was not happy about what we did,” recalled Anas, who acknowledged that the team had taken a risk by following through with the meeting even after dark. Residual unease from the incident colored Ossoff’s handling of the next production. For two years, Anas’s team, which included Divela, had conducted a series of undercover sting operations exposing African soccer officials, culminating in an operation that captured FIFA’s second-highest African official accepting a $65,000 bribe on film. In June 2018, Anas’s production company released a documentary about the investigation. The film quickly became an international sensation, resulting in the dissolution of Ghana’s national soccer association, the suspension of several top referees and the resignation of one senior FIFA official. Concurrently with Anas’s film, Insight released its own documentary with the BBC about the making of Anas’s investigation. The films prompted new threats against Anas and his team. In Ghana, Kennedy Agyapong, a member of the country’s Parliament whose allies had been implicated by the investigation, used his popular television show to publish photos of Divela and details about his and Anas’s locations. The team in Ghana stepped up security measures, but the situation on the ground remained dangerous. On Jan. 16, 2019, Divela was shot and killed. After the shooting, Ossoff traveled to Ghana to speak at Divela’s funeral and published an op-ed in The Washington Post calling on international press freedom groups to investigate the shooting, which remains unsolved. But the experience left him confronting the limits of his influence as a journalist. “To really make a difference,” Ossoff recalled thinking in the aftermath of the shooting, “you do have to engage in the political arena.” Eight months later, in September 2019, he announced his Senate bid in Georgia. Ossoff formally left Insight in February 2021, the month after winning in a runoff election. Shortly after taking office, he transferred ownership of the company to Patterson and another colleague, who reincorporated the company as Insight Film. Ossoff was not compensated for relinquishing his stake, which was valued between $1 million and $5 million, according to financial disclosure documents. Since then, his former employees have watched with an uncanny sense of familiarity as Ossoff has brought his cinematic approach to anti-corruption work to the Senate. Patterson mentioned Ossoff’s performances during recent oversight hearings, in which the senator has clashed with Trump’s nominees over their support for the administration’s controversial policies. “I very much recognize the person who’s cross-examining the individuals in those committees,” Patterson said. During one confirmation hearing this summer, a stony-faced Ossoff sat on a dais across from Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence. “Who won the 2020 election?” asked Ossoff. “I’m not going to do this with you,” Clayton responded, squirming in his seat. “This is a job interview,” Ossoff shot back. “… Who won the 2020 election?” Clayton dodged, and Ossoff pressed him again. After a few minutes of sparring, an exasperated Clayton threw up his hands and leaned back in his seat. Before the hearing was over, Ossoff’s team had clipped the exchange and blasted it out on social media. It immediately went viral.

Hegseth’s staff tried to block troops’ participation in Paris NFL game

washingtonpost.comHegseth’s staff tried to block troops’ participation in Paris NFL gameThe office of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to block the U.S. military’s ceremonial participation in the NFL’s first-ever game in Paris this weekend but relented after the State Department urged the Pentagon to let at least some American personnel be involved, officials told The Washington Post. Sunday’s contest between the New Orleans Saints and the Pittsburgh Steelers, to be played at Stade de France in the city’s suburbs, was supposed to feature dozens of troops, officials said. But after last weekend’s unrest in the French capital, which has drawn criticism from President Donald Trump, Hegseth’s office moved to cancel all military involvement, they added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations. State Department officials objected, emphasizing to Hegseth’s staff what they said is the diplomatic value of having U.S. troops participate in such a high-profile event and arguing that the department did not assess that U.S. citizens or personnel in Paris were at a high risk of danger, the officials said. Hegseth’s office agreed to restore elements of the military’s participation, officials said, including a color guard. Such ceremonial units, which carry the American flag and individual service flags during events, usually require fewer than 10 military personnel. Spokespeople for Hegseth’s office declined to address questions about the abrupt change of plans or who in the secretary’s office attempted to pull all military support for the Paris game. On Friday, a senior Defense Department official provided The Post with a brief, unattributed statement saying: “The Department is supporting the NFL game in Paris this weekend amid the ongoing riots and unrest. As President Trump has said, France is really in trouble.” “This decision was made by the Secretary’s core leadership team, not one person alone,” the statement says. The State Department and the NFL declined to comment on the episode. The U.S. military has participated in other NFL games played overseas this season, including in Melbourne and in London. Two other games are planned for Europe this season, one in Madrid and one in Munich. Paris and other cities across France have seen mass protests over school funding and the cost of living. The State Department has issued an advisory to Americans planning to attend Sunday’s game, urging them to avoid demonstrations and places of unrest. Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron have traded barbs over the protests. In the past few days, Trump has sought to rouse his political base ahead of the U.S. midterm elections by blaming the unrest on immigration challenges and Islam, and urging France to “close your borders and take control before it is too late!” Macron has denounced such comments as “stupid.” More broadly, Trump’s relationship with Macron — as with some other European leaders — has soured amid disagreements over support for Ukraine, tariffs and other issues. “I think maybe it’s looking like tomorrow is going to be a bad day in France. So you worry about it,” Trump told reporters Friday. “I would have said the NFL could have probably postponed that match if you want to know the truth, because France is really in trouble. That’s what happens when you go left. That’s what happens when you allow unlimited numbers of people into your country from very unfriendly countries.” Macron and Trump generally got along during Trump’s first term — with the president’s visit to France on Bastille Day in 2017 piquing his desire for mammoth military parades in Washington, and his admiration of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe inspiring the controversial gold-and-white winged arch and drone storage monument that he is seeking to erect near Arlington National Cemetery. Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Dan Lamothe and Rick Maese contributed to this report.

Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority

thebignewsletter.comElon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic MajorityA few months ago, Paramount owner David Ellison succeeded in forcing California and Democratic states attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against his acquisition of Warner Brothers. He used a variety of tactics, including a threat to move the studios out of the state, and ultimately bluffed the elected officials into folding. BIG predicted at the time that Ellison’s threatened capital strike, along with political coercion, was a preview of what is to come if voters choose Democrats as a Congressional majority. And sure enough, that’s what one of Ellison’s close allies - Elon Musk - just did. Earlier this week, following reports that Musk had throttled Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite network, Politico ran a story that several Dem members of Congress are gearing up to hold oversight hearings if the midterms go their way in a couple of weeks. Musk responded by explicitly threatening any Democrat or institution seeking to scrutinize him, his portfolio of companies, or his time at DOGE. Here’s what he said: It’s a remarkable statement, and it speaks to a fundamental view held by Musk and his allies that the votes of ordinary people simply should not count. He and a small circle make the key decisions in our society. Musk tweets so much that it’s hard to keep track of his views, but he is also explicit about that point too:Elon Musk calls to imprison journalist Kara Swisher after she said Democrats should investigate him if they win back Congress. “Sounds like Swisher really wants to go to prison.” 12:22 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 295K Views580 Replies · 2.11K Reposts · 7.87K Likes Musk’s political threats are not really the story. The story is that he actually has the leverage to make them real, through a network of political influence and, more importantly, control over key social infrastructure. As with Ellison’s ability to harm California, Musk can actually threaten the Pentagon, foreign countries, and the U.S. government itself. And he does. The story is that, depending on the outcome of the midterms, which we’ll know a lot more about in 11 days, we’re entering a new phase of a battle between democratic systems and oligarchical ones that will test the limits of Musk’s extraordinary power and the temerity of Democrats to actually do something about it. Let’s start by reckoning with Musk’s power, which spans all sorts of infrastructure, campaign finance, and media. As to his control over critical infrastructure, the most salient revelation, and the catalyst for renewed political controversy, is Musk’s apparent role in throttling Ukraine’s access to military-grade satellite service through Starlink, a satellite-based internet network operated by Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX. Ukraine took significant damage and was unable to orchestrate its offensive strategy against Russia as a result of the cut-off. How does this system organize the fate of wars? Starlink is adjacent to Starshield, a SpaceX service that provides secure communications for governments. It’s a critical piece of national security infrastructure. And that goes beyond providing internet access to war-torn battlefields. By some accounts, Starlink operates roughly 75% of all active maneuverable satellites. It provides internet service designed to connect homes, businesses, vehicles, ships, aircraft, and more, including in remote locations that are poorly served by existing broadband or fiber-optic cables. And it’s increasingly important commercially. Just yesterday, United CEO Scott Kirby cited the airline’s partnership with Starlink for boosting its market share. (To believe this, you have to believe there’s actually enough competition between airlines for Starlink to make a difference, and I have my doubts, but it’s clearly a useful service.) SpaceX has private shareholders, but it is a government sanctioned firm whose growth over the past two decades is fundamentally owed to public funds, some $48 billion in contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, as well as access to key public space infrastructure. SpaceX started receiving DARPA money in 2003, a year after SpaceX was formed, and has been a go-to private contractor for every administration since. In other words, Musk’s control over essential infrastructure, and his ability to wield it privately despite procurement terms superficially nodding to safeguards, is a bipartisan creation of the federal government. There is some debate over the extent to which Musk wields that power unilaterally or in collaboration with government officials — it’s far closer to a public-private partnership than a purely private entity — and a 2023 expose by Ronan Farrow reveals how that collaboration looks more like dependence across swaths of the federal government: Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of [Farrow’s] inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told [Farrow]. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Not unlike other historical and contemporary barons of distribution networks, from Cornelius Vanderbilt to Jay Gould to Andrew Mellon to Jeff Bezos, Musk’s control over infrastructure provides him with leverage over public institutions. His quasi-unilateral intervention in the Ukraine-Russia conflict is one example. And the way that power works is by threatening to pull the deployment of that infrastructure, or discriminate between who can access it, which has commercial and geopolitical implications. It’s the power of a capital strike, not unlike Meta’s renewed threat, just yesterday, to cut off service to the State of New Mexico in response to a jury verdict finding them liable for over 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices law. Or take (Amazon) your (Google) pick (Uber/Lyft), really, because capital strikes are as American as unbridled monopoly power. Musk’s threat is also to use his wealth, so much of which is traceable to benefits conferred by the government, to distort our democratic elections. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index estimates that SpaceX is the source of over 75% of Musk’s overall net worth, which hovers around $1 trillion. And Musk’s election spending is a business investment for which he expects a return. As of mid-October, nearly 50 megadonors had spent close to $2.4 billion on the midterm elections, and Musk’s $369 million in campaign contributions dwarfs everyone else. At least $176.8 million has gone solely to support Texas AG Ken Paxton’s bid for the Senate and to oppose Democrat candidate James Talarico.James Talarico@jamestalaricoThere is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.There is something deeply wrong with Talarico5:13 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 49K Views385 Replies · 1.04K Reposts · 6.38K Likes Musk is far from the first, or only, oligarch to wield other instruments of persuasion, including the media. His purchase of Twitter/X evokes Henry Ford’s 1919 purchase of the Dearborn Independent, then the second most widely distributed newspaper behind the New York Times, in the wake of his Senate campaign loss. And just as Henry Ford used his newspaper to grind various political axes, with a heavy dose of overt antisemitism, Musk’s takeover of Twitter has amplified partisan conservative voices and driven social wedge issues to divert attention from a more unifying politics. Add to Musk’s efforts to control the public commons his lawsuit against Media Matters, alleging that the watchdog group interfered with Twitter/X contracts and economic advantage when it published a report showing advertisements appearing next to pro-Nazi content. Understandably, many advertisers pulled their spending from Musk’s platform. Here, Musk’s effort to censor his opponents is also a threat to bury any other opponent in litigation costs. And it’s yet another data point in Musk’s leverage over the federal government, reflected in the Trump administration’s transparent weaponization of antitrust. The FTC’s own, subsequent investigation into Media Matters is hard to see as anything but the abuse of public resources at Musk’s behest. But of course, Musk and the billionaires are one part of the equation. The other is voters, who are choosing to move away from DOGE and the Trump era by voting for the ostensible opposition party. And what are some of those Democrats likely to do? That’s less clear. One response is to campaign on the blatant corruption eroding our democracy, as Talarico is doing. Multiple studies have observed that ad saturation driven by massive campaign spending can have marginal returns on voter persuasion and eventually lead to voter suppression. And on some level, voters react to the source of funds. A recent Data for Progress poll showed that 75% of likely voters were less likely to vote for candidates who receive support from the AI industry. Musk is polarizing, at best, and has a net-negative favorability rating even in Texas. A different response, one we saw with the Skydance merger, is to cower and fold before the superrich. For example, even though support for AI - another area of Musk investment - has become a third rail in politics, some Democrats are backing away from talking about it at all: Senior Democrats and candidates are worried that if they go too hard in criticizing AI, industry-affiliated super PACs could drop millions more dollars against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and strategists. They are especially worried about a slate of competitive races, including Reps. Don Davis in North Carolina, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, Henry Cuellar in Texas and a handful of South Texas and Pennsylvania races, getting hit with even more spending on topics like AI. I have experience in politics and in running large legislative campaigns, so here I’ll offer advice. Be direct and aggressive against men like Musk. Politicians don’t need to chase every polarizing issue, but the inability to put forward an honest and moral position on a defining economic and social question kneecaps the ability to harness broader political support. And we can see that because Republicans increasingly want Musk’s money, but don’t want him near their campaigns. Musk’s donations are funneled through political action committees like the Senate Leadership Committee, America First, and Lone Star Liberty, none of which bear his name. And while Republicans have been far less critical overall of Musk’s political interloping, several spoke out against his DOGE cuts, and Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio has joined calls for an oversight hearing on Musk’s weaponization of Starlink in Ukraine. Republicans are constrained by Musk’s giving to form a more coherent political message. Democrats shouldn’t be. Here’s my prediction. I don’t think Dems will back down from their calls for oversight hearings regarding Musk’s conduct. And I suspect some Republicans will join, particularly if Dems overperform in the midterms. The fact about people like Elon Musk is that their power is also their weakness. Campaign consultants can hardly beg for a more perfect foil than someone whose most identifiable consumer product, the Cybertruck, is a politically charged purchase and a visual manifestation of ego. But it would be naive, if not damaging, to think that oversight hearings are adequate on their own. Oversight hearings easily drift into theatrical content farms, and viral social media clips, on their own, risk reinforcing a growing perception that too many Democrats are more adept at pretending to care than doing anything meaningful to generate durable outcomes. More importantly, the question isn’t whether there should be oversight, but the point of that oversight. It’s critical to neutralize Musk’s ability to threaten nation-states and our own government, and if that means building the case for breaking apart his empire or imposing new rules, that must be baked into the hearings from the beginning. A free society cannot be bullied by threats of capital strikes, particularly as to essential infrastructure, and the ability to channel capital must be done through democratic means. What would real oversight of oligarchs look like? Well, it would mean seeking intel about corrupt slush funds for the White House ballroom or Trump’s presidential library, about the purchase of equity stakes in companies like Anduril just before receiving nearly $1.8 billion in government contracts, about leading a $300 million investment in Polymarket while it receives conspicuously favorable regulatory treatment, or about $2.6 billion in stock trades immediately prior to the Iran war. It would also mean simultaneously governing, by moving legislation to close the McDonnell “official acts” loophole, to ban profiting off of public service, and to ban Congressional stock trading. When the next President takes office, Congress should abandon the filibuster to do these things. The path to durable governance is through tearing down parliamentary barriers to governing. Moreover, oversight hearings cannot stop at the low hanging fruit. Democrats must create a drumbeat for oversight of corporate bad actors. It’s a target-rich market: JetBlue and Instacart on surveillance pricing, Live Nation inducing a corrupt settlement with the Justice Department amid their losing antitrust trial, Skydance on its relationship to sovereign wealth funds, Jeff Bezos and Amazon on their ongoing monopolization of e-commerce, HPE-Juniper on the circumstances of their corrupt merger settlement, the Big Three PBMs, the Big Four Meatpackers, KKR and Black Bear on private equity crippling youth sports, Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic on the efforts to hide the private financial risk of the AI bubble in a systemically vulnerable network of private credit, insurance, pension funds and banks. And on and on. And Elon Musk. The richest welfare recipient in the world. As to Musk, the most obvious thing to do is not a matter of partisan convenience, but of strategic necessity: nationalize SpaceX. It’s something Matt has written about for BIG previously. SpaceX should be treated like a public utility. It’s a private company in form, but hardly so in terms of the government funding that has been central to its growth. Will Democrats actually accomplish real oversight? I don’t know. But I can say that squandering power breeds resentment, and fear of reprisal is an abdication of the duty to govern. Fundamentally, Musk’s threat, “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” is a cautionary admonition against violence, taken from scripture, Matthew 26:52. Perhaps the best response draws from another scripture, Job 1:21, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.” Thanks for reading! My name is Lee Hepner, I’m a guest-writer for BIG while Matt is out on paternity leave. Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. cheers, Lee Hepner

Here’s Why We Need to Nationalize Elon Musk’s Companies

rawamerica.comHere’s Why We Need to Nationalize Elon Musk’s CompaniesIn response to reports in The Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk personally ordered the deadly slowdown of internet access to Ukraine and that Trump then called and begged him to get it restored, Nobel Prize winning economist and all-around genius Paul Krugman called yesterday for the United States to nationalize Musk’s Starlink/Starshield array of thousands of satellites providing internet service around the world. On MS NOW, former Bush speechwriter and columnist (and guest on my show) David Frum echoed the sentiment in an interview with former Bush White House Communications Director Nicole Wallace. And Matt Stoller — often brilliantly on the monopoly beat — is also writing thoughtfully about what to do about this terrible situation. Senator Adam Schiff framed the issue when he wrote on Musk’s Nazi-infested social media site: “Either the President was lying or Musk was lying, but the decision to slow down satellite speed and access has life or death consequences for Ukraine. This deserves a full investigation by the Senate. Elon Musk should be compelled to testify before Congress and under oath. National security decisions should be made in our national security interests, and not based on the personal whim of an unstable executive.” Politico then followed up with an article titled “Dem gavels are coming for Elon Musk” citing both Republican and Democratic members of Congress calling for Musk to be called before Congress under oath. That simple call for a normal political process provoked an imperious and apparently furious Musk to reply with an implied threat: “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …” If ever there was a business that merited nationalization, Starlink is it. It only exists because it’s been heavily subsidized by US government contracts and facilities, uses the internet that the US government invented, and — those in favor of nationalization argue — shouldn’t be subject to the whims of an eccentric, ketamine-addled, Nazi-saluting, election-buying CEO whose apparent decision just cost Ukrainian lives. There’s even an argument to be made for nationalizing the rocket ship part of SpaceX (which owns Starlink/Starshield) and, like during the years when we first put men on the moon, handing it over to be owned and run by NASA. But is it even possible? Turns out that American history says an emphatic, “Yes!” During the crisis of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country’s railroads, phone companies, and telegraph operators. He did the same with the nation’s radio networks and radio stations. All were returned to private ownership after the war, but that temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis. President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same during World War II, nationalizing airplane manufacturers, gun manufacturers, over 3,300 mines, the nation’s railroads, dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Co., Hughes Tool Co., Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even one of the nation’s largest retail outlets, Montgomery Ward (as Krugman brilliantly details). He also nationalized 17 foreign companies doing business in the US. After FDR died, President Harry Truman continued seizing companies that were using the war as an excuse to jack up profits to the detriment of our nation. He nationalized meatpacking facilities across the country, the Monongahela Railroad Company, the nation’s steel mills, and hundreds of railroad companies. Like with Wilson’s nationalizations, nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it took until 1965 before all were privatized. Many had had their boards of directors and senior management replaced with people who’d put the interests of the nation ahead of their greed for profits. In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the voluntary nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak. In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history. In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994. Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, bankers made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation. Reagan investigated over 1000 CEOs, dragged some before Congress, and threw many of those bankers into prison. When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize all 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization. When George W. Bush was handed the White House by 5 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline’s security system was entirely in private hands. They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security. President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock. We (through our government) ended up holding 7.64 million shares in US Airways, 18.7 million shares of America West Airlines, 3.45 million shares in Frontier Airlines, 1.47 million shares in American TransAir, and 2.38 million shares in World Airways. Congress had deregulated the nation’s banks in 1999 when Republicans pushed through an end to the Glass-Steagall Act and Bill Clinton signed it into law. The resulting banking system crash in 2008 forced the Bush administration to nationalize the country’s two largest mortgage lenders (they held about 40% of all US mortgages), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The Bush administration then additionally nationalized a 77.9% share in AIG, a 36% share of Citigroup, and a 73.5% share of GMAC, forcing out GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner, who’d been a particularly terrible manager of that company and was actively lobbying against what Bush thought were America’s interests. As President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the brink of collapse. His administration created a new company, NGMCO, Inc., that nationalized the assets of GM and was 60.8% owned by the federal government. GM was finally fully re-privatized by the Obama administration in 2013. Chrysler went through a similar process, although both the UAW and the Canadian government were part owners when it was temporarily nationalized. Thomas M. Hanna, Director of Research at The Democracy Collaborative and author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States, compiled most of the data above in a brilliant paper titled “A History of Nationalization in the United States 1917-2009.” Toward its end, he summarizes the case for nationalizing — perhaps only temporarily — what could reasonably include America’s space-based infrastructure: “In such times of political and economic crisis, policymakers of all ideological persuasions in the United States have never been hesitant to use one of the most powerful tools at their disposal: nationalization of private enterprises and assets. “This included the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who nationalized railroads, and the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries (among others), and the Republican Ronald Reagan, who nationalized a major national bank; the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who nationalized dozens of mining and manufacturing facilities, and the Republican George W. Bush, who nationalized airport security and various major financial institutions; the Democrat Barack Obama, who nationalized auto manufacturers, and the Republican Richard Nixon, who nationalized all passenger rail service.” So, if America were to decide that Musk’s satellite and/or rocket business really should be the property of the taxpayers instead of the world’s richest man and his investors, how would that be done? Instead of trying to regulate or engage in a protracted and expensive PR battle with him, why don’t we just buy them now? The entire market capitalization of SpaceX is a mere $2.16 trillion if we were to simply force a purchase of all it’s stock, and that includes things that we don’t need to buy like his AI and social media company that have all been rolled in together. Just the satellite business could cost about half of that, depending on whose valuations you’re using. While that sounds like a lot of money, it’s less than the budget deficit Trump has run up so far just this year alone. And remember, we poured fully $6 trillion into keeping our economy afloat during the Covid pandemic year of 2020. Today’s crisis — with Trump sucking up to Putin and Starlink/Starshield being used to kneecap Ukraine — could easily lead to World War III, something that could dwarf the threat of Covid, Nazism in the 1940s, Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack, or the massive bank robberies that took place during the Reagan and Bush administrations. A nuclear war between major powers literally threatens all life on Earth. Squeals of “socialism!” and “Venezuela!” aside, we know how to nationalize industries that are working against our nation’s interests and have done it before, repeatedly. This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war. This time, it’s about saving both America and the world. Congress needs to have a serious discussion about the merits and dangers of nationalizing Starlink/Starshield and SpaceX the way we have so may other renegade but vital companies in the past. Pass it along.

Scoop: Trump Reportedly in ‘Panic Mode’ Ahead of New Documentary’s Release

rawamerica.comScoop: Trump Reportedly in ‘Panic Mode’ Ahead of New Documentary’s ReleaseGood evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America. If you’re watching this on Substack, help us get these stories in front of more people by clicking the ❤️ and tapping the restack icon. Those two clicks help more than you know. Today, a White House insider tells Raw America that Donald Trump’s administration is in “full panic mode” over an upcoming documentary produced by a former Trump administration official. The president is also now defending Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring the estranged mother of Democratic challenger Amy Acton, despite the ad being widely condemned by both Republicans and Democrats. The president has been threatening to withhold federal disaster relief, compensation for veterans and other federal money to various states if their voters elect Democrats on November 3. And the Department of Justice is now reportedly investigating former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski for allegedly using his role as former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s de facto chief of staff to cash in. One more thing before the news: we’re aiming to grow our newsroom to be able to compete with the billionaires next year, but that can only happen with your help. As you’ll read below, Raw America’s White House correspondent, Brian Karem, has his ear on the ground and is working his sources within the administration to paint a fuller picture of what’s happening behind the scenes. Our Capitol reporter, Luke De Cresce, is developing his own sources in the House and Senate so we can bring you the stories the billionaire-owned outlets won’t cover. This work can only continue if our readers step up to financially support it. Right now, we’re offering 20% off of paid memberships to make it even easier to subscribe. That’s just 17 cents a day. We’re almost 90% of the way to our goal of 10,000 subscribers by Election Day. Can you chip in right now to help us get there? Claim your 20% off before it's gone Be sure to catch our interview with Kentucky’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Charles Booker tomorrow at 12 PM ET ! You can watch it live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com. One source inside President Donald Trump’s administration confided that the White House is in “full panic mode” ahead of the release of a documentary produced by a former Trump administration official. Miles Taylor — who was chief of staff in the president’s first-term Homeland Security Department before becoming a whistleblower — said he’s releasing the film next week through his website Defiance.org to show “what Trump has turned Washington into.” “[Taylor] potentially has information that the president wouldn’t want people to see,” the White House official told Raw America’s Brian Karem. “... We’re anticipating the worst.” Trump has also recently lashed out at journalists, telling The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg that he’d “better be careful” after asking him a question. The president later had Feinberg removed from the White House travel pool. Feinberg told Raw America that the move “felt like a brushback pitch,” referring to a baseball thrown high and tight near a batter to scare them away from home plate. Other administration sources attributed the chaotic atmosphere in the White House to the president’s enabling of senior officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Olivia Troye, who was a national security and counterterrorism advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence, called Miller a “horrible human being.” “I think he is someone who has gone all in down the rabbit hole on extremism,” Troye said. “And I think in his mind, there would be no migrants, immigrants or any mixed race in our country.” Other sources inside both the FBI and the Department of Justice have said they’re facing internal pressure to suppress votes ahead of the midterms and are “looking for a way out.” Naomi Seligman, who is president of whistbloweraid.org, encouraged those with information to come forward and said her organization “would be happy to talk with any or all of these folks, if they are interested.” In Ohio, Trump is now officially defending one of the ugliest political ads of this cycle, if not this century. In a Thursday Truth Social post, the president defended a commercial produced by Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as “very powerful.” The ad featured Donna Arthur, who is the estranged mother of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton. Arthur said in the ad that her daughter has “lied her entire life” and that she shouldn’t hold office. Trump wrote: “anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor,” in his signature style of oddly placed capital letters. The ad leaves out important context. Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was criminally charged with raping her when she was just a child. Acton’s mother stayed married to him despite her husband assaulting her daughter. The two fled the state after he was released on bond, and he stayed on the lam until he died in 2004. Acton said she hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother since she was 12 years old. The backlash has come from both sides of the political aisle. Two-term Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine called Ramaswamy’s ad “deeply, deeply troubling.” Former Republican Senator Rob Portman told Politico the spot “crosses the line.” Trump dismissed the criticism, arguing DeWine “probably wants a Dumocrat to win” and said Ramaswamy should keep the ad on the air. Ramaswamy’s campaign has reportedly committed another $4 million to the ad in the final weeks of the campaign cycle. Acton said the spot was tantamount to exploitation, adding that her mother “is not well.” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, told The New York Times that Donna Arthur “stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” If you’re learning something from these stories that you wouldn’t have learned elsewhere, we’re counting on you to support our reporting with a paying subscription. Right now we’re offering subscriptions for 20% off. Can we count on you to join for just 17 cents a day? Claim your 20% off discount The midterms are less than two weeks away, and Trump’s approval rating has plummeted to a record-low 36 percent according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. As desperation sets in, the president’s pitch to voters is sounding more like a shakedown every day. During a recent rally in Gastonia, North Carolina on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley, Trump said that if he loses to Democrat Roy Cooper, he may not send the remainder of the Tar Heel State’s pending Hurricane Helene relief funds. He reassured the crowd he was joking, but Democratic North Carolina Governor Josh Stein said that was “no way to run a country.” A few days later in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump dangled the threat of withholding compensation for veterans from Camp Lejeune who were suffering health problems from contaminated water if Republicans didn’t win. And unlike his Gastonia comment, he didn’t couch his remarks in humor when he said “if we don’t win, there’s no money.” That’s a significant threat, as more than one million Marines, family members and civilian employees at Camp Lejeune were exposed to the toxic water between 1953 and 1987. Over in Kansas, Trump promised year-round sales of E15 fuel, but conditioned it on whether Republican Senator Roger Marshall prevailed on November 3 against Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton. A spokesperson for the Hamilton campaign likened the president’s remarks to “blackmailing Kansans for our votes.” Trump also hinted that he wouldn’t send federal money to Ohio if Amy Acton is elected governor. And we all remember when he suggested he’d send every American adult a check for $5,000 if the GOP keeps its majorities in Congress. Moody’s economist Mark Zandi told Newsweek that offer “appears highly unlikely” to ever materialize. Our final story today is about Corey Lewandowski, who was Donald Trump’s campaign manager for his first White House run back in 2016. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department is now investigating Lewandowski over claims that he leveraged his top post at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a money-making opportunity. The investigation sprung out of a referral from the DHS’ inspector general. It’s the first publicly known example of the president’s second-term DOJ looking into someone who was once in Trump’s inner circle. Lewandowski was a senior advisor to Kristi Noem when she led the DHS earlier this year, before both she and Lewandowski resigned in March amid heightened public scrutiny over excessive spending. While Lewandowski was working in Noem’s office an unpaid special government employee, he or his associates signed off on nearly every expenditure in excess of $100,000. DHS’ internal watchdog office found evidence he Lewandowski have been involved in improperly awarding contracts to friends and business contacts. Lewandowski maintains he didn’t do anything illegal. Still, the Journal pointed out that Trump’s Justice Department has so far mostly focused its resources on hounding the president’s critics and reduced its renowned public corruption unit to just two prosecutors. Lewandowski has reportedly told people he expects Trump to pardon him if he’s ever formally charged, though his lawyer made sure to dispute that. While Bari Weiss is driving CBS into the ground and CNN reporters are resigning in anticipation of David Ellison bringing in Weiss to do the same there, Raw America is doubling down on our commitment to provide you with the unfiltered truth not watered down by a billionaire owner with a Mar-a-Lago membership. We say this a lot, but it bears repeating: we don’t have a wealthy benefactor with a bottomless bank account keeping us afloat. We have you. That’s why we’re running a special sale and offering Raw America memberships at a 20% discount for just 17 cents a day. We’re counting on you to keep this work going. Will you make your support of independent media official by subscribing today? Get 20% off a paying subscription I’m British Chris. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. If you haven’t already, please help us break through the algorithm by tapping the ❤️ and clicking restack. And be sure to watch our live interview with Kentucky Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Charles Booker tomorrow at 12 PM ET. Share

Top GOP Operative Let Out-of-State Voters Vote From His PA Home

thebulwark.comTop GOP Operative Let Out-of-State Voters Vote From His PA Home(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock) ONE OF THE MOST HIGH-PROFILE grassroots organizers in the Republican party purchased a home in Beaver County, Pennsylvania in April 2024. The former steelmaking stronghold just north of Pittsburgh was a logical place for Scott Presler to put down roots. His get-out-the-vote efforts have been heavily focused on Pennsylvania, which was destined to be one of the key swing states that cycle—and, it seemed, well beyond. Presler cast his own ballot using that address during the 2024 cycle. So did three other people outside the Presler family. A review of voter registration records shows that GOP operatives from states across the country used Presler’s home address to cast ballots in Pennsylvania during the 2024 election. They include a consultant who voted in Florida in both 2020 and April 2025, along with a right-wing social media personality from Oklahoma. Presler has been a leading proponent of the Republican party’s claim that Democrats have illegally registered voters. He even has attacked a homeless shelter in Pennsylvania for allegedly having 500 people registered to vote from there even though it has a 100-bed capacity. (“Imagine being confused by something this obvious. The homeless are also allowed to vote!” tweeted Daniel Pearson, a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial writer.) Now legal experts say that Presler’s use of his home as a base for out-of-state voters to cast Pennsylvania ballots raises questions about whether he committed the same acts of which he has accused others. An individual who wishes to vote in Pennsylvania must, by state law, reside in the state and the intended election district for at least thirty days before Election Day. The address provided when registering to vote must be “considered the residence . . . in which his habitation is fixed, and to which, whenever he is absent, he has the intention of returning.” The law also makes clear that “a person shall not be considered to have gained a residence in any election district of this State into which he comes for temporary purposes only, without the intention of making such election district his permanent place of abode.” In a statement sent to The Bulwark from a generic email account, Presler’s PAC, Early Vote Action, confirmed that Presler’s residence was used as a voting address for other individuals, but defended the practice. “Mr. Presler is a generous person who, over time, has had friends find residency in his home while actively working and residing in Pennsylvania. EVA PAC takes its voter registration compliance with law very seriously,” the statement read. “Several of the residents that once lived in Scott’s home have now since departed and found residence elsewhere in other states—yet as you’ve shown, the PA voter rolls continue to reflect their names here. It is pure madness that PA can’t clean up their voter rolls.” But a close review of financial documents, voting records, and social media activity calls into question whether these “friends” had truly established residency in Pennsylvania as defined in state law. Among those who listed Presler’s home on their voter registration is Heather Langley. In an article she wrote for Nola.com in November 2024, Langley was described as a “business and political consultant” based in New Iberia, Louisiana. Records filed with the Federal Election Commission also indicate that she once resided in Crestview, Florida. Writing in August 2024, Presler said that Langley had “uprooted her life to spend the next 3 months for Trump in Pennsylvania.” What was not revealed in that post was that Langley was using Presler’s address as her home base. Langley’s own posts on X also suggest that she did not plan to make Pennsylvania her “permanent place of abode.” In posts from August and October 2024, Langley referred to Louisiana as her home state. And after the election, Langley appears to have gone back south. Following a snowstorm that hit southern Louisiana, she posted a photo of her dogs in the snow to X on January 21, 2025: Federal campaign finance records further complicate the idea that Langley moved to Pennsylvania in 2024 to make it her permanent place of residence. Between August 5, 2024 and November 13, 2024, Langley received twelve payments from Presler’s Early Vote Action PAC for “field strategy consulting” and travel reimbursement, totaling $9,407.47. These documents filed with the FEC list Langley’s address as a home in Crestview, Florida. Langley was registered to vote at that Crestview address in August 2020, and voted from that address in November 2020. And just a few months after the 2024 election, Langley once again voted in Florida—this time casting a ballot in the special elections in the state on April 1, 2025. Presented with this information, Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia election lawyer who represents Democratic campaigns, said that Langley seems to be “someone who has traveled for work and is staying someplace for work.” He added that “an individual who has stayed someplace . . . for a temporary work stay has not established Pennsylvania residence. That’s not even a close call under Pennsylvania law.” Last year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reaffirmed that “physical presence and permanency” were required for voting in the state. The court also ruled that a person’s stated intent was not sufficient on its own: “In the law of domicile, intent is the actual state of facts, not what one declares them to be.” Instead, the court considered facts such as a person’s “presence or absence at an address, where the members of his household reside . . . where he sleeps, what belongings and personal effects he keeps at the address, [and] whether he owns another home to which he is more permanently attached.” Share ANOTHER PERSON WHO REGISTERED to vote using Presler’s Beaver County home but who appears to have roots elsewhere was Alfred Ashley. Ashley’s social media activity suggests he traveled from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania at some point in 2024—with one of his posts indicating he arrived in Pennsylvania six weeks before Election Day. While it’s unclear exactly when Ashley arrived in Pennsylvania, what is clear is that on September 20, 2024 he responded to an X post telling him to register voters in Pennsylvania by writing: “As an out of state resident, I can not legally register voters here.” Despite this, only three days later on September 23, 2024, Ashley posted that he “Moved to Pennsylvania JUST to vote for Trump.” Two weeks later, on October 8, 2024, Ashley filmed a selfie video inside what appears to be Presler’s house1 as proof that he lived there. He did not state that it was Presler’s home in the video, though he did include a frame of what appears to be him and Presler together at the end, seemingly at the Beaver County Courthouse. In the video, Ashley said: I am at my house that I have moved to about five weeks ago and I just registered to vote today here in Pennsylvania. And so I just want to give you guys a little tour, prove that I actually do live here. I don’t know how I plan to do that. Oh, here we go, you can just kind of see from the scenery behind me that it is Pennsylvania. Later that month, Ashley was photographed and tagged in Langley’s post announcing that she had registered to vote in Pennsylvania. On October 17, 2024, Ashley posted to X that “@ScottPresler & I are residents of Beaver County Pennsylvania.” But Ashley’s posts from after the election suggest that he quickly left Pennsylvania and returned to Oklahoma. On November 11, 2024, he wrote that he was “driving to Oklahoma tomorrow.” A December 7, 2024 post to X also places Ashley in Oklahoma. On January 31, 2025, he wrote, “My RINO senator from Oklahoma MUST get primaried.” Give a gift membership JOSEPH ALBERT PETRIELLA ALSO REGISTERED to vote at Presler’s Beaver County house in 2024 and voted by mail from the address, according to Beaver County voter rolls. Unlike Ashley and Langley, Petriella’s digital presence is limited. Just six days before the 2024 election, Petriella donated $235 to Trump National Committee JFC [Joint Fundraising Committee], Inc. Of that donation, $211.50 was passed along to Trump’s campaign committee, now called Never Surrender, Inc. Corresponding FEC forms list Petriella’s address as a home owned by a Virginia-based company in the Courthouse neighborhood of the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia. He has listed other Arlington addresses on FEC forms since 2020. Since October 2024, Petriella has listed Presler’s PAC, @EarlyVoteAction, in his X profile bio. Archived captures of Petriella’s X profile show he listed his location as “Pennsylvania” between at least October 21, 2024 and March 12, 2025. However, he changed his location to “DC” by March 30, 2025—the same location his X account lists today. Marian Schneider, Pennsylvania’s former deputy secretary of state for elections and administration, told The Bulwark that the use of a temporary abode for purposes of voting would run against the intent of the state’s laws. “People who come here temporarily who know they’re not staying here really should not be registering in Pennsylvania, especially if they leave right after the election,” she said. “What you want to avoid is somebody coming to Pennsylvania, voting in Pennsylvania one year, then going back to their other state and voting in that state the next year.” Share The Bulwark EVEN PRESLER HIMSELF appears to spend limited time at his Beaver County home. After buying the property in April 2024, he continued to post about trips “back to Northern Virginia.” Based on a search of the FEC database, on every federal campaign contribution Presler has made since voting in Pennsylvania in 2024, he has listed a family home in Fairfax Station, Virginia. In January 2025, Presler posted that “while I’m keeping my house in Pennsylvania, the majority of my time this year will be spent in New Jersey.” In August 2025, Presler posted a video of himself at the Beaver County house captioned: “At my house in Beaver County, PA, doing some yard work. I haven’t been home since December & it’s important that I’m a good neighbor.” Despite these posts, voter records show that since the 2024 election Presler has continued to vote from his Pennsylvania address. He even won a seat on the Republican State Committee—the Pennsylvania GOP’s governing body—representing Beaver County in May 2026. County voter records indicate that a 2026 general election ballot was recorded for Presler and on Thursday, Presler posted a photo of himself returning his ballot in Pennsylvania. And throughout the current election cycle, Presler’s Beaver County house has continued to operate as a base for Republican operatives to vote in Pennsylvania. Braden Douglas Sisk registered to vote at Presler’s address in Beaver County on June 10, 2026. Sisk’s profile picture on Facebook features him standing with Presler, and his bio describes him as a Washington State National Delegate to the RNC. On June 20, 2026 Sisk posted a photo of his service dog sitting in front of a Beaver County Republicans table. He also posted from an animal hospital just north of Pittsburgh on September 24, after his dog underwent surgery. Voter records from Beaver County suggest that Sisk already has cast his ballot in Pennsylvania this cycle. But on October 18, 2026 he posted to Facebook from the Pittsburgh airport that he was traveling to Seattle. He wrote, “What do you do when your service dog just gets discharged from the ER with terminal liver failure? You go back home to Washington State, chase ballots, and help save your state!” Defining residency is not entirely black and white under Pennsylvania law, and it is up to county election officials and the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis. But it’s in that gray area where Presler himself has made some of his sharpest attacks against Democrats and election administration officials. He has made countless accusations of voter fraud—even going so far as to claim that the 2020 election was stolen—while using his own house to test the limits of Pennsylvania’s residency requirement laws. As Schneider noted, people who relocate temporarily for political work shouldn’t be registering to vote in Pennsylvania. “These are people who are gaming the system, which is exactly what they’ve been railing about, and that’s what’s annoying.” Leave a comment

DOJ seeks to block Alaska Senate result if Republican incumbent narrowly loses

washingtonpost.comDOJ seeks to block Alaska Senate result if Republican incumbent narrowly losesThe Justice Department has moved to preemptively block certification of the results of Alaska’s Senate race if Republican incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses his tight race against Democrat Mary Peltola next month, launching an unusual legal battle amid broader concerns over the Trump administration’s willingness to accept the election results. In a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday, department officials described the candidacy of a third contender in the race — another Republican named Dan J. Sullivan Jr. — as a bid to mislead supporters of Sen. Sullivan into voting for the wrong candidate. They asked a federal judge to bar the state from certifying the race’s results should the senator lose by a margin less than the number of votes his same-named challenger receives. In that scenario, the department said, the court should investigate whether that result was tainted by voter confusion. The move marked a remarkable bid by the Justice Department to potentially intervene in the outcome of a race that could determine control of the Senate before the election has occurred. Just hours before the suit was filed, Attorney General Todd Blanche downplayed the suggestion his agency would seek to interfere with state certified election outcomes outside of what he described as a “doomsday scenario.” “It is not DOJ’s intention to — and it’s never our intention to — improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process,” Blanche told reporters Thursday. “But, you know, to say there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course, I’m not going to say that.” As Election Day approaches, Democrats have grown increasingly alarmed by what they view as attempts by the Justice Department to influence the outcome of the vote. The Trump administration has pushed in public and in court to exert greater control over state-run election administration and worked to cast doubt on the integrity of the results. In Alaska, Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward wrote in the Thursday filing, “the sole purpose of [Dan J. Sullivan’s] candidacy is to benefit the Peltola campaign by reducing the number of votes for Senator Sullivan.” “Given the substantial likelihood that the inclusion of Dan J. Sullivan will confuse or mislead voters looking to cast a vote for Senator Sullivan and thus distort the will of Alaskan voters, there is a substantial likelihood that a certification of the election will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity,” Woodward, the Justice Department’s third highest-ranking official, added. Dan J. Sullivan did not immediately return requests for comment Friday. Spokespeople for Sen. Dan S. Sullivan and Peltola also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The candidacy of Dan J. Sullivan — a retired teacher and a former member of the Alaska Independence Party who registered as a Republican shortly before filing to enter the race this year — has been a source of consternation for Republicans. Alaska election officials moved in June to boot him from the ballot, agreeing that his entry into the race was meant to confuse voters. But Dan J. Sullivan has repeatedly denied claims that he was trying to confuse, or coordinating with Democrats or Peltola’s campaign. A state court ordered him back on the ballot later that month, a decision later affirmed by the state’s Supreme Court. He advanced to the general election in the state’s August primary, which selects the top four candidates regardless of party. He received only 2.5 percent of the vote — almost entirely from liberal strongholds in the state. Name confusion is not new in the state of under 780,000. Dan S. Sullivan, the current senator, was first elected in 2014, the same year the then-Anchorage mayor, also named Dan Sullivan, was running for lieutenant governor. Jim Lottsfeldt, an Anchorage-based political consultant, said name confusion likely contributed to Dan S. Sullivan’s victory that year. (Former mayor Sullivan endorsed Sen. Sullivan against the teacher Sullivan in this year’s race.) Lottsfeldt had the idea at the time to recruit more candidates named Dan Sullivan to the Senate ballot to confuse voters, though he declined to actually go through with it. He denied any involvement in Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy this year. “I actually looked and saw there were like 14 Dan Sullivans,” Lottsfeldt said in an interview last month. President Donald Trump on Wednesday called Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy a “SCAM” and hinted that his administration could soon seek legal intervention in the race. “We are looking at powerful legal options to remove the fraudulent Dan J. Sullivan Jr. from the Ballot, and holding the Democrats accountable for their Election Interference, in the pursuit of Justice and Fairness,” Trump wrote on social media. Still, election experts described the legal arguments advanced by the department in the suit Thursday as “absurdly thin” and predicted it would not withstand judicial scrutiny. University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller called the department’s suit “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.” “In short, like many Department letters over the last few years, it is designed to win the press release rather than the litigation,” Muller wrote in a blog post. The suit relies on a novel reading of the National Voter Registration Act -- a broad statute that governs voter registration requirements. Instead, Justice Department lawyers cited a mention in the law’s preamble Thursday to justify its interest in the outcome of the Alaska race, saying it authorized the federal government to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” Though the suit called for Alaska’s results to be put on hold in the event of Sen. Sullivan’s narrow loss so an investigation can be conducted to determine voters intended that result, the filing does not explain how such an investigation would be carried out while also protecting the secrecy of voters’ ballot choices. Trump has spent years questioning election procedures and has fretted in recent months that a Democratic takeover of Congress could lead to his third impeachment. He continues to insist he won the 2020 election, even though recounts and court reviews found he lost, and he regularly complains without evidence that elections are rigged against Republicans. He and his administration have spent the past two years trying to intervene with how states run elections, but have had little success. Trump tried to limit who received mail ballots but was stopped by the Supreme Court. The Justice Department sued 30 states for their voter rolls but has lost case after case in court. The Department of Homeland Security has prioritized finding noncitizens on voter rolls, but a judge this week restricted how it can conduct its investigations. Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor and director of the school’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, told NPR this week he did not believe the Trump administration and its backers would challenge results if Democrats win control of Congress in a blowout. But Hasen, who spoke before the Justice Department filed its latest lawsuit, named Alaska as a potential legal battleground if Democrats narrowly take control of the Senate. The state uses ranked-choice voting and takes longer than others to tabulate results, heightening the chances of litigation there, he noted. “If it comes down to one seat, then I think all bets are off. And then I’m very concerned that the Trump administration will try to do things to manipulate the outcome of the elections,” Hasen said.

Trump Repeatedly Short-Circuits During Rally Speech

newrepublic.comTrump Repeatedly Short-Circuits During Rally SpeechPresident Donald Trump won’t stop inserting wild sound effects into his already incoherent rants. After holding 21 campaign rallies in the span of just two months, the evidently exhausted 80-year-old president appeared to short-circuit repeatedly during a rally in Iowa Thursday. “If you don’t want Communists controlling the Senate, which is between JIIIAAAAT,” Trump slurred. “How about the gentleman from a place called Michigan, he’s in a jihadist. He’s a jihadist!”Twitter embed Trump was referring to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim and a Democrat—not a Communist or jihadist. Later, in a desperate attempt to appeal to normal people, Trump once again pretended he could relate to struggles with landscaping equipment, with some … creative insertions. “You got to be very smart to turn on a lawnmower. I don’t want you to have to think too much. I’d like you to POWW or BIIING,” Trump said. Twitter embed It appears that Trump’s post-verbal outbursts are becoming a commonplace communication tactic for the commander in chief. At a rally in South Carolina Wednesday, Trump declared “EUHH” when discussing former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, announced “PEW, PEW, PEW” when lying about his unlawful military strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats, and shouted “POW” when describing how oil would supposedly flow when his extended military campaign against Iran finally ends. Matthew Bianchini, the Republican mayor of Pemberton Township, New Jersey, physically charged at one of his constituents during a township meeting Wednesday night. Video footage from a reporter with the Pine Barrens Tribune shows Bianchini having to be restrained by multiple people and escorted from the council chambers while he yelled, “I am getting you—I am fucking get you!” Bianchini was upset at Michael Sawka, a frequent critic. Sawka called for Bianchini to resign and to be arrested after the incident. “He just threatened me! That is on video! That is on audio,” Sawka said. “I want the police here to arrest him for that threat. That is assault!” During the meeting, Sawka allegedly insulted Bianchini’s wife and daughter, who were at the meeting, and then made an obscene gesture at Bianchini. Later, Bianchini told TV station WPVI, “Was it wrong? Absolutely. Was it justified? Absolutely. And I would do it again if I had to.” “Don’t attack my family. I think any good husband, any good father, would’ve done just what I did.” Sawka denied provoking the mayor. “His family behind us started saying stuff. I turn around, and I start waving my hands, like kinda just—why don’t you all just shut up? I didn’t even say a word; I just was waving my hand,” Sawka said. Bianchini has a history of confrontation since becoming mayor in January. He told a councilmember to “shut the fuck up” during a budget dispute in May. President Trump went on another unprompted homoerotic tangent at a rally on Thursday, this time about military generals. “Just recently I gave all members of the United States military $1,776,” Trump said at the Iowa rally, speaking of his one-time “warrior dividend” for service members. “And everyone said, ‘Oh, it can’t be done. You can’t do it. It won’t be done. You can’t do it.’ Well, I did it. I said, generals, I want to give them a bonus. They’ve been so great. Tell me what we can do.... These three guys who were so handsome. I hate handsome men. I’ve always hated. They’re like central casting, four-star guys.” Trump went on to finish his anecdote.Twitter embed This is becoming a trend for Trump, which is especially strange given that he likes to present himself as particularly hypermasculine. For the last week, he has been obsessing over Senator Jon Husted’s buttocks. “I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body. And I looked and I watched up and down. I watched his ass and I looked at the whole. And then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands, he’s got these, like, claws. And I got it. You are a great athlete. I didn’t know that because he doesn’t talk about that. Congratulations, now they finally know. That was very good,” Trump said last week. “I’m studying his body,” Trump said again days later. “I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course. But it’s never been my thing. But I looked at his ass. And then I looked at his legs. I said, ‘His ass, shit, it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’”Twitter embed “Every night now he plays out a new gay fantasy in public and makes bizarre noises. His words increasingly make no sense. Dementia is overtaking him, and the fact that his party refuses to see it makes the whole party a danger to the United States,” Trump biographer Seth Abramson wrote online. “Vote to protect your country.” Jared Kushner oversaw foreign slush funds filled and managed by the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, Vanity Fair reported Thursday. In the forthcoming book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, author Matthew Cole made a shocking revelation about Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s potentially illegal dealings with foreign dictators. During the first Trump administration, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service discovered a way to hack into Kushner’s iPhone. Officials learned that he was secretly moving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a bank account at First Dubai Bank. Crucially, Kushner did not own the account, but was merely a signatory for the account managed and owned by the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, a government-funded charity run by Dherar Belhoul Al Falasi, a close friend of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, referred to as MBZ. Starting in 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis transferred roughly $750 million into the account to be used as a foreign policy slush fund. The charity was used to fund the UAE government’s covert intelligence operations overseas, as well as its secret weapons-purchasing programs, one confidential source told Cole. First Dubai Bank is run by Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, MBZ’s brother. (Tahnoon also oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm Affinity Partners.) The money was sent by a bank in Azerbaijan, where banks have a well-established but unadvertised practice of exchanging Saudi riyals or Emirati dirhams for an equal amount of American dollars. Four senior Trump administration officials—including two national security advisers, a White House chief of staff, and a former CIA director—told Cole they were not aware that the president had authorized Kushner to access a foreign government bank account. Kushner’s lawyer denied that his client had any knowledge of the charity or the bank account, and claimed that Trump’s son-in-law did not make any arrangements with foreign leaders that the president did not agree to. But that wasn’t the only account Kushner managed. By the spring of 2018, MBZ had also put roughly $1 billion for Kushner into a second account at Israel’s Central Bank—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging. Unlike the political slush fund, Kushner’s activity in this account indicated that it was for his personal use. The money was difficult to access, and so Kushner would channel requests to Netanyahu for the funds to be released through then-Ambassador David M. Friedman, and then move the money through an account in Cyprus. The former diplomat denied any involvement in the scheme, and claimed that “there are no accounts, and never were.” Additionally, the UAE secretly put money into yet another account at Israel’s Central Bank as a “rainy-day defense fund” in case of an attack from Iran. It should go without saying, but Kushner did not disclose his access to these accounts to the IRS—potentially violating federal law. At the time, Kushner was a government employee who worked in the White House, meaning he was required to submit both public and confidential financial forms and disclose any bank account on which he had access as a signatory or beneficiary. Kushner also failed to disclose himself as an agent of a foreign government, having been paid nearly $2 billion in total by foreign leaders. If he offered anything in return for the money, even just conversations with his father-in-law, then he would have violated U.S. bribery laws and the foreign agent statute. This is far from the first time that Kushner has been accused of blatant self-dealing in his service to Trump. He used used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit his business partners, invested in a firm that saw massive gains from Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, and used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East. Attorney General Todd Blanche is open to blocking states from certifying the November midterm elections. Blanche made the comments during a Thursday press gaggle in Virginia. “Is there any scenario in which DOJ would weigh in on that certification process or try to block states from certifying?” a reporter asked. “Is there any scenario? Yes,” Blanche said. “Of course there’s scenarios that we could all come up with hypothetically, some doomsday scenario for example, right? I don’t think it’s proper to make any kind of conclusory statements about what’s gonna happen in the future.... It is not DOJ’s intention to—and it’s never our intention—to improperly interfere with our elections.” “But to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I’m not gonna say that,” he continued. Twitter embed The federal government is not supposed to play a role in state certification of elections. The soundbite quickly raised alarm to Blanche’s left. “THIS IS CODE RED !!” wrote California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office. “Trump’s politicized DOJ is now saying out loud that they may interfere in the election in a desperate, unprecedented, and completely unAmerican and anti-democratic attempt to keep Trump and MAGA in power.” “He answered the question of whether Donald Trump’s DOJ may interfere in the midterm elections with a ‘Yes,’” said Campaign for New York Health’s Melanie D’Arrigo. It is incredibly abnormal for a sitting attorney general to float the possibility of interfering with an election, especially one who believes the Justice Department is not independent from the president (in this case, a president who has spent six years trying to manufacture a baseless voter fraud scandal). Yet Blanche, Trump’s formal personal attorney, did it with ease.

Corruption is voters’ top issue ahead of midterm election, CNBC survey shows

cnbc.comCorruption is voters’ top issue ahead of midterm election, CNBC survey showsKansas residents fill out their ballot for the midterms on the first day of in-person voting at the Douglas County Clerk Election Office in Lawrence, Kansas on October 14, 2026. Voters are now more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high grocery and gas prices, according to the final CNBC All-America Economic Survey before the Nov. 3 midterm election. The finding follows a monthslong messaging effort by Democrats to link widespread economic dissatisfaction with what they allege is rampant corruption by President Donald Trump and his Republican allies. CNBC’s survey of 1,000 registered U.S. voters found 36% of respondents pointing to government corruption as one of the most important issues facing the country right now. The cost of food and groceries came second with 34%, followed by protecting democracy and the price of gas, which garnered 23% each. The nationwide poll, which gauged attitudes about the economy, Trump, Congress, artificial intelligence, the Iran war and more, was conducted Oct. 14-18. It was co-led by Democratic pollster Hart Research Associates and Republican pollster Public Opinion Strategies, and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Read the full survey results here. To be sure, the question asking voters to name their top concerns lists several economy- and cost-related topics separately, subdividing an issue that might otherwise rank higher if lumped into a single category. But the results nevertheless align with other recent polls showing corruption has shot to the top of voters’ list of pressing worries. A Fox News poll published last week found 60% of registered voters are extremely concerned about government corruption, surpassing concerns about inflation and high prices. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found some two-thirds of respondents think Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, up 10 percentage points since September 2025. Gallup recently found perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. have hit multi-decade highs. And an August poll from Reuters/Ipsos found nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump’s businesses influence his presidential decisions. Republicans have also tried to seize on growing anti-corruption sentiment. The Trump administration has launched a task force led by Vice President JD Vance aimed at cracking down on fraud, while the president frequently accuses his Democratic enemies of crookery. “I just want to say that from day one of my administration, we’ve waged an unprecedented war on corruption and fraud, and will not let our country be looted and plundered by thieves and pirates and foreign fraudsters and basically scum,” Trump said Tuesday while unveiling a new reward program for whistleblowers. But with Republicans in charge of the federal government — and as high costs linked to Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war have put the GOP on defense — Democrats have been able to cast blame more directly. “Americans have spent well over $100 BILLION extra on gas because Trump chose to go to war with Iran,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Wednesday on X. “His ego-fueled decisions cost you thousands.”Flood lights illuminate the low rain clouds around the U.S. Capitol Building at night on October 11, 2026, in Washington, DC. Their arguments often spotlight Trump, attempting to draw a contrast between Americans’ widely felt financial struggles with the president’s surging net worth, his family’s lucrative business dealings and his focus on pricey construction projects. Other Democratic candidates have widened the scope of the message, delivering a pitch that the system itself is broken. “The problem is that the people’s elected representatives don’t represent the people. They represent the donors and special interests,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., said in an April campaign video. “Corruption is why things don’t work for ordinary people.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has hammered the claim that Republicans have betrayed their vow to bring down costs. “The wealthy and well-connected are cashing in. What are Republicans doing to lower costs for everyone else? Absolutely nothing,” Jeffries wrote Friday. Democrats’ push appears to be resonating with voters, even as large swaths remain skeptical of both parties. Respondents to the CNBC survey gave Democrats a 4-point edge over Republicans, 35% to 31%, when asked which party would do a better job dealing with government corruption. But that gap grew to 17 points in Democrats’ favor among voters who said corruption was their most important issue. And independents, by a 15-point margin, said Democrats would address corruption better than Republicans – though 41% of those respondents think neither party would do a good job. The apparent rise in concern about corruption is welcome news to critics of the president who have long lamented that Americans have become numb to scandal in the Trump era. That shift is taking place because voters are feeling the impact of inflation and connecting it to what they see in Washington, said Brian Lemek, executive of the Democrat-backing political action committee Defend the Vote, in an interview. “It’s the only thing people are talking about right now,” said Lemek, whose group briefed candidates on the issue in June. Voters are “looking at the reality that their costs are high” and “making the connection between this corrupt and broken system and their high costs,” he said. Additionally, survey respondents overwhelmingly opposed the idea of elected officials, including the president and members of Congress, personally owning or trading stocks in individual companies that have contracts with the federal government. That should not be allowed, 93% of voters said in the poll. A similar proportion – 89% – said that companies owned, or invested in, by a sitting president’s immediate family members should not be allowed to receive contracts from the federal government. “This definitely ties back to the corruption issues that we’ve been talking about,” said Alicia Simmons of Hart Research Associates.

Ken Paxton’s Trust Gave a $600,000 Infusion to a Convicted Fraudster’s Company

texastribune.orgKen Paxton’s Trust Gave a $600,000 Infusion to a Convicted Fraudster’s CompanyFour years after North Texas home builder Scott Sherman completed a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, his new construction materials business received a $600,000 cash infusion. The financial boost came from a blind trust set up to prevent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, from any overlap in their personal investments and their actions as elected officials. But previously unreleased records from the attorney general’s 2023 impeachment investigation show the trust was far from blind and did not shield the Paxtons from its business dealings, including the investment in Sherman’s business. Before long, Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel, which Sherman built with his father, grew into a vast enterprise with various locations and subsidiaries. And along the way, some of those businesses stopped paying taxes to local governments, including school districts. But as their tax debts stacked up, Wildcatter companies wired the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars in the months leading up to and during the attorney general’s impeachment on charges of corruption and bribery. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Legislature and is now in an expensive and tight race for a U.S. Senate seat against Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker. While Paxton has been in public office for more than two decades, the blind trust he established upon becoming attorney general has largely obscured his business dealings. The Paxtons’ investment in Wildcatter through that trust offers a new, previously unreported look at both the limits of that trust and the attorney general’s financial association with the very type of business executives whose prosecutions he typically celebrates. “In Texas, we fight fraud head-on and will not rest until every last corrupt actor is brought to justice,” Paxton said in a news release last year. In a recent social media post linking to a newly released campaign ad, he wrote, “As Attorney General, I’ve made big pharma and fraudsters pay billions.” Doing business with a recently convicted felon undermines that narrative and erodes public trust in his role as the state’s top anti-fraud watchdog, ethics experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said he would have thought “the attorney general of Texas would have the good sense not to be dealing with a convicted felon.” “They’ll pay out their friends while they’re not paying their taxes, run up debt,” said Painter, who has been critical of staunch Paxton ally President Donald Trump. “But the question is, why is the attorney general of Texas dealing with those kinds of people?” Wildcatter Sand Services had a tax warrant issued against it for back taxes after facing a lawsuit by local governments. Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Ken Paxton did not answer detailed questions from the news organizations about the Wildcatter investment or whether he knew of Sherman’s conviction. He has previously defended his business dealings, saying he follows ethics laws. A spokesperson for Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce last year, said that she was not aware of Sherman’s criminal history. Sherman ran a homebuilding firm, Artisan Operating LP, when he pleaded guilty in 2014 for his role in a mortgage fraud conspiracy. The scheme involved artificially inflating home prices to obtain larger loans for more than two dozen properties in cities across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Sherman did not respond to calls made to his cellphone and company or to emailed questions. Paxton’s connection to Sherman is the second revelation in recent weeks of the attorney general engaging with people charged with federal crimes. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton celebrated New Year’s Eve 2024 in Dubai with two Americans who failed to return to the U.S. after being indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges. A spokesperson for Paxton didn’t address his association with the defendants but said in a statement to the Journal that the attorney general has been “politically persecuted for years.” ProPublica and the Tribune found the Paxtons’ investment in Wildcatter by reviewing records collected by impeachment investigators. The records show that Ken Paxton had at least some knowledge of the blind trust’s investments, which could violate terms the Paxtons set when establishing the trust. It would also run afoul of U.S. Senate rules, which Paxton would be bound by if elected, said Donald Kettl, an ethics expert and former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Those rules, Kettl said, require senators with a blind trust to have no knowledge of its investments. “It’s reasonable to ask whether a candidate for the U.S. Senate has followed the ethics rules for financial reporting of blind trusts that would be required if the candidate became a senator,” he said. In setting up the blind trust, the Paxtons agreed that their friend Chip Loper would manage the assets without consulting with them or taking “any instructions regarding investment matters,” according to incorporation documents. Loper did not respond to a request for an interview and did not answer questions about the Paxtons’ involvement in selecting investments. Text messages that emerged during the impeachment probe, however, showed he and Ken Paxton discussed certain investments. Mortgage and deed records show that Paxton purchased eight properties between 2015 and 2026 and then transferred them into the trust. The Wildcatter investment also appears to have slipped past the required firewall. Angela Paxton served for years on a Wildcatter advisory board beginning in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune could not find any documents describing her responsibilities in the role, which she described as “non-governing” on her personal financial disclosures. While on the board, she voted for legislation that shielded a subsidiary from certain environmental complaints. The Paxtons also claimed more than $93,000 in itemized losses from Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel on their 2020 federal joint income tax return. “That is proof positive that there’s nothing blind about this trust,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in legal and government ethics. If Ken Paxton “can report on his tax return a transaction, then he is not blind to the transaction.” After Wildcatter received the cash injection from the Paxtons’ blind trust, Sherman went on a shopping spree. He purchased a sand mine in the North Texas town of Denison and a concrete plant 40 miles down the road in Gunter, a city of about 2,000 residents. Both are in Grayson County near the Oklahoma border. Neighbors complained to Texas environmental regulators about clouds of dust from Wildcatter and other companies located at the Gunter site that they said coated their properties for up to 12 hours a day. In 2021 and 2022, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued violation notices to Wildcatter Redi-Mix, the company that runs the Gunter plant. At least one dust-related violation was resolved when a road leading to the plant was paved in 2022, according to TCEQ documents. TCEQ did not respond to a request for comment. Neighbors continued to raise concerns about the plant. Angela Paxton joined the advisory board of Wildcatter Materials, which owns Wildcatter Redi-Mix, a year later. The IRS defines advisory boards as lacking legal and financial authority over companies. She was still serving on the board in 2025 as of her last financial disclosure. Complaints against the company continued. At one point, Gunter resident Deirdre Diamond, a respiratory therapist and lead advocate for a local group created to fight pollution from concrete batch plants, reached out to her representative in the Legislature, then state Sen. Drew Springer. Despite the TCEQ’s previous violation notices, Springer concluded that the neighbors’ complaints were “abusive” and filed a bill that he said at the time would prevent efforts to “weaponize the system.” He made similar comments in a recent interview with the news organizations. Springer’s bill allowed the TCEQ to ignore residents after more than five unsubstantiated complaints in seven years. Diamond and other opponents believed the bill was an attempt to keep residents from exercising their rights and argued that the language was too vague. They said the legislation did not make clear what would constitute an unsubstantiated complaint and that some complaints may be repeated over the years because of TCEQ inaction. When the bill reached the Senate floor, Angela Paxton voted for its passage. Matt Welch, a spokesperson for Angela Paxton, pointed to the measure’s bipartisan support in the Senate, saying it was needed “to stop a small group of environmental activists from wasting taxpayer dollars by weaponizing the complaint process.” He said that between 2019 and 2023, the group filed more than 100 complaints against Dallas-area industrial sites that did not result in findings by the state environmental agency. “These frivolous complaints divert state resources from legitimate violations.” Angela Paxton did not recuse herself from voting on the bill because it did not relate to any specific company, Welch said. He added that Paxton’s role on the advisory board “carried no decision-making authority” and that she was unaware of any complaints or violations against Wildcatter. Ethics experts said she should have disclosed her relationship with the company and recused herself. State law bars lawmakers from voting on bills that benefit them or their businesses. The prohibition does not, however, apply to legislation that regulates an entire industry, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said. Because lawmakers write the laws governing what they must disclose and when they should recuse themselves, “a good amount of the time, the guardrails that they create for themselves are not enough,” according to Andrew Cates, a San Antonio ethics lawyer, who said this is one such instance. Meanwhile, neighbors of Wildcatter’s Gunter plant said the new law left them demoralized and convinced that lawmakers were not interested in protecting them or their land. Diamond moved away after the bill passed. She said she feared the plants’ impact on her children’s health and believed the regulators were on the side of the company. She was stunned to learn about the Paxtons’ investment in the company. “You can’t pretend to be about protecting the people when you directly profit from it,” Diamond said in an interview. A bank statement from the Paxtons’ blind trust checking account shows various deposits from Wildcatter in early 2023. Obtained, highlighted and redacted for privacy by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune In the months leading up to the bill passing the Legislature, four Wildcatter companies wired more than $73,000 to the Paxtons, according to bank statements reviewed by the news organizations that were part of the previously unreported impeachment documents. About $10,000 arrived in the two weeks before Angela Paxton voted on the environmental bill. An additional $12,000 was wired the week after the legislation passed in the Senate. Because the records ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed are limited, the news organizations cannot say with certainty why the payments were made and how they were accounted for on the companies’ books. The payments came as some Wildcatter companies were failing to pay local property taxes. At the time, Wildcatter Sand Services, the company the Paxtons’ trust had invested in, already owed more than $31,000 in back taxes, according to Grayson County public records. Several Wildcatter companies also owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in local taxes in 2023 that soon became delinquent. That year, Ken Paxton was facing his own troubles as allegations of bribery and corruption reached a fever pitch. Early in 2023, the U.S. Justice Department’s public integrity unit, known for handling high-stakes political corruption cases, took over an investigation into allegations by Paxton’s senior advisers that he abused his office. (It was later dropped in 2025.) Paxton also reached a tentative $3.3 million settlement with some of those employees. They had accused him of firing them after they went to authorities with allegations that he had used his office to go after the enemies of an Austin real estate investor and donor. The proposed payout required legislative approval, drawing the ire of lawmakers who questioned why taxpayers should be on the hook. After the Legislature took no action, a judge awarded the whistleblowers $6.6 million in 2025. Paxton called the ruling a “bogus judgment in support of baseless claims by rogue employees.” Some of the Wildcatter payments came while a House committee was investigating the whistleblowers’ claims about the attorney general’s conduct. On May 19, a week before Paxton was formally impeached, the blind trust wired $9,000 to attorney Mitch Little’s firm. Little later represented both the trust and Paxton in his impeachment trial. It’s unclear whether the money from Wildcatter was used to pay for the legal representation. The trust’s checking account would not have had enough money for that payment without deposits from the companies earlier in the month, records show. At the time, the trust also had an investment account with $9,300 in cash and just under $1 million in securities, but records do not show any distribution from that account to the checking account in that period. Neither Loper nor Little, now a state representative, responded to questions about the transaction. Angela Paxton’s spokesperson said she has no knowledge of any payments for impeachment lawyers. Craig Holman, ethics lobbyist for consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington, D.C., said it would be particularly problematic if any of the money was used as a “passthrough” for Paxton’s legal fees. All told, Wildcatter companies wired the Paxtons’ trust 15 payments between January and June 2023 totaling more than $83,000. It is unclear whether payments continued after that date because the records collected by impeachment investigators ended in June. The following year, two of those companies became delinquent on nearly $200,000 in 2023 property taxes to local schools, cities and counties. The governments had to sue to recover what they were owed.