Today’s edition of quick hits.

* Getting to the bottom of the Starlink matter: “Elon Musk weighed in on Saturday with his first explanation of the disruptions to the Ukrainian military’s satellite system, saying in a post on X that Ukraine had violated the terms of service for his Starlink internet service by using it ‘for offensive drone strikes to kill people.’”

* In related news: “Ukraine’s military Starlink system was working normally again on Saturday morning, the country’s defense minister said, raising hopes that the 10-day disruption of the country’s vital satellite internet service by Elon Musk’s SpaceX was ending.”

* Conditions in France: “Protests across France over a worsening cost-of-living crisis and growing inequality descended into violence for a second straight weekend. France’s Interior Ministry said 410,000 people took part in protests in several major cities, including Paris.”

* The obviously right call: “A federal judge on Monday ruled that Maureen Comey, a former senior prosecutor at the Justice Department and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, was unlawfully fired and is entitled to back pay.”

* There’s credible excuse for withholding this evidence: “The federal government has stopped sharing evidence with Minnesota authorities who are investigating the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers, state officials said in recent court filings.”

* This buyout initiative would reduce Microsoft’s global workforce by roughly a fourth: “Microsoft said Monday that it’s offering buyouts to a wide swath of employees as it strives to balance a costly artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out with capital efficiency. The software maker announced a new voluntary exit offer for certain workers in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom at its experience level of 70 or below. Microsoft will offer buyouts to about 60,000 workers, part of the company’s efforts to trim costs and retool its workforce for the AI era.”

* Doellner should probably keep in mind that Democrats and independents buy cars, too: “Audi chief Gernot Doellner drew heavy criticism on Monday for ​appearing alongside US President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in the battleground state of Georgia, with the head of Germany’s top union saying it violated the ‌automaker’s company guidelines.”

See you tomorrow.

The post Monday’s Mini-Report, 10.26.26 appeared first on MS NOW.

Donald Trump’s seemingly endless quest to isolate the U.S. on the world stage continued last week when his secretary of state openly promoted the CIA as a tool for destabilizing foreign governments.

Here’s Marco Rubio in a post on X from Friday, encouraging Cubans — whose suffering the Trump administration has compounded with sanctions designed to fuel a national uprising — to “create the change you desire” by partnering with the CIA.

To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba – now is the time.

The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) October 23, 2026

That sure sounds like “Come work with the CIA to help us topple your government,” which explains why the negative replies were replete with Bay of Pigs references and other “coup” talk.

It’s not exactly a secret that the CIA has been used by U.S. governments to undermine foreign governments and activist groups. But there’s a kind of brazen idiocy in thinking it was a good idea to offer such partnerships in such a public fashion.

Think about it: Even Cubans who might be open to such an offer would be wise to question the judgment of an administration that would so willingly broadcast it for all to see on Elon Musk’s pornography- and racism-filled platform.

And anyone not legally in the U.S. who agrees to help the administration topple Cuba’s government will need to acknowledge the harsh reality that aiding Trump’s CIA wouldn’t necessarily stop the president’s immigration officials from targeting them down the line.

And as former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul noted, Trump’s support for authoritarian figures elsewhere should give pause to any Cubans considering Rubio’s offer.

Your decision to back autocrats and oligarchs in Venezuela instead of democracy should give pause to anyone hoping you are committed to democracy in Cuba.

No better way to inspire Cuban democrats than to support democracy in Venezuela. https://t.co/zATr8OAVqa

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) October 24, 2026

Trump does not care about upholding democratic principles in the Western Hemisphere, or anywhere for that matter. His administration has aligned itself with authoritarian-style leaders across Central America and South America. Now, it’s eyeing regime change in Cuba — and looking to draft confederates in one of the most glaring ways possible.

The post Rubio uses social media to urge Cuban turncoats to work with CIA appeared first on MS NOW.

Catholic leaders who met with President Donald Trump at the White House last week say they were unwittingly used for a political stunt ahead of the midterm elections and that images and video of the meeting were publicly distributed without their permission.

Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee was among a dozen bishops invited to the Oval Office by the recently created White House Faith Office on Oct. 22. During the event, Grob and other Catholic leaders stood behind Trump and prayed for the country. Then, according to Grob, photos were taken of the group and the bishops were ushered out of the room.

“Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops,” Grob said in a public letter published Sunday.

In his letter, Grob apologized for appearing at the White House event, which he described as a “political photo opportunity.” Grob said the event was intended for leaders to discuss issues such as immigration, human rights and reproductive healthcare, but was instead “manipulated” by the White House.

“I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way,” Grob wrote in his letter. “We came in good faith to try to work for the betterment of our fellow human beings, to ease their suffering, to build up the common good, and to pray with a president, not to pose for a political photo opportunity to benefit the few. We should never have been put in that position by the White House.”

On Saturday, Bishop William Joensen of the Diocese of Des Moines in Iowa also apologized for his attendance, saying in a statement that he wished he had been “more shrewd and less simple, like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purposes.” He said that the bishops were not aware that the meeting would be “on the cusp of a national election,” and emphasized that their involvement does not indicate an endorsement of any political party or candidate.

“There are many things tied to this present Administration that are blatantly at odds with our Catholic faith. The advance communication we received indicated that we were to have a conversation and that key officials would be interested in hearing our perspective,” Joensen wrote.

“In retrospect,” he added, “I would have done well to be more mindful of Jesus’ admonition: ‘Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves,’” invoking a verse from the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible’s New Testament, likening himself and other faith leaders to well-meaning, vulnerable people in a hostile environment.

Shortly after the event, White House official Margo Martin shared a video of the event to social media in which one bishop can be heard praying to “surround our country to protect us against any influence of evil.”

Later that day, White House Faith Director Jennifer Korn also shared a video from the event on X, denying that it was “just a ‘photo op.’”

“These are Catholic Archbishops and Bishops who spent time talking with us about important issues on religious freedom, school choice, family tax credits, religious visas, and life,” Korn said. “They are leaders within their communities and have a seat at the table.”

When asked about the bishops’ public statements, including the accusation that published media from the meeting was distributed without their permission, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers defended Trump as a strong president for Catholics in a statement to MS NOW.

“There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it: he stopped the weaponization of the federal government against Christians, proudly defended and expanded our religious rights, pardoned pro-life activists, stopped the chemical mutilation of our nation’s children, and protected parents’ rights,” Rogers said.

The post Catholic bishops accuse White House of turning prayer with Trump into ‘political photo opportunity’ appeared first on MS NOW.

Liliana’s blood pressure is dangerously high, a complication of her poorly managed diabetes. Her doctors are urgently concerned for her health, pointing to signs of liver failure and potential symptoms of recurring cancer.

Yet she is unable to get the care she needs. That is because Liliana, who I am referring to by her middle name to protect her confidentiality, has spent more than a year in an immigration detention center in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles from her children in Maryland and from a community where she has built her life for almost a decade.

Liliana has missed the birth of her first grandchild. Now her daughter is pregnant again.

During that time, Liliana has missed the birth of her first grandchild. Now her daughter is pregnant again. And as yet another family milestone approaches without her, two independent physicians have warned immigration authorities that Liliana’s health is rapidly deteriorating.

I have been representing Liliana for the past year as she remains in detention. She has no criminal record. She has strong ties to her community, finds joy doing painting and remodeling work and spends her free time making arts and crafts.

As an immigration attorney, I have represented dozens of immigrants seeking humanitarian relief. After a while in this line of work, you believe you have mapped the full geography of our broken system. But working on Liliana’s case dismantled that certainty, showing me the depths of injustice our immigrant neighbors face.

Under the Trump administration, I have witnessed firsthand the devastating outcomes of shortsighted executive memos and the steady militarization of our immigration system. With recent reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ordered its agents to increase the number of daily nationwide arrests by 1,000, we are likely to only see more detentions like this — detentions that protect no one, but inflict incredible harm on people and communities across the country.

Liliana should never have been detained in the first place. When her daughter survived human trafficking as a minor, Liliana supported her cooperation with U.S. federal law enforcement, leading to her daughter becoming a T-visa applicant. Through this specialized status established by Congress to protect trafficking survivors, Liliana is eligible for protection through a pending derivative T-visa application. In coming forward to help the U.S. federal government, their family entered into the government’s intended framework: assist law enforcement and receive protection from detention and removal while their case is pending.

Instead, a year ago Liliana was detained during a routine ICE check-in, after explaining she could not wear an ankle monitor for medical reasons related to her diabetes. Rather than accommodating her, the ICE officers laughed, she told us. Then they sent her across the country to Richwood Correctional Center, a detention facility in Monroe, Louisiana. Longtime immigration attorneys understand that transfers to the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana are not due to a lack of capacity in local facilities. More often than not, it is an intentional tactic to move a client across state lines, limit their access to counsel and keep them in due-process limbo.

According to the ACLU of Louisiana, the state’s detention centers have become a “black hole” for systematic human rights abuses, medical neglect and inhumane living conditions. Under the second Trump administration, detentions have skyrocketed, with nearly 13 % of all detained immigrants nationwide held in Louisiana-based facilities. And now the administration is seeking to potentially increase that number.

Richwood Correctional Center officials have largely ignored the urgent warnings from the two doctors who have evaluated Liliana’s condition and warned of her dangerously high blood pressure and early liver failure.At the same time, my organization, Ayuda, has partnered with Louisiana pro bono counsel Flavia Moody, who is admitted to the Fifth Circuit and is preparing an amended petition and a temporary restraining order in an existing habeas corpus case to challenge the lawfulness of her detention. The habeas process is actively moving forward, but the process is moving at a painfully slow pace, notoriously common within the state’s Fifth Circuit.

Under ICE’s own Performance-Based National Detention Standards, individuals with severe, deteriorating medical conditions, pending humanitarian relief claims and clean records are prime candidates for release on humanitarian parole or supervision. Any single one of these reasons are grounds for her release. Liliana has all three. And yet she remains miles away from her family, in limbo and under unimaginable conditions.

Through my weekly conversations with Liliana, I have witnessed her rapid deterioration. We have limited time together, which makes it even harder to get information, assess how she’s doing and see what can be done to help. Her health is spiraling on multiple fronts, aggravated by the systematic neglect at the Richwood Correctional Center. Her unmanaged diabetes is causing hypertension so severe, Dr. Sugarman warns it could trigger a stroke. Most recently, I learned her hand is discolored due to an untreated surgical wound from a recent procedure performed in detention.

I am also concerned since she has a history of cancer and has been showing symptoms pointing to a possible recurrence. At every turn, it seems like there is no reprieve for her health. Liliana tells me no one at the facility takes her or her needs seriously, and that she’s facing harassment from staff and another detainee. Along with Liliana’s family, I’m alarmed by her condition and deeply worried for her.

Liliana’s ordeal is not an accident of bad luck or an isolated bureaucratic failure. It’s the deliberate architecture of our deportation policy, working as it is currently designed to.

As a lawyer, a daughter dedicated to keeping families whole and an American citizen, I am appalled to witness our government inflict such suffering — not in the service of the law, and certainly not in defense of public safety, but out of a hollow impulse to wound the already wounded. Liliana’s ordeal is not an accident of bad luck or an isolated bureaucratic failure. It’s the deliberate architecture of our deportation policy, working as it is currently designed to, treating congressionally enacted protections as inconveniences to sidestep rather than binding law.

Since July 23, 2025, Liliana has been unlawfully detained, separated from her family and fighting for her life. We have exhausted every legal and humanitarian path. Her prolonged detention violates binding precedent (ICWC v. Noem), squanders taxpayer funds and actively jeopardizes her health and safety.

It is Liliana herself who best captures the sheer cruelty of the system holding her hostage. From inside the Louisiana facility, she told me, “There is a lot of injustice here, how they treat us, the food they give us is for animals and they don’t give us the medication we need to live. I hope there is justice for all the mothers who are here, who have kids back at home, who are sick, who have autism, who cry for their kids. The only thing I can say is that I hope there is justice for everything that is happening to us.”

Justice begins with ICE releasing Liliana today.

The post I’ve represented dozens of immigration cases in my career. This is the one that broke me. appeared first on MS NOW.

The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling for Donald Trump is one of the precedents the Justice Department has relied on in defense of firing Maurene Comey as a federal prosecutor. That defense failed Monday, at least at the trial court level, when U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ordered retroactive reinstatement and back pay for the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey.

Maurene Comey had alleged that she was fired last year because of her relation to her father, whom Trump fired during his first presidential term and who then became a prominent Trump critic and a serial target of federal prosecution in Trump’s second term.

Backing her civil lawsuit on Monday, Furman said that neither the high court’s 2024 immunity ruling in Trump v. United States nor its ruling on presidential firing power last term in Trump v. Slaughter supported the government’s “sweeping and unprecedented theory of executive authority.”

The Obama-appointed judge in the Southern District of New York noted that unlike the Slaughter case, the immunity ruling wasn’t even about the president’s removal power but rather immunity from criminal prosecution. Still, the Department of Justice cited language from the immunity case to argue that assistant U.S. attorneys like Maurene Comey exercise “core executive power” under the Constitution and are therefore removable at will because, the government argued, a contrary rule would impede the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” power.

Furman conceded that the immunity ruling’s sweeping language made the government’s claim “at least colorable.” But he cautioned that the high court itself had said to read its opinions in context. In light of that admonition, Furman said there were “several good reasons” not to rely on the immunity ruling here.

“At most,” the judge wrote, “the language in Trump v. United States upon which [government] Defendants rely should be read to mean that Congress may not regulate the removal of an Executive Branch official at the behest of the President himself and may not interfere directly with investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking.”

Against that backdrop, Furman wrote, the immunity case is irrelevant to this one, because government officials insisted that Comey’s firing wasn’t ordered by Trump. “To the contrary,” the judge wrote, “they assert that it was the then-Attorney General [Pam Bondi] who ‘authorized and directed’ Comey’s removal.”

The judge concluded that he had to reject what he deemed the government’s bid to upend longstanding limits on executive firing power that are still intact even after recent Supreme Court rulings. He said that endorsing the DOJ’s argument would disrupt the constitutional order and “risk a return to the spoils system that Congress has sought to end since the nineteenth century.”

He said the government violated the separation of powers, federal law and the plaintiff’s Fifth Amendment due process and statutory rights.

The DOJ said it would appeal Furman’s ruling “in due course.” If the case reaches the justices, then the GOP-appointed court majority that issued the immunity and Slaughter rulings can decide whether and how they apply here.

The post Why a judge said the Trump immunity ruling doesn’t justify Maurene Comey’s firing appeared first on MS NOW.

Over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, there have only been a handful of prominent officials who have resigned in frustration and expressed public concerns about the president and his administration. One of them is Marc Rosenblum.

Rosenblum served as the executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s statistics office. When he resigned over the summer, he declared in a LinkedIn post, “I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. … Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”

Luis Miranda, a top DHS spokesperson during the Biden administration, told Wired, “Marc was exactly what every American should want in a career public servant. The Trump administration has governed by silencing or ignoring facts and information they believe doesn’t line up with their extreme rhetoric, and that has damaging implications, so it’s no surprise career officials whose job is transparency are unable to do those jobs.”

All of this came to mind last week when Rosenblum made headlines for a new and related reason. The Washington Sun reported:

A former top statistics official who resigned from the Department of Homeland Security this summer says the government is overstating how many unauthorized immigrants have left the country during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Marc Rosenblum, whose blistering resignation letter from a decade-long career at DHS garnered national attention, is behind a new estimate published Thursday that says between 790,000 and 1.9 million immigrants departed the U.S. from Jan. 20, 2025, to July 31, 2026.

According to the Republican administration’s official line, Trump and his team have pushed out more than 3 million undocumented immigrants during that period. According to the official who directly oversaw the Department of Homeland Security’s statistics office, that number simply isn’t believable.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin could help shed additional light on what’s true by releasing detailed information to bolster the administration’s claims, but so far he has refused to do so. In fact, last month, when pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on the lack of data transparency, Mullin said, “Every time we give numbers out … you guys want to go in there and pick it apart.”

In other words, according to the DHS chief, the administration could provide the public with information, but then people might scrutinize the information — and that’s just not a door that Team Trump is prepared to open.

The problem, however, isn’t limited to DHS. At the FBI, Director Kash Patel and his team have faced accusations for months about manipulating statistics for political purposes. And just two weeks ago, MS NOW reported that the Patel-led bureau had padded its total number of arrests by including ones that were made by state and local police forces.

Making matters worse, when the administration isn’t inflating data, it’s hiding. In fact, Politico reported two weeks ago that the IRS was supposed to have released detailed data on the impact of the Republicans’ 2025 package of tax breaks, but Team Trump decided to delay the release for reasons it did not want to talk about.

This came on the heels of Trump’s Commerce Department announcing sweeping new changes to the proposed 2030 census, including plans to exclude undocumented immigrants and immigrants who are in the United States legally but have yet to secure green cards or citizenship.

What we’re dealing with, in other words, is a Republican administration that lies about data, inflates data, hides data, fires those responsible for compiling data and in some instances even makes up data.

The public, here and around the world, has long been able to rely on the integrity of statistics from the United States government. Less than two years into Trump’s second term, that confidence is evaporating.

The post On multiple fronts, the Trump administration faces accusations of data manipulation appeared first on MS NOW.

Mississippi Republicans’ newfound objection to AI-generated ads is the latest sign that MAGA world is fretting over the state’s U.S. Senate race.

The Democratic candidate, Scott Colom, said late last week that his campaign would delete an ad created with the help of artificial intelligence tools that depicted his Republican opponent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, hurrying away from reporters, as she has done before. The ad has been online for weeks, but Mississippi’s Republican attorney general demanded that Colom’s campaign take it down.

According to Mississippi Today:

Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch said Friday that Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, likely violated state law with a digital ad that featured an artificial intelligence-generated depiction of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith running away from reporters.

Colom told Mississippi Today he would delete the post because he didn’t want Fitch to launch litigation with taxpayer money. That came after Fitch sent Colom a complaint letter demanding that he remove that ad from his social media accounts. If he did not, the complaint said, the attorney general’s office could file an injunction against him.

“As violations of this election integrity law can carry criminal penalties, Attorney General Fitch has also asked Scott Colom and his campaign to preserve all records related to this matter so as not to obstruct justice,” the statement reads.

The article quotes Colom as saying Hyde-Smith is “clearly desperate” and that her allies are attempting to “weaponize the justice system to distract from the real issues, which is that she has sold out our farmers, sold out our small businesses, and sold out our families.”

You can judge for yourself whether you believe the Mississippi GOP truly cares about the scourge of AI-generated political ads, but the party’s fierce support for President Donald Trump — whose social media feeds have become cesspools of political AI slop — raises doubt in my mind.

What seems more likely to me is that Mississippi Republicans are trying to undercut Colom’s campaign, which has already garnered laughter for another ad targeting Hyde-Smith — in a midterm race the GOP didn’t think would be competitive.

Republicans have reportedly voiced concerns that Hyde-Smith’s Senate seat appears to be in play for Democrats in next week’s election, amid backlash toward Trump and the GOP. The fact that the president scheduled a rally in Mississippi one week out from Election Day reflects such concerns, despite forecasters giving Hyde-Smith the edge in their estimates of how the race will shake out. The GOP candidate has said Trump would come campaign for her “if I get in trouble,” and it looks like that’s what’s happening.

Short of a victory, one could argue that Colom improving on Democratic Senate nominee Mike Espy’s 2020 election numbers would be a remarkable feat for liberal activists in Mississippi, which boasts the largest percentage of Black eligible voters out of any state in the country but has — with help from decades of racist voter suppression — remained almost exclusively under control of white conservatives.

Colom is looking to change that. His ads prove that his campaign has the GOP’s attention — and help support Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s argument that Democrats need to invest more heavily in Southern states.

The post In Mississippi’s Senate race, GOP targets Democratic candidate’s ad appeared first on MS NOW.

A federal judge on Monday ruled that Maureen Comey, a former senior prosecutor at the Justice Department and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, was unlawfully fired and is entitled to back pay.

In a 55-page opinion, Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York ruled that Comey’s July 2025 firing from her job as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was a violation of the Civil Service Reform Act and the Constitution. Furman, an Obama appointee, ordered her reinstated with back pay from her firing through December 2025, when she accepted a job as a partner with a Manhattan-based law firm. The opinion does not give Comey the option to return to the prosecutor’s office.

Furman also determined the DOJ violated separation of powers principles under the Constitution and Comey’s Fifth Amendment due process rights, as well as her rights under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Comey filed a civil suit against the DOJ after she was fired last year in a terse letter that stated she was being terminated “pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States,” without further elaboration. Her lawsuit alleged that she was unlawfully fired because of her affiliation to her father — whom President Donald Trump has unsuccessfully sought to prosecute — and/or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs. She also named then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, and the White House as defendants.

Comey led the Southern District of New York’s cases against convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, music mogul Sean Combs and others. Furman noted that during her tenure, Comey “consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.” Comey spent nearly a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney at the Southern District of New York before she was fired.

While the court’s decision is a near-total victory for Comey on her legal claims, she has been waiting for relief since September 2025, when she filed her complaint. Comey joined the Manhattan-based law firm of Patterson Belknap as a partner three months later.

Comey’s lawyers called the decision a “hard-earned victory” for her and “all civil servants and … all fighting for the rule of law.”

“This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law,” they said in a statement.

Maurene Comey did not respond to a request for comment from MS NOW.

A DOJ spokesperson said the department “disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course.”

The Trump DOJ has fired several high-level prosecutors who have refused to carry out the administration’s priorities — including one who declined to lead the prosecution of James Comey. That case has been delayed until early next year. In the meantime, the former FBI director has vowed to continue critcizing Trump despite the pending litigation.

The post Judge orders back pay for James Comey’s daughter, finding she was illegally fired appeared first on MS NOW.

For those concerned about Donald Trump trying to derail election results he doesn’t like, Friday was an unsettling day: The Justice Department filed a preemptive lawsuit aimed at blocking certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race — but only if the Republican incumbent, Sen. Dan Sullivan, loses while his rival with the similar name remains on the ballot.

Usually, Trump waits until after Election Day to try to overturn the will of the voters. As of late last week, he took a step toward doing so before the votes are tallied.

Legal experts from the left, right and center took a good look at the litigation, and the reaction was universal amazement at how ridiculous the case is. Richard Pildes, a New York University law professor who specializes in election issues, went so far as to say, “It is one of the weakest election lawsuits I’ve ever seen.”

The question then became why in the world the Justice Department would embarrass itself with such an absurdity. We didn’t have to wait too long for an answer.

On Monday afternoon, the president boasted to reporters that the case was filed at his behest. “I’m the one that said, ‘Do it,’” Trump declared. On Saturday and Sunday, he continued to not only defend the lawsuit — his argument was rooted in part on the idea that Alaskan voters might not know what “incumbent” means — but also claimed that he was directly responsible for the case’s existence.

The president’s public comments helped shed light on the unfortunate origins of this foolish case, and why it’s a bad idea for federal law enforcement to file lawsuits based on the whims of a former television personality whose only legal background is being charged with dozens of felonies. But Trump also offered a timely reminder about who’s pulling the strings at Main Justice. The New York Times reported:

Mr. Trump has grown increasingly agitated about the dueling Sullivans, among other election-related grievances. He has demanded the department take legal action, even as some department officials raised concerns about the merits and constitutionality of the case, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general during the Biden administration, told the Times, “The department is taking commands from the president and throwing spaghetti at the wall to file meritless lawsuits. The ultimate goal is undermining faith in the election, intimidating voters and discrediting results the administration doesn’t like.”

It has long been obvious that the West Wing effectively controls this Justice Department, but to the extent that any pretense existed, it’s now gone. Indeed, it wasn’t long ago when the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington abandoned Reflecting Pool prosecutions, drawing outrage from the president who expected to be personally consulted about developments in a baseless vandalism case.

“From the moment President Trump was re-elected, he has muscled his way into the driver’s seat at the Justice Department, leaving tread marks on its time-honored independence from the White House by demanding, and sometimes directing, investigations into his enemies,” the Times reported in August. “But his tight grip on the steering wheel has often threatened to lead the department off a cliff.”

Two months later, the problem appears to be intensifying.

During Blanche’s confirmation process, Blanche made it clear that he, unlike Trump’s first-term attorneys general, envisioned his role as that of an instrument of the president’s will. Indeed, while Trump has ended up clashing with all of his other attorneys general, Blanche was positioned to succeed where others failed because he willingly accepted the idea that his office is an extension of the West Wing.

But recent events have brought into sharp relief the fact that Blanche’s goal is to serve one American, not 340 million Americans. It’s precisely what makes Trump’s former defense lawyer the AGINO — the Attorney General in Name Only.

The post Who runs the Justice Department? Blanche and Trump aren’t bothering to hide the answer. appeared first on MS NOW.

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* In Ohio’s gubernatorial race, the editorial board of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland announced months ago that it would no longer make endorsements in top-of-the-ballot races. After seeing Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s notorious attack ad, the editors changed their mind and endorsed Ramaswamy’s Democratic rival, Amy Acton. From the endorsement:

There are moments when a community must decide what it stands for, when its institutions have a duty to speak and when silence itself becomes a statement. Ohio has reached such a moment.

Vivek Ramaswamy, seeking the highest office in this state, has produced a campaign advertisement that weaponizes the sexual abuse his opponent, Amy Acton, suffered as a child. People across the political spectrum have rightly condemned it.

But condemnation has to mean something. Our politics have been debased for a decade, but this we will not accept. A candidate who uses childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it has crossed a line that Ohioans should defend, whatever their party.

For his part, the GOP nominee is still airing the disgusting attack, though his campaign has switched from a 60-second version to a 30-second version.

Ramaswamy also appeared on Fox News on Monday morning and accused Acton of being “crazy” and “unstable,” which came after Donald Trump spent part of the weekend reiterating his support for the vile attack.

Also on Monday morning, Acton appeared on MS NOW and said, “I can tell you that decency is on the ballot in this election.”

* In Mississippi’s unexpectedly competitive U.S. Senate race, Democrats supporting local prosecutor Scott Colom began investing in the contest last week. And soon after, the Senate Leadership Fund, the top Senate Republican super PAC, announced that it’s spending more than $1 million in the hopes of rescuing Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

These moves precede the president’s scheduled rally in Mississippi in support of Hyde-Smith.

* In Texas’ U.S. Senate race, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico continues to pick up some GOP endorsements, including a new one from Thomas Phillips, the former Republican chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

“Paxton’s longstanding reputation will embarrass Texas in ways our state simply cannot afford,” Phillips wrote in an op-ed for The Beaumont Enterprise, referring to Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

On a related note, ProPublica reported last week that the scandal-plagued GOP nominee’s trust invested $600,000 in a convicted fraudster’s company, Paxton’s “tough on crime” claims notwithstanding.

* In South Carolina’s U.S. Senate race, a new super PAC representing the data center industry is scrambling to try to help appointed Republican Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina.

* And in North Carolina, The New York Times reported that new mail ballot rules are opening the door to thousands of ballots not being counted.

“At issue is a requirement that voters seal not only the outer envelope of their mail ballot but also an inner envelope that contains the ballot itself,” the article explained.

The post Monday’s Campaign Round-Up, 10.26.26: Fallout from Ramaswamy ad continues appeared first on MS NOW.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said on social media over the weekend that the Department of Justice does not seek “to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.”

The Department of Justice does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska's election. This litigation seeks to ensure that after Alaskans cast their ballots, they are preserved in a manner so that only Alaska's governing officials have the…

— Attorney General Todd Blanche (@AGToddBlanche) October 24, 2026

That statement is tough to square with the lawsuit the DOJ filed days earlier against Alaska’s election officials, as the department seeks to intervene there and in California amid GOP fears of losing congressional control in next week’s midterm elections.

The federal government’s Alaska complaint stems from its concern that Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan could lose a close race to Democratic challenger Mary Peltola due to the presence of a candidate on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan, who the DOJ said is running “with the intention of misleading supporters of Senator Sullivan into voting for him.”

But even if that claim about the other Sullivan’s intention is true, the legal question is: What can a federal court do for the federal government about it?

In the part of its complaint in which the DOJ makes its case for having legal standing to bring the suit, it said that its asserted legal injuries would be solved by a court order “declaring a certification of an election result prejudiced by Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot unlawful and enjoining defendants [Alaska officials] from allowing such a certification to occur.”

Putting the merits of the DOJ’s argument aside — election law experts have deemed it incredibly weak — its complaint expresses an interest, contra Blanche’s post, in stopping the certification of Alaska’s election. To “enjoin” something is to stop it from happening. At least, according to the complaint, the DOJ wants to halt Alaska’s certification if the result is “prejudiced” by the other Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot, At least, according to the complaint, the DOJ wants to halt Alaska’s certification if the result is “prejudiced” by the other Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot — a claim that would be difficult to demonstrate in a timely manner, if ever.

Furthermore, in the complaint’s “prayer for relief,” which is the standard section where a plaintiff tells a court what it wants, the DOJ lists two specific things.

First, it asks the court to: “Declare that certification of any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, would violate Defendants’ duties under the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] to ‘protect the integrity of the electoral process.’”

Second, it asks the court: “Defendants from certifying any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan and any further procedures or relief this Court deems necessary and appropriate to determine what the result would have been absent Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot.”

That second request for relief reads as if it is missing a word at the beginning. If so, then based on the rest of the complaint, the word “Enjoin” would seem to fit well. As in: Enjoin defendants from certifying … (I asked the DOJ press office whether a word is missing there, and if so, what that word is, but I did not immediately hear back.)

Whatever’s happening with that line, the government’s opponents are reading the complaint as seeking to block certification. Peltola’s campaign committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which are attempting to join in the case to get it dismissed, said in a Sunday filing that the “DOJ seeks an unprecedented order precluding certification of the U.S. Senate election if the candidate the President favors loses narrowly.”

Calling the government’s claims “utterly without legal basis,” they said the Alaska district court “should not allow this lawsuit to hang like the Sword of Damocles over the ongoing election, lending false legitimacy to the President’s and the Attorney General’s ongoing efforts to spread false narratives about Alaska’s elections as voting continues and as results begin to be tabulated next week.”

The post Blanche says the DOJ doesn’t want to block Alaska’s election. The DOJ’s lawsuit says otherwise. appeared first on MS NOW.

Last week a judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release the Rev. Edward Nalwamba, a Ugandan priest who had lived in Colorado for more than 25 years before being sent to an immigrant detention center 13 months ago. The priest’s health deteriorated during his detention, to the point that he now relies on a wheelchair.

After a court set him free, the private prison company that operates the detention center for Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly wouldn’t provide Nalwamba with a wheelchair, so fellow detainees literally carried him from the facility.

Days earlier, a federal judge blocked DHS from carrying out a variety of field operations focused on uncovering alleged voter fraud in nine states as part of a broader push to identify noncitizen voters. The New York Times report on the developments noted:

[Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin], who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wrote that the scope of the operations also raised concerns about voter intimidation. She noted that according to agency memos, the Homeland Security Department “surveils, covertly infiltrates and interrogates the staff of nonprofits and churches conducting voter engagement” and had targeted nearly 150 such nonprofit groups as of July.

The Trump administration, in other words, was found to have conducted covert surveillance inside houses of worship, in addition to conducting interrogations of the churches’ staff.

This was not the first time the Republican administration was found to have spied on churches.

A few months into Donald Trump’s second term, the president’s team launched a task force that was intended, according to the White House, to eradicate “anti-Christian bias” within the federal government. At a launch event in April 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi began by attacking Joe Biden, whom Bondi said had “abused and targeted Christians.”

The slander was baseless. What’s more, when the task force tried to bolster its accusations with a lengthy written report, the allegations against the former president and his Democratic administration largely fell apart.

But more than a year after Team Trump started making a concerted effort to convince Americans that Biden and his White House “abused and targeted Christians,” it’s the incumbent president and his Republican administration that continue to clash with faith communities — up to and including surveillance of churches.

It’s hard not to forget the incident from July, when ICE agents hauled off a nun who was wearing her habit and walking down a public sidewalk en route to Sunday Mass (she was released from federal detention after a backlash from members of Congress), but such examples keep cropping up.

Indeed, there have been related controversies surrounding Team Trump suing a Catholic diocese in New Mexico to seize 14 acres of land for additional border barriers; the Pentagon’s narrowed list of officially recognized religions; Trump picking fights with Pope Leo XIV; the administration stripping funding from Catholic charities; a White House offensive against the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde for her defense of marginalized communities; and instances in which federal agents have shot faith leaders with pepper balls.

If these developments had unfolded during a Democratic administration, is there any doubt Republicans and conservative media outlets would have launched hysterical campaigns about the “Democratic war on religion”?

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post The Trump administration keeps clashing with faith communities appeared first on MS NOW.

After a stunning election victory for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, American right-wing officials and commentators fell back on their usual response to a loss for one of their own: baseless claims that the contest was rigged.

“Is Brazil turning into a Banana Republic?” Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser turned election denier, wrote on X, appending a chart of a rolling vote count that showed Lula overtaking his right-wing opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro. “What does this remind you of?”

“Where have we seen this same pattern?” far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asked. “Ahh yes, 2020 …”

Lula won 51.8% of Sunday’s second round of voting to Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent, a margin of almost 4.4 million votes. It was a remarkable reversal from the first round, in which Lula lost to Bolsonaro by 2 percentage points. Never before had a Brazilian candidate come back from a first-round loss to win the second, and Bolsonaro refused to concede the upset, asking election officials to annul the results and calling the extension of voting hours (which both campaigns had requested, after weather and transportation problems) a “dirty trick.”

The result is a blow to President Donald Trump, a friend to authoritarian strongmen and longtime ally of Bolsonaro and his family, including his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently imprisoned for attempting a coup. Trump has yet to respond to Bolsonaro’s loss, but the reaction from the American right was swift, with some of its loudest voices calling for U.S. intervention in Brazil.

“If a conservative government in Brazil did this, everyone in the mainstream press in America would lose their minds,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X, referring to the extended voting hours. “But I guess they’re just choosing to be silent because it’s all for the cause.”

Mike Benz, a former vlogger who praised Hitler and now enjoys special access to the State Department, suggested that the extended voting hours had “just stacked the 2026 vote for Lula,” and that they were the work of a Brazilian court installed by USAID — the humanitarian and development agency at the center of Benz’s many conspiracy theories, and which he helped dismantle.

“Don’t be cucks,” pickup artist turned conservative commentator Mike Cernovich urged the State Department on X. “The election was rigged and it must be done again, the legal way.”

“It’s time for President Trump to send in a team for Lula,” one far-right influencer said on X, referring to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and capture of its president, echoing Jones’ call for “Lula to get the Nicolás Maduro Treatment.”

Trump did not explicitly endorse Bolsonaro in this election, but the defeated right-wing family seems to be asking for more direct U.S. help now.

“This is a message to you: Do not recognize this election because even more other facts are coming up right now,” said Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flávio’s brother, who lives in Texas and was sentenced in Brazil to more than four years’ jail time for lobbying the Trump administration to interfere in his father’s trial. “We need to cancel this election. It was clearly fraudulent, but we need international pressure. We need you to share this video, make sure that everybody’s on the same page.”

Strangely, in a video, posted to X, Eduardo Bolsonaro offered early Polymarket predictions as evidence of the alleged fraud.

The post Flávio Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil has MAGA crying ‘rigged!’ appeared first on MS NOW.

One of the recurring themes this election cycle is a sense of betrayal: There are a growing number of constituencies that backed Republicans two years ago, only to feel abandoned by Donald Trump and his party.

Farmers, for example, voted for the president by lopsided margins in the 2024 race, and many have been let down by an administration that’s repeatedly made matters worse for the agricultural industry. Latino voters also shifted to Republicans in large numbers two years ago, confident that Trump would focus his deportation agenda on violent criminals. They now know better.

Similarly, many Muslim voters also took at enormous risk in 2024, moving toward a GOP nominee who championed a Muslim ban in his first term. Two years later, it’s a community that feels used and betrayed by a party that has seized on Islamophobia as the foundation for its closing message in the midterm elections.

But it’s also worth sparing a thought for those who believed Trump when he promised he was committed to “making America healthy again.” An overwhelming body of evidence leaves little doubt that he didn’t mean a word of it. The New York Times reported on the findings of a devastating investigation:

In total, since taking office again, Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from clean-air regulations that were going into effect. Some were among the country’s worst industrial polluters, including chemical manufacturers, copper smelters and coal-burning power plants. About 3.3 million people live within three miles of at least one affected facility.

The exemptions represent the biggest presidential intervention in enforcement of the Clean Air Act in the half-century since President Richard M. Nixon signed the bedrock environmental law. And that is only one of the ways the Trump administration is dismantling a variety of federal environmental protections.

The Times documented in great detail the degree to which the Republican administration has systematically dismantled public safeguards to champion the wishes of polluters and chemical manufacturers, in ways without precedent in American history.

I’m mindful that much of the “MAHA” movement’s base is comprised of activists who are focused almost entirely on opposition to vaccines. But to the extent there are others who are genuinely interested in making America healthy again and who have sincere concerns about the spread of cancer-causing pollution, the Republican White House has gone to stunning lengths to express total indifference to those issues, instead elevating chemical industry lobbyists to leadership roles inside Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.

“Donald Trump and [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] keep treating MAHA activists like disposable political pawns and now wonder why many resent it,” Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse recently said in a statement. “There’s not one MAHA promise Trump hasn’t been willing to break once the checks clear from his big chemical, food and tobacco donors. Food, air, water safety and kids’ health have all been compromised to feed profits for makers of addictive fruit flavored vapes, cancer-linked pesticides, and PFAS forever chemicals. And every time RFK Jr. proves himself a phony by making excuses for Trump’s latest MAHA double-cross, like making glyphosate great again.”

Time will tell how many of these constituencies move toward Democrats in the midterms or decide not to cast to ballots at all; but after the dust settles on the election cycle and the president and Republican leaders assess what went wrong, they might want to start by acknowledging the Americans who felt betrayed after counting on the GOP to deliver.

The post As Election Day nears, a growing number of constituencies feel betrayed by Trump appeared first on MS NOW.

Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton hit back at Republican Vivek Ramaswamy over his controversial ad featuring her estranged mother, telling MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” there is “no low” her opponent won’t “sink to.” With Election Day just over a week away, Acton framed the race as a choice about the kind of politics that Ohio — and the country — are willing to accept.

“Decency is on the ballot,” she said.

The 60-second ad, which ignited a firestorm and garnered national backlash when it was released last week, features Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, accusing her daughter of lying about her childhood, including her account of growing up in poverty and living in a tent. Ramaswamy’s campaign has defended the ad as evidence that Acton has misrepresented her past.

However, Acton has said she has not spoken to her mother in nearly five decades. She and her brother were removed from Arthur’s custody in 1978 after their stepfather was arrested and indicted for raping Acton when she was 12 years old.

“It isn’t an easy story,” Acton told “Morning Joe” on Monday. “It’s a sad story. It is my story.”

Acton called the ad part of an “era of cruelty and distraction” in politics. She said people are tired of the hostility and want leaders focused on solving problems and noted that all five living Ohio governors, three Republicans and two Democrats, have publicly condemned the ad.

“Everyone is exhausted of living this way,” she said. “They’re tired of the hate and the chaos and vitriol. They want public servants again who actually solve problems instead of making them. And kindness is not weakness.”

Acton said the country needs “good public servants on both sides of the aisle, back in office again, who want to do the hard work of making life better.”

The physician, who served as Ohio’s top public health official, told MS NOW that her difficult childhood shaped her commitment to improving people’s lives and made her a “fighter for the things that we all hold dear.”

“I know what it feels like to be left behind,” she said. “I know what it feels like to be hungry, or not have the heat on, or be just struggling.”

Acton said voters have shared their own experiences with her on the campaign trail.

“I’ve been on the road now, and people are hearing my story; I’m not ever the only one who’s been through a thing or two in their childhood,” she said. “Half our kids are living in poverty in my state, up to 70% in some pockets. While these folks are capitalizing and enriching things for themselves, the people of my state are going backwards on every single measure, and that’s why I’m here.”

The Democrat said the ad reinforced her view that “there’s no low my opponent won’t sink to,” and she accused Ramaswamy of being “just out for himself.”

With Election Day approaching, Acton said “decency is on the ballot” and urged Ohioans to “help us push back on this” and bring more humanity back to politics.

“Let’s not give into this and let’s not give up on one another,” she said. “I see a new day dawning right now.”

You can watch Acton’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.

The post ‘Decency is on the ballot’: Acton slams Ramaswamy’s ad featuring her estranged mother appeared first on MS NOW.

As October got underway, Donald Trump threw an online tantrum by way of his social media platform, lashing out at Sen. Tom Cotton because the Arkansas Republican hedged on a daylight saving time proposal supported by the White House. The president, however, didn’t just throw around some juvenile names.

After making the case that Cotton was focused on his “ego” and failing to put “Arkansas first,” Trump publicly released the senator’s cellphone number and encouraged Arkansans to use it.

Nearly two weeks later, as the president expressed fears about Texas’ U.S. Senate race, he threw another online tantrum, this time targeting Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, whom Trump labeled a “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE” political hack who would deserve the blame if state Attorney General Ken Paxton loses.

On Friday, after Trump’s Justice Department filed an outlandish lawsuit targeting Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (who is not up for re-election this year) denounced the radical gambit, declaring in a statement, “Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot. The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit.”

Naturally, the president who demanded the lawsuit wasn’t pleased. In yet another lengthy online rant published Saturday night, Trump labeled Murkowski “the Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far,” before falsely saying that the senator “only got elected” because of the state’s system of ranked choice balloting, which he falsely described as “corrupt” and a “total Democrat [sic] scam.”

He added that Murkowski “probably wants” Democrats “to steal the Election,” before adding, “Lisa Murkowski is a DISGRACE to Alaska and our Country. You just don’t get any worse!”

Trump concluded that if incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, “everything we’ve done for Alaska will come to an immediate hault.” (In context, I suspect he meant “halt.”)

For good measure, shortly before midnight, the president kept going, adding in a follow-up tirade, “They’ve been trying to get rid of Lisa Murkowski forever in Alaska, then she came up with the Ranked Choice Voting SCAM.” (Again, it’s not a scam; Murkowski isn’t the one who came up with it; and the system was not responsible for rescuing her career.)

That Trump holds the GOP senator in contempt is not exactly new, but the recent series of harangues directed at senators from his own party is a timely reminder that this guy, 11 years into his political career and nearly six years into his presidency, still has no idea how to deal with Congress.

Evidently, as the president sees it, if he can just harass his ostensible allies enough through online antics, then maybe they’ll succumb to his intimidation efforts and follow his demands.

Except, as he probably ought to know by now, his harassment efforts tend not to work. Cotton didn’t change his mind about daylight saving time; Cornyn hasn’t become a Paxton cheerleader; and Murkowski hasn’t backed off her criticisms of an indefensible lawsuit.

What we’re left with is a president who keeps picking pointless fights with intraparty allies, whose support he might yet need in the near future, in the run-up to critically important U.S. elections — which is every bit as foolish as it sounds.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post ‘A disgrace’: Trump finds yet another Republican senator to condemn ahead of the midterms appeared first on MS NOW.

The Trump administration’s threats against states over alleged noncitizen voting have reached a crescendo just eight days from the midterm elections, with Justice Department officials claiming such cases have risen to “emergency” proportions in California.

But MS NOW has found the number of federal prosecutions based on allegations of noncitizen voting remains low in the state — and across the country.

Three weeks before Election Day, the Justice Department sent California a password-protected thumb drive that identified more than 20,000 individuals it believed to be noncitizens registered to vote in the state.

The delivery came with a warning: It wasn’t just noncitizen voters the DOJ would come after; anyone who had participated in tabulating that ballot — including state officials or poll workers — would be seen as aiding and abetting an offense and criminally liable.

And last week, DOJ and Homeland Security officials were in Los Angeles to announce 28 criminal cases against lawful permanent residents, each of whom, officials said, appeared on the federal list of 20,000 likely noncitizens registered in California.

But those 28 announced cases represent just over one-tenth of 1% of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” who DHS claims are registered to vote in California, which highlights how infrequently Trump’s DOJ has filed criminal charges against noncitizens for election-related crimes in the state. Put another way: The 28 individuals charged in California represent .0001% of the state’s 23 million registered voters.

An MS NOW review of the charging documents that have been made public also reveals that some of the election-related charges loudly touted by DOJ officials in press conferences and on social media appear to have been quietly dropped.

In another threatening letter to county election officials on Friday, the Justice Department continued to claim that it had charged “28 aliens for unlawful voting and registration offenses.” Federal court records show that in five of the California criminal complaints, the charge for “fraudulent voter registration” had been crossed out with a red line, with the initials of the corresponding Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent who brought the complaint.

Those five individuals now appear to be charged only with the crime of making a false statement under oath in a naturalization application, not with unlawfully registering to vote or voting, said Samantha Trepel, a former Justice Department prosecutor, who reviewed some of the charging documents.

After reading the charging documents filed by the HSI agents, Eric Balliet, who spent more than 20 years at that agency when he worked for ICE, told MS NOW that based on his experience the federal judge overseeing some of the cases likely struck down the election-related charges.

“Facts and transparency matter. If judges are not finding sufficient probable cause exists in nearly 1 in 5 of the voter fraud cases that are presented to them, then that is a problem,” said Balliet, who served at the Department of Homeland Security across multiple administrations, including during President Donald Trump’s first term. “That shows the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure remains intact.”

Balliet added that the dropped election-related charges at this stage show “a lack of familiarity of the elements of the crime that the agents are investigating,” adding that it is not the fault of the HSI agents, because “they were never trained or provided legal guidance on what is required to pursue these charges.”

The Justice Department could bring back the election-related charges in those cases at a later date. But asked why the voting-related charges were dropped in some of the cases, Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels did not provide a direct answer. “The 28 noncitizens were charged in criminal complaints with federal crimes,” Pels said. “The department is bringing more election fraud cases every week.”

Of the 28 publicly announced cases, eight are unavailable through a federal records search and unable to be verified as of publication.

The relatively minuscule number of criminal complaints announced in California represents a nationwide trend. An MS NOW review of court records found that between early September 2026 and mid-October, the Trump administration charged 105 people with illegally registering or voting as a noncitizen.

And that small number also directly contradicts Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. The president has made frequent unfounded claims about noncitizen voting as pretext for claiming that the midterm elections have been rigged against Republicans, and as justification for possible federal interference, civil rights attorneys and former DOJ officials have warned.

Those experts also say the Justice Department, run by Trump’s former personal lawyer, is attempting to intimidate states into disenfranchising voters of color. Based on the records publicly available so far, the majority of the 28 charged in California were from counties with significant nonwhite populations.

“This administration has one goal only: suppress the votes of Black and Latino voters who they deem expendable,” Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and former assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, told MS NOW. “Historically, the Justice Department has focused on enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”

Noncitizen voting is extremely rare and has never swayed the outcome of an election, according to research from both partisan and nonpartisan organizations. Past convictions are also rare; a Heritage Foundation database found that nationwide between 2000 and 2025 there were 71 criminal convictions of noncitizens for unlawfully voting.

Asked if the DOJ was worried its actions could result in the disenfranchisement of American citizens — as some have already been incorrectly counted in the Trump administration’s lists of alleged noncitizens — Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, said “no.”

“Every action the department has taken to protect the integrity of this year’s elections is grounded in the law and being litigated in open court,” Pels said. “Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote and that every lawful ballot is counted.”

The Justice Department has made no secret that California is in its crosshairs, filing a new lawsuit alleging that the state has ignored the federal government’s urgent requests that it verify the citizenship of the 20,000 individuals, refuse to mail them ballots and segregate any that are returned.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held a rare Sunday afternoon hearing on the DOJ’s demand that California segregate ballots the administration claims are from alleged noncitizens. The judges on the federal appeals court appeared ready to reject the Justice Department’s effort. A federal judge in Santa Ana, California, has scheduled a hearing on the lawsuit for this week.

Pressed on the timing by MS NOW, the Justice Department did not directly answer why it waited for months to send California any list of suspected noncitizens to the state. The DOJ first alleged in July that California had more than 190,000 potential noncitizens on its voter rolls but did not send a list of individuals to the state until Oct. 13.

The 20,000 alleged noncitizens are the ones that “have been manually verified to date,” Pels, the Justice Department spokesperson claimed, adding “that number can and will go up.”

But the small number of charges brought to date in California and across the country compared with the more than 150 million Americans who voted in the last presidential election “shows that noncitizen voting is not a widespread problem,” said Trepel, who served as a Justice Department prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division across Republican and Democratic administrations.

“States already have multiple safeguards in place to ensure only eligible citizens can vote, and there continues to be no evidence that noncitizen voting poses a meaningful threat to election integrity,” Trepel said. “Efforts to exaggerate the issue risk undermining public confidence in our elections and could be used to justify removing eligible voters from the rolls.”

The Justice Department itself has repeatedly admitted that the new citizenship lists it is creating to verify a person’s voter eligibility are not perfect and could have errors. Earlier this year, a Justice Department attorney said “certainly a responsible state would not take” the government’s citizenship lists “and then immediately or automatically throw off every single person on their voter rolls who does not appear on that list,” according to a court transcript reviewed by MS NOW.

And during a press conference last week, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter made a similar admission, saying “there may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect.”

“These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens,” McCotter said.

The top federal prosecutor in California, Bill Essayli, described the department’s lawsuit against California as “an emergency and we expect the courts to treat it as such.”

Meanwhile, the White House continues to defend the noncitizen voter hunt. A White House spokesperson called it “decisive lawful action to protect our elections.”

David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who now advises Republican and Democratic election officials across the country, said the Trump administration was targeting California and spinning a false narrative about widespread noncitizen voter fraud because “they are failing at everything they try. This is desperation and it will fail.”

“This administration has spent 21 months using all of the resources of the federal government to try to manufacture evidence to support the president’s lies about widespread noncitizen voting,” Becker said. “In all that time they have charged only a few dozen. Every time their claims are subjected to scrutiny, they fall apart, revealing an infinitesimally small number of noncitizens accidentally on the lists.”

California officials, for their part, have questioned whether the data supplied by the DOJ is in fact verifiable or even usable. Claims of noncitizens on voter rolls in other states have quickly fallen apart, as in the case of Nevada, which found that every person the Trump administration accused of being a noncitizen on its voter rolls was in fact a citizen, according to email exchanges between Nevada officials and DHS officials provided to MS NOW.

In Los Angeles County, where the Justice Department claims more than 7,000 noncitizens are registered to vote, the election officials found that some of the people on the list have a listed birthplace in the United States, a strong indicator that they are citizens. In a sampling of the suspected noncitizen list, LA County County Registrar Dean Logan said, officials also found that some had no voting history and that others had canceled their voter registrations.

Still, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters on Thursday that the Justice Department had not ruled out pursuing legal action against other states before the election.

“There’s a number of states that we’re looking at,” Blanche said. He said that it was “never our intention to improperly interfere with elections” or a state certification process.

“But you know, to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that,” Blanche added, “of course I’m not going to say that.”

The post As the DOJ amps up threats against noncitizen voting in California, the number of cases brought there — and across the country — remains low appeared first on MS NOW.

As last week neared its end, struggling consumers confronted yet another discouraging development: Oil prices reached levels unseen since April. With so little time remaining in the midterm election cycle, and with affordability on the minds of so many Americans, common sense suggested this would be a topic Donald Trump would avoid at his latest campaign rallies.

And yet, the Republican president apparently couldn’t help himself.

Trump: "While oil prices are temporarily high … the United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-25T00:27:47.633Z

Saturday night in Georgia, Trump began by assuring his supporters that gas prices would “be falling dramatically” just as soon as he figured out a way to end the war he launched against Iran. If he had stopped here, it would not have been notable.

But then he kept going.

“The United States’ oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars,” the president said, conceding that he wasn’t sure whether to bring this up, and that members of his own team advised him, “Please don’t mention that, sir.”

He blew off the good advice.

Trump’s own team told him not to celebrate higher energy prices shortly before Election Day, since Americans generally don’t want to be told to be happy about their pain at the pump. He decided not to listen, evidently because he’s delighted to see Big Oil cash in, regardless of the impact on unhappy consumers.

The president first rolled out this talking point just two weeks after launching the war, using his social media platform to argue, “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

That line proved wildly unpersuasive and was quickly dropped from the White House’s talking points, before making an unexpected comeback at an event in Arizona two weeks ago. “Our country is making more money than it’s ever made because of the fact that oil is so high,” Trump boasted, effectively telling American consumers to be glad they’re paying more at the pump.

As a substantive matter, the problem with Trump’s claim that “we’re making a fortune” is that the word “we” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s true that the United States is producing a lot of oil, and it’s also true that higher prices help generate oil industry profits. But since the number of Americans who benefit from oil industry profits is very small, few will likely celebrate the ongoing hit to their wallets.

But as a political matter, it’s remarkable to see the Republican — who has gone out of his way to make the midterms a referendum on himself — execute such a bizarre strategy at the worst possible time.

“I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump,’” he said. The trouble is, there’s nothing fake about such headlines: Trump really did talk about all the money Big Oil was making while people were suffering at the pump, which he then promptly followed with, “I don’t give a damn.”

If Republicans are very lucky, voters won’t hear about this.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump ignores his own team’s advice, celebrates higher oil prices appeared first on MS NOW.

In the recent past, countless international observers had ample reason to fear the ascendancy of strongman leaders in nations around the globe, as democracies suffered one setback after another. Donald Trump’s return to the American presidency offered a dramatic example for the West, but the broader authoritarian pattern extended elsewhere.

This year, however, democracy and its champions are starting to turn the tide.

In April, then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán suffered a lopsided defeat, ending his radically regressive 16-year reign, despite the White House’s intervention on his behalf.

Six months later, the 14-year reign of Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vucic also crashed, thanks in large part to a student-led progressive movement. The Associated Press reported:

The long-ruling authoritarian leader on Sunday conceded the defeat of his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party to a grassroots movement of university students who led protests for almost two years against him before unseating him in a historic change of government. […]

The diverse youth movement’s message that rampant corruption, cronyism and organized crime under Vucic were eating away at the country resonated widely with voters.

Sounding a rather pitiful note after having been rejected by his own country’s electorate, Vucic attributed his defeat to a series of perceived enemies, including “the deep American state, the one that is also against President Trump.”

The celebrations in Belgrade continued anyway.

People in Belgrade celebrated following Serbia's Aleksandar Vucic speech conceding defeat to a student-led protest movement in a historic election that ends his long grip on power and heralds a new political era in the Balkan country. reut.rs/4zkXvww

— Reuters (@reuters.com) 2026-10-26T05:03:08Z

“I ​have just spoken by phone with the leaders of the Students’ List, who won the elections in Serbia, to congratulate them on their victory,” Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar said in a statement. “I assured them of Hungary’s support. I was delighted ​to hear how much strength our victory in April had given them during this difficult struggle.”

Hours later, the world learned that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a surprising fourth term, defeating his right-wing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, four years after Bolsonaro’s father attempted a coup that ultimately sent him to prison, and who also enjoyed the White House’s backing.

As The New York Times noted, Bolsonaro refused to accept the outcome, “increasing the risk of unrest over the election result.”

Time will tell what becomes of conditions in Brasília and who ultimately succeeds Vucic. But as the dust settles on these elections, there is an obvious and heartening through line connecting the election results out of Hungary, Serbia and Brazil: Democracies defeated autocracies.

Every country has its own unique political dynamics, and the victors in these countries are hardly identical. But when leaders of the global authoritarian movement lose, it’s worth celebrating — because when voters reject candidates like Vucic and Bolsonaro, it’s not just a setback for them and their parties, it’s also a failure for the movements they help represent.

That said, there’s fresh evidence to believe the White House hasn’t yet gotten the message: The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is eyeing Orbán to serve as the next United Nations secretary-general, which is both bonkers and evidence that the broader democratic fight remains ongoing.

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A group of former federal prosecutors and human rights lawyers is coming together to investigate political corruption and law enforcement violence that it says is being ignored by the Justice Department under President Donald Trump.

Organizers said the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, dubbed the Rule of Law Project, would gather facts and present cases either to state or local prosecutors, or to a future Justice Department it said may operate in a less partisan manner than the current one.

Founder Brad Adams, who spent 20 years with the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch overseeing investigations of state violence, said the group was responding to a climate — citing recent stories alleging grift among politicians and incidents like shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers — in which “senior officials openly engage in corruption and federal agents beat and kill innocent people with impunity.”

“The rule of law is on life support, but it’s all of our responsibility to make sure it doesn’t die,” he added.

Adams said the group would be funded by undisclosed private donors, and would operate in a strictly nonpartisan manner, probing corruption among members of both parties.

“The Rule of Law Project’s mission is to bring back the ideal that the law protects and binds everyone, that criminal conduct has consequences and that no one — regardless of office, badge or influence — may escape those consequences.”

The Rule of Law Project will seek to investigate and document instances of official corruption and police violence across the United States that appear to have gone unexamined and unpunished, though without the subpoena power afforded to government investigators. It will gather evidence and witness statements and turn over “prosecution-ready case files” to state and local authorities, or a future Department of Justice the group said may be more willing to take on those cases.

“I do not think we can break the cycle in this country without criminal accountability,” Adams said, adding that he anticipateed working with Congressional investigators where appropriate.

State and local prosecutors have launched investigations into some cases of ICE violence, but have faced obstacles in obtaining evidence.

DOJ officials disputed the idea that they ignore potential criminal activity, saying the department assesses each case on the merits.

The lead investigator will be Mark Blumberg, who spent almost 30 years in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division investigating and prosecuting acts of official misconduct. For the last 20 years, Blumberg led DOJ efforts to enforce civil rights laws in elections. He also served on the FBI’s Shooting Investigation Review Group and Customs and Border Protection’s National Use of Force Review Board.

The group said he would lead a team of former federal prosecutors and investigators with decades of federal law enforcement experience.

“People need to trust that the game is not rigged against them, that the law applies to everyone,” Blumberg said. “If those in power aren’t held accountable for illegally enriching themselves and using violence against others without cause, that undermines any incentive for the rest of us to follow the law. Our public officials should model the best behavior for our country, not milk it dry for power and riches.”

Organizers said the Rule of Law Project would investigate officials who appear to have used their public office for private gain, including those who solicit or accept something of value in exchange for influencing their official duties, who improperly seek to influence executive and legislative actions, and whose official acts affect their personal financial interest.

A series of news stories over the past 20 months has documented questionable conduct by public officials or FBI corruption investigations that were closed by Trump officials.

For example, MS NOW was first to report that the FBI recorded Tom Homan accepting $50,000 cash in an undercover sting operation, an allegation Homan has denied. The case did not move forward.

More recently, ProPublica reported that the Trump Justice Department declined to move forward on FBI investigations of potential illegal cash for contract schemes involving Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the late Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham and Democratic Rep. James Clyburn. Collins and Clyburn deny wrongdoing. The FBI told ProPublica that it had found “nothing implicating Senator Collins” and that the stories about the lawmakers were based on “half-baked misleading claims from former FBI personnel and a convicted felon to spin a predetermined narrative.”

Other cases have come to light that typically might have drawn Justice Department scrutiny, including a recent New York Times report that former DOJ official Alina Habba received a $50 million compensation package from the daughter of a Venezuelan billionaire who sought and got a pardon from Trump. Habba denies wrongdoing and the DOJ has not indicated whether it will — or will not — investigate the matter.

The Rule of Law Project will also investigate excessive-force cases and improper conditions of confinement, with a specific focus on unlawful conduct by ICE and CBP, the group says. Investigators will also look into federal interference with protected liberties, including the right to vote.

After an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine in July, officials said the FBI was not conducting a civil rights investigation.

The DOJ also declined to open a civil rights investigation into the January ICE shooting of Renée Good in Minneapolis.

“We only take cases that an independent Justice Department would have pursued in ordinary times,” Blumberg said. “That’s the standard I held myself to as a prosecutor. We’re not here to seek retribution or to settle scores. We’re here to ensure the law applies to the powerful the same way it applies to the rest of us.”

Since Watergate, the Department of Justice has operated independently of the White House in choosing which cases to investigate and prosecute. Days after he was sworn in, Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would not pledge to run the department independent of Trump and the White House.

“No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that,” he told NBC in August.

Among the board members of the new group is Kenneth Roth, former executive director at Human Rights Watch.

“Since the current U.S. government won’t investigate allegations of ICE violence or official corruption, we will,” he said. “To lay the foundation for prosecutions when they become possible.”

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