Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed is facing accusations that he is more focused on national politics than representing Michigan after leaked audio showed him describing the state’s Senate seat as a platform to build the progressive movement and influence the Democratic Party ahead of the 2028 presidential election. El Sayed is competing against Rep. […]
Emergency appeal comes after court upheld ruling blocking president’s order ahead of November midtermsThe Trump administration has asked the supreme court to clear the way for an executive order from Donald Trump that could dramatically change mail-in voting.The emergency appeal comes after an appeals court upheld a ruling blocking the president’s order in nearly half the country ahead of November’s midterm elections. Continue reading...
A legal expert was stunned Monday as the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to give President Donald Trump the path forward to alter mail-in ballot voting in the United States.Michele Goodwin, professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, told CNN that the Trump administration's move to push to restore an executive order after the Supreme Court ruled to block Trump's move to tighten rules for mail-in voting was "absolutely unprecedented.""We've never seen an executive order like this Trump order," Goodwin said."Notably, in that First Circuit Court of Appeals [decision], which upheld the injunction from a lower court, one of those three judges was Trump-appointed," Goodwin explained. "That court said that this is null and void on its face, and it is because it's extraordinary. We have known and held for centuries that the domain of elections is left to states to control and monitor. They're responsible for that. This is not something that is just of the last year or two of this administration. This is something that has been fundamental to the United States and its rule of law and politics."The Trump administration's move has reflected an ongoing pattern, she said."One of the ways of seeing this has been a longer arc of Donald Trump with suspicion about U.S. elections," Goodwin explained, referencing Trump's longtime claims that the 2020 election was "rigged" and his legal challenges to try [to] prove that unfounded theory."It's worth noting that he lost every one of those challenges except for one, which was not a matter of whether he won or not," Goodwin added. "It was just during COVID to allow for those who were overseeing, those who were handling the elections, to be able to come six feet within those that were handling it. So, it's dead on arrival, but we're not really sure what might happen with the Supreme Court."
President Donald Trump has politicized America’s intelligence-gathering operations to an unprecedented degree, and a former CIA analyst who worked for Trump’s NSC is now raising the alarm.“In 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault: senior officers fired in public, clearances revoked for dissent, decade-old assessments denounced by the CIA director in the press,” Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst and an NSC director for Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, wrote for Lawfare on Monday. “Earlier this month, the campaign reached the raw intelligence itself, as the White House declassified selected reporting to sustain election interference claims that the intelligence community’s own finished analysis would not support.”As one example of Trump’s politicizing intelligence, Curlee described how members of the CIA with expertise in Venezuela were fired when they did not back the administration’s position on taking over that country.“Twenty years later, days after taking office, the second Trump administration tasked the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to assess whether the Venezuelan regime had directed Tren de Aragua—a criminal gang—to invade the United States,” Curlee wrote. “The question, from Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, matched nearly word for word the predicate for the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, last invoked in World War II to intern Japanese, German, and Italian nationals.”She added that she knows this firsthand because she tasked the Venezuela assessment.“I was the NSC’s acting senior director for intelligence programs across the transition—Biden’s last week, Trump’s first,” Curlee said. “I knew the NIC, the intelligence community’s most senior, most deliberate analytic body, would carefully weigh the evidence and reach a consensus position. How much rode on that judgment became clear when the administration carried out lethal strikes on alleged drug boats off Venezuela and, in January 2026, sent U.S. forces into Caracas to seize Nicolás Maduro himself.”She added, “The NIC did not give the answer the White House wanted, concluding that Tren de Aragua had not entered the country at Maduro’s direction, undercutting the administration’s case in court. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard denounced the finding, and her chief of staff, Joe Kent, pressed the acting NIC chair to “rethink” it. When he held firm, Gabbard had him walked out of the building, ending the career of one of the country’s most accomplished analysts.”From there, Curlee lists other ways that Trump has pushed out people in the CIA and other intelligence agencies for engaging in work that the president disliked for purely political reasons.“From its first days, the second Trump administration treated the intelligence community not as an instrument of the state but as an enemy within: a ‘deep state’ that had allegedly lain in wait for the president during his first term,” Curlee wrote. “The aim was explicit: Put career civil servants ‘in trauma’ to make them not want to come to work. At the CIA, that program arrived on schedule.”She continued, “First they came for the people. On day one, the president revoked the clearances of 51 former officers who had spoken on Russian election interference. A month later, amid the purge of trans service members, the DNI fired 100 trans intelligence officers from 15 agencies. In May 2025, she fired two senior analysts over the Tren de Aragua assessment. And in August 2025, Gabbard publicly revoked 37 more clearances—including that of one of the intelligence community’s most respected experts on Russia—seemingly without irony, for the ‘politicization or weaponization of intelligence.’”Curlee said that Trump then denounced findings that had previously been proven beyond reasonable doubt, from Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election to warnings about white nationalist terrorism, violence against LGBT people and assessments about women’s reproductive health.“And the threat did not stop at termination,” Curlee pointed out. “Former CIA Director John Brennan was referred for criminal investigation and interviewed by the FBI over the same analysis the administration had set out to discredit. The lesson reached every desk—a clearance, and with it a livelihood, could be revoked with a phone call; a career could end in front of a grand jury. By mid-2026, the president was describing intelligence that contradicted his preferred reality as ‘treason.’”Curlee also warned about Trump politicizing intelligence during his July 16th speech falsely claiming that China had meddled in the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Biden.“The president delivered a primetime address alleging that China had interfered in the 2020 election, built on a mass declassification of election-related intelligence assembled by the White House’s Government Transparency Task Force—a body created to comb the classified...
President Donald Trump is facing a huge problem in November, The Bulwark's Sam Stein told MS NOW's Jonathan Lemire on "The Moment" Wednesday.The problem, he noted, is compounded by Trump's inability to course-correct in a simple way that most candidates facing a huge backlash for their party would.The president is currently demanding Republicans cancel their Senate recess to force through the SAVE America Act, a voting restriction bill Trump has become obsessed with that has no path to passage in the upper chamber.Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Stein told Lemire, is "in a weird spot" since any attempt to follow Trump's command would end in the bill failing, making him look "feckless" and earning Trump's wrath anyway.The fundamental issue, said Stein, is that "every party in power in the midterm has to deal with this type of equation. Usually you want to sort of downplay how great things are, because you don't want voters to feel like you're out of touch or leaving them behind. But Trump is incapable of doing that. He continuously talks about this being a 'golden age' and how everyone's 401k is skyrocketing. So there's crosscurrents there."It further compounds the issue, Stein said, that Trump and his MAGA allies are sitting on a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars and are doing nothing with it to save the party that polls warn is headed for doom."What you're seeing in the polls is that Republicans are, by and large, much less enthusiastic than Democrats to vote in this midterm election," said Stein — with some even threatening to vote for Democrats. "That is real poison for the Republican Party," he said, because the turnout they enjoy whenever Trump is on the ballot is set to vanish.The upshot of all of this, he said, is that between Trump's refusal to message defensively, his lack of spending and the "general malaise," Democrats "could really run up the numbers." - YouTube www.youtube.com
The Palm Beach Post — which happens to be the largest newspaper in Palm Beach, home of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Resort — has bad news for Trump and the Republicans. With the midterms looming, not only does the president and GOP face abysmal polling, but a new district created by Florida’s newly gerrymandered map appears to be more competitive than state Republicans hoped. “Trump's low approval rating is enough to raise alarms for Republicans in the midterm elections this fall,” writes the Post, noting that “new polls show a majority of voters are opting for Democrats on a generic ballot.” Trump has attempted to rig the congressional map by pushing for redistricting in Texas, which kicked off a multi-state redistricting battle that ultimately netted Republicans more potential seats to win, but as the Post explains, not only have “pollsters found that voters' enthusiasm and intention lean Democratic,” but one of Florida's new districts turned out to be a toss-up. While Florida’s 25th Congressional District, which includes the coast from Miami Beach to Delray Beach, was created by Florida’s Republican lawmakers specifically to result in a conservative-leaning district, the highly reputable, non-partisan Cook Political Report lists it as a toss-up leaning solidly Democrat. The Post notes that Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), incumbent from the 23rd District, is running for the seat. What’s more, the Post pointed to a number of new polls that spell bad news for Republicans, writing, “An Emerson College Polling survey found 53 percent of Americans were more likely to vote Democratic in a generic 2026 congressional ballot, compared to 42% voting Republican.” The paper noted that Democrats’ “significant lead” was being driven by “women voters, who break for the Democratic candidate by a 27-point margin, 56 percent to 39 percent, while men are more split: 49 percent support the Democrat and 44 percent the Republican.” Meanwhile, “The poll gave Trump a 39 percent job approval rating, compared to 57 percent who disapproved.”The Post also cited a recent poll by Fox News, which found 68 percent of Democrats are extremely motivated to vote in November compared to 57 percent of Republicans. According to the paper, “The poll respondents were also more likely to say Democrats could better handle several issues, including the economy and inflation, issues Trump ran on in 2024.” Furthermore, “When asked if the election was held today, 53 percent of voters would back their Democratic candidate in the House race, compared to 46 percent who would vote Republican. Fox News said 53 percent is the highest percentage received by either party in their generic House ballot polls since 1996.”According to Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who works with Democrat Chris Anderson to conduct Fox News polls, "The best estimates I’ve seen suggest the GOP could retain the House even if the Democrats win the national vote by 2-3 points, but if Democrats win by 6-7 points, they probably take the House."
President Donald Trump is putting additional pressure on his fellow Republicans to pass his signature 'deep throated' voting reform bill, the SAVE America Act.
