Mary "Tracy" Morrison, owner of The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain in Arkansas, orchestrated a disturbing assault on a 13-year-old student during an April 2025 "circle time" session, ProPublica reported.

Morrison berated the boy, struck him repeatedly with a plastic cylinder, and instructed classmates to choke, slap, punch, and pinch him for nearly 40 minutes while three staff members watched without intervening.

The incident was captured on video.

Craighead County Sheriff’s Detective David Bailey, a Jonesboro native, began investigating the school.

"More came out in Bailey’s interviews with parents and current and former employees and in interviews that child advocates conducted with the students, documents show: allegations of “waterboarding” a child and cutting another’s hair as punishment," ProPublica found, and added, "Slapping a student. A wooden paddle named Fred.

Morrison pleaded guilty to permitting child abuse and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 120 days of house arrest, five years' probation and surrendered her occupational therapy license.

The case exposed Arkansas's lack of oversight of private schools receiving public Education Freedom Account vouchers.

Despite the abuse allegations, state officials quickly restored funding to the school, which now operates under a new name with Morrison still owning the property.

Watch the video below.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was put on the spot Wednesday during his Senate confirmation hearing regarding the Justice Department’s repeated attempts to seize states’ voter rolls, and was reminded of his agency’s repeated failures to enact President Donald Trump’s “election interference” agenda.

The Trump administration has sought to gain access to states’ voter registration lists, with the Justice Department suing countless states in order to compel them to hand over their rolls. The administration has gone as far as to impose new rules that would punish defiant states by cutting federal funding earmarked for disaster preparedness, rules that one former Trump official called “extortion.”

In all cases, however, the Trump administration has come up short, and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) was hoping Blanche might admit to this fact.

“Since last year, DOJ has sued 30 states seeking their voter lists; 14 of those lawsuits have been resolved by federal judges,” Hirono said. “Mr. Blanche, did any of those 14 federal court judges from across the country agree with DOJ's legal position? Yes or no.”

After a brief pause, Blanche answered with a vague response.

“Um... with some of the legal positions, yes,” Blanche said.

“Pardon?” Hirono asked.

Blanche went on to declaratively state, “The answer to your question is yes, some of the judges agreed with some of our legal positions, and most of those cases are under appeal.”

Hirono appeared eager to correct the record, and gave a little laugh as she did so.

“Actually, that's not correct. The answer is actually no,” Hirono said. “These 14 federal judges – some of them Trump appointees – disagreed with DOJ's position in terms of getting access to these voter rolls. It's all part of DOJ's attempt – and with the president – at election interference.”

A former Department of Homeland Security official warned Wednesday that President Donald Trump has imminent plans to invoke emergency powers he's never actually had authority to use, and that unlike his first term, there are no guardrails to stop him.

Miles Taylor, ex-DHS chief of staff, argued on his Substack that Trump will address election fraud claims on Thursday as a prelude to accessing what government insiders call the "Doomsday Book"—a collection of "presidential emergency action documents," or PEADs, that theoretically provide "break-glass options for national emergencies."

The problem for Taylor are the contents of the book, which he wrote “hint at draft orders that would let a president detain 'dangerous persons' without trial, censor the press, flip an internet kill switch, commandeer social media, or even ground Americans and stop them from traveling.”

Taylor said he feared Trump could manipulate those powers to produce "nightmare" results.

"What if Trump discovered these emergency powers could be weaponized for purposes beyond actual emergencies?" he wrote. "What if someone manufactured a crisis to justify it?"

Recalling that scenario nearly became reality in Trump's first term, Taylor claimed this time could be quite different.

"The guardrails are gone," he wrote, "Trump is a loser surrounded by losers. His administration has been beaten again and again in federal court. This isn’t because judges are out to get him; rather, it’s because his people are incompetent and can’t seem to read the law. The same pathetic crowd of has-beens that couldn’t pull off a ham-fisted, first-term quest to steal an election won’t be able to execute a power grab in the second, no matter how much time they’ve had to prepare."

If one guardrail remains, Taylor argued it was the Trump administration's competency, or lack thereof.

"I won’t bet the republic on their drooling incompetence," he wrote. "No matter what happens, our ultimate backstop must be to make these elections Too Big To Rig. I’ll say it again and again in the months to come. That means no matter what barriers they throw in our way, Americans WILL be registered to vote. They WILL show up at the polls."