Jordan Green, Special to Raw Story

Jordan Green is an investigative correspondent based in Greensboro, N.C., who covers right-wing extremism for Raw Story. His work has been featured in a host of publications, including the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Nation, In These Times and Sojourners.

Prior to joining the staff of Raw Story in March 2021, Green spent 16 years covering housing, policing, nonprofits and music as a reporter and editor at Triad City Beat in North Carolina and Yes Weekly. Green’s exposé on Medicaid fraud by a bogus drug-treatment program placed third for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s David Carr Investigative Reporting Award in 2020, while his reporting on how tax revaluations discriminated against Black homeowners in Winston-Salem won the N.C. Press Association’s second-place award for investigative reporting in 2013.

Republican group with white power ties openly plots infiltration of Florida government

A network of Florida Republicans with links to hate groups and the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally is mobilizing to seat members on local government boards and run for elected office in the Sunshine State and beyond.

Members of American Restoration Coalition, or ARC, who count among their ranks a city council member and two planning and zoning board members, openly promote Patriot Front on their social media pages. Some of the Republican activists also belong to a secretive “white Christian fitness crew” with a paramilitary aspect that has shared a gym with white supremacist Active Clubs.

Members of the group, described by its executive director as “a strategic level organizing apparatus for Heritage Americans,” knocked on doors for Marshall Rawson in July and August, helping him win an upset victory in the Republican primary for a north-central Florida state House seat. Rawson attended the violent Unite the Right rally in 2017 and has a long history of involvement in the white nationalist movement, as previously reported by Talking Points Memo.

One of the “Heritage” activists, Jonathon Norris, who campaigned for Rawson and who sits on the Palm Bay Planning and Zoning Board, also attended Unite the Right.

The network’s links to Patriot Front and the Active Clubs, and Norris’ presence at Unite the Right are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.

ARC’s website describes it as a representing “the interests of Heritage America,” a euphemism for white people. During the men-only group’s launch in January to an audience assembled by private invitation, President David Outlaw outlined a strategy to “take up positions on planning and zoning committees, city councils [and] state representative [seats].”

“We’re restoring America back, you know — I’ll let you fill in how far back we’re going to restore it,” said Chandler Langevin, a Palm Bay councilman who serves as ARC’s executive director said at the group’s launch ceremony, prompting laughter in the audience.

Outlaw provided a more precise marker during his speech for how far the group wants to turn back the clock.

“We have walked in these wicked ways for the better part of a century,” Outlaw said, while decrying immigration, abortion and “sexual degeneracy.”

The coded meaning of “Heritage Americans” was revealed when an X user challenged Langevin by asking, “Are you pro white or racially conscious? If you believe in multiculturalism for citizens then I hope you fail. Diversity is not our strength, and our forefathers knew it.”

“What do you think a Heritage American is?” Langevin replied.

The racial framing of ARC’s position on immigration is also revealed in a recent post stating, “White South Africans can stay.” Another post, which displays a photo of German scientists recruited by the United States following World War II, states, “Old stock Europeans can stay.”

Some of the members’ rhetoric to Republican allies conveys support for upholding democratic institutions, but the group’s social media sends a different signal by sharing clips of white supremacists calling for revolution.

Stefan Hartmann, a physician assistant and ARC cofounder who plans to run for Melbourne City Council in 2028, said in a speech during an event hosted by a local Republican group that the United States is “entrusted to every generation” on condition that “citizens will rise from their occupations and assume again the duties of citizenship” when “its institutions are threatened” and “its liberties neglected.”

Hartmann’s speech contrasts with a video shared by ARC’s X account that shows a montage of speeches at the annual white supremacist American Renaissance Conference. Thomas Rousseau, the leader of Patriot Front, says: “The field is no place for democracy. The organization intentionally does not have a committee structure; it has a chain of command.” Eric Orwoll, leader of the whites-only Return to the Land project, states, “We are a nation without a state, and really without our actual territory.”

The call for a white power revolution is even more explicit in a video of Rousseau’s speech in Washington, D.C. on July 4.

“We wish for nothing less than and nothing short of a revolution,” he said. As described by the ADL Center on Extremism, Rousseau asserted in the speech “that America belongs exclusively to white men ‘by blood,” while singling out Jews (“Jewish cabals”), Latinos (“Mexican cartels”) and Black people (“African criminals”) as enemies.

ARC endorsed Rousseau’s call as “a powerful speech for our generation of men who are doing great things to save our civilization.”

Patriot Front’s manifesto calls “for the formation of a white ethnostate,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, while explicitly excluding people of color “from its conception of pan-European identity.” The manifesto claims that “an African” might be a “citizen,” but is still “not American,” adding, “The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people as well as those who do not share the common unconscious that permeates our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”

Described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a white nationalist hate group,” Patriot Front emerged after Unite the Right as a splinter group from another white supremacist group Vanguard America. James Fields Jr. marched with Vanguard America at Unite the Right. After leaving the rally, he plowed his car into a crowd of antifascist marchers, killing Heather Heyer and injuring others. The rebranded Patriot Front eschewed the Nazi symbolism on conspicuous display at Unite the Right, while pitching its vision for a white ethnostate through rhetoric extolling Americana that was calculated to appeal to mainstream conservatives.

Langevin has also expressed support for Patriot Front on his X account.

Rawson, the Republican candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, is not the only member of the pro-white network who attended Unite the Right. Following publication of the Talking Points Memo story about Rawson’s attendance, the candidate admitted to a Republican group: “One of the things that was true though is me and my wife were at Charlottesville with another couple to defend the memory of Robert E. Lee and in the home of Thomas Jefferson.”

In 2017, the comics fandom website Bleeding Cool published a series of stories about Jonathon Norris’ wife, reporting that the couple had attended Unite the Right. According to the outlet, Norris’ wife posted on wrote on her Facebook page: “When Jonathon told me he was going to Unite the Right, I had no idea the true magnitude of what it was. He was riding there with another couple from Florida, and I said I didn’t have a desire to go.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rawson responded, when asked if Jonathon Norris and his wife were the other couple at Unite the Right. “Jonathan Norris is a friend,” he added, before abruptly hanging up the phone.

Norris can be seen, alongside his wife, in an archived YouTube video republished by Talking Point Memo wearing a bike helmet and carrying a homemade shield. The video opens with someone off camera saying, “Marshall’s finally here,” and showing Rawson leaning in for a hug. The video shows the two couples milling around with a group of people wearing shirts and helmets displaying the insignia of League of the South, an antisemitic group that promotes the secession of the southern U.S. states and seeks to establish a white ethnostate.

Norris, who was appointed to his seat on Palm Bay Planning and Zoning Board by Langevin, did not return emails for this story.

Langevin likewise did not respond to emails and could not be reached at a phone number provided by the city. But he posted a comment on X complaining that a “scumbag Marxist reporter with awful physiognomy is reaching out to my guys who helped on the Marshall Rawson campaign to label everyone a neo-Nazi.”

The Florida white “Heritage” activists’ social media accounts also reveal an alliance with Active Clubs, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a network of white supremacist groups that operate in Europe, North America and Australia.”

Like Patriot Front, with whom it maintains close ties, the Active Club network emerged as an effort to reposition the white power movement in response to the legal and public relations debacle after Unite the Right. Robert Rundo founded the Active Club network while in Europe facing federal rioting charges. Rise Above Movement, a group that Rundo had previously led, fell by the wayside as more than half its members faced charges for attacking counterprotesters at Unite the Right at other pro-Trump events, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Active Clubs recruit young, white men through appeals to physical fitness and brotherhood, while providing opportunities for mixed martial arts events, banner drops and other propaganda efforts and pushing a sense of racial grievance.

ARC’s X account describes Rundo as “a legend” in a July 12 post showing the Active Club leader speaking at American Renaissance. Hartmann and Norris have met Rundo in person, as documented in a post on Hartmann’s Instagram earlier this year. The photo shows the three posing shirtless along with a fourth unidentified man at a fitness and wellness facility attached to Hartmann’s medical practice in Indialantic.

Norris and Hartmann are also members of a secretive “white Christian fitness crew” called Avalon Group that has shared a gym with four branches of Florida Active Clubs. A photo of four men with blurred out faces posted on the Avalon Group X account earlier this month shows a set of flags and other interior details in the background that match footage of balaclava-clad men lifting weights in a video posted on the Florida Active Clubs Instagram account in March. The Florida Active Clubs post advertises “a statewide power lifting tournament hosted by Avalon Gym.”

Norris’ involvement in the Avalon Group is revealed through a photo of a man with a white T-shirt with red lettering that depicts the historic Coast Artillery regiment at Fort Morgan in Alabama. Photos on a public-facing Facebook page show Norris wearing the same shirt. In another photo posted on Facebook, he can be seen wearing a black sleeveless shirt with the Avalon Group logo.

Hartmann can also be seen in a photo of three Avalon Group members posing with assault rifles at shooting range. One of the men in the photo with a blurred-out face wears a red wrist brace, black pants and white T-shirt with a rifle and sling. A video posted on Hartmann’s Instagram page shows him with his face revealed wearing the same wrist brace, pants, T-shirt, rifle and sling at a gun range with matching blue partitions.

Hartmann, who is currently on vacation in Italy, did not respond to messages from Raw Story. Instead, he wrote in a post on X: “Sorry can’t comment for Marxist chuddpaper I’m too busy Euromaxxing.”

The Avalon Group X account, which appears to be run by Norris, includes a handful of posts praising Active Clubs or youth affiliate groups. A post earlier this month depicts members attending a mixed martial arts fight featuring Gypsy Crusader aka Paul Nicholas Miller, a notorious racist livestreamer, while another defends the livestreamer Chud the Builder aka Dalton Eatherly, who faces attempted murder and other charges.

Posts on the account have become increasingly aggressive in recent days.

In response to a question from an X user asking what kind of weapon is most suitable for dealing with “Black teen” violence, the Avalon Group posted on Sept. 16: “We’re building the networks and training now, so we can help and support each other later.”

On Wednesday, the account posted: “The time for debate is over.” Then: “We are in a physical war.”

While members of the Florida white nationalist network project a paramilitary posture behind masks, blurred digital photos and pseudonymous X accounts, their electoral mobilization project is moving into high gear while pledging to expand into other states.

“Throughout the year we’ve been in a trial phase in Florida… networking, building, and identifying a few key races we thought were winnable,” Langevin posted on X last month, following Rawson’s primary victory. “We’ve already achieved multiple wins at the local level and last night one of our patriots won his primary for state House by 10 points.

“We have been quiet throughout this year as we build a foundation for our program, but we are getting to the point now of solidifying our gains and pushing outward.”

Bombshell memo on horrific race massacre exposes complicit FBI: 'They lied like crazy'

GREENSBORO, N.C. — In July 1979, a North Carolina Ku Klux Klan leader named Joe Grady summoned two FBI agents to a Waffle House to warn them “about possible violence in the future.”

Earlier that month, members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization and local Black residents had forced armed Klansmen to retreat inside a community center where they were screening the hugely controversial movie Birth of a Nation. The euphoric anti-Klan protesters celebrated by stealing their Confederate flag and burning it.

That confrontation in the town of China Grove was only the most recent in a string of incidents of leftist harassment that Grady complained had violated the Klan’s constitutional rights.

An official memo describing the meeting is one of thousands of pages recently released by the FBI that detail the agency’s handling of one of the most notorious episodes of white supremacist violence in the past 50 years. About three months after Grady’s warning, a caravan of Klan and Nazis, led by a former FBI informant also working with the police, drove into a Black public housing community in Greensboro and opened fire on an anti-Klan march, killing five leaders of the Workers Viewpoint Organization (later renamed Communist Workers Party).

The FBI said it was releasing the documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

The memo about the July 1979 meeting with the Klan leader also indicates that the FBI's awareness of potential violence was so sufficiently heightened that they asked Grady if the KKK had automatic weapons in its possession.

An official FBI memo details a meeting that took place between two FBI agents and Klan leader Joe Grady in July 1979. (Courtesy FBI)

Despite live television coverage capturing the carnage, Klan and Nazi defendants were acquitted of murder in a state trial and acquitted of civil rights violations in a subsequent federal trial. The Klan and Nazis were later found jointly liable with the Greensboro Police Department for the death of one of the demonstrators in a federal civil lawsuit brought by survivors.

In 2020, the city issued a formal apology acknowledging that the police department “failed to warn the marchers of their extensive knowledge of the racist, violent attack planned against the marchers” by the Klan and Nazis, “with the assistance of a paid GPD informant.”

Less attention has focused on the FBI, whose agents accessed the same stream of intelligence about the Klan and Nazis’ plans to disrupt the rally. A 2006 report issued by an independent truth and reconciliation commission determined that “the single most important element that contributed to the violent outcome of the confrontation was the absence of police,” while finding it “immoral and unconscionable for the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — which both had their own inside intelligence on the Klan and Nazis about the potential for violence on Nov. 3, 1979 — to fail to share that information with local law enforcement.”

The civil suit brought by the survivors put the FBI together with the Klan, Nazis and police at the defense table during the federal trial for an alleged conspiracy to deprive those killed and injured in the attack “of their equal rights, privileges and immunities,” which they argued was motivated by their “hostility to communists, labor organizers and advocates of equal rights for Black people.”

Cecil Moses, who managed the FBI’s investigation of the massacre as assistant special agent in charge of the Charlotte Division, was one of the individual defendants. The judge dismissed Moses as a defendant.

“I could tell you under oath that I had absolutely no information,” Moses told Raw Story. “Nobody from the Greensboro office had mentioned to me that there might be problems that day.”

North Carolina was unfamiliar territory for Moses at the time. Only one month before the massacre, Moses had been transferred from the Memphis office and received a promotion to the number two position in Charlotte. His new boss, Special Agent in Charge Herb Monahan, was away on a hunting trip in the mountains for annual leave at the time of the massacre. Moses was at home doing his laundry on Nov. 3 when the deputy director in Washington saw the massacre unfolding on live TV and told him, “You better get up there on the double.”

The memo describing Klan leader Joe Grady’s July 1979 meeting with the agents reveals an effort to bring Moses up to speed on the agency’s pre-Nov. 3 intelligence on the potential for violence, so he could respond to awkward questions from the media.

Dated Nov. 26, 1979, the memo authored by an unidentified agent notes that “the information is being submitted at this time to assist ASAC Moses in his comments to the press concerning Joe Grady’s statement to the press that he contacted two FBI agents at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during July, 1979.” The note goes on to say that agents didn’t bother to document the meeting at the time because it was “nonspecific and did not fall within any current FBI investigative guidelines.”

Another retroactive memo, dated Dec. 5, 1979, describes a phone call by Eddie Dawson to his former FBI agent handler, Len Bogaty, at his home on Halloween night “to advise that he was now working for the Greensboro Police Department and he was furnishing information concerning a forthcoming ‘Commie’ rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, which the Klan might attend.

The memo goes on to say that the following day, Bogaty contacted a lieutenant in the police department, who “indicated he had received the information concerning possible disruption of the WVO rally by the Klan.”

An official FBI memo details Klansman and former FBI informant Eddie Dawson's contact with the FBI three days before the Greensboro Massacre, and an unidentified FBI agent's contact with the Greensboro Police Department to confirm Dawson's information was received. (Courtesy FBI)

Moses, now 89, said he doesn’t remember the memo.

“I had not been fully briefed on everything,” Moses said. “I didn’t even know we had an active Klan in North Carolina. I didn’t know we had a Communist Workers Party.”

Notwithstanding Moses’ avowed lack of awareness about the two opposing groups, the 2006 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report asserts that the FBI initiated surveillance on Workers Viewpoint Organization on Oct. 23 “as a result of the China Grove confrontation,” and then closed the preliminary investigation on Nov. 2 — one day before the massacre.

Moses acknowledged the existence of the investigation to Raw Story, but he said he hadn’t known about it until after it was closed.

“It didn’t rise to my level,” he said. “I hadn’t been informed of it. They didn’t brief me on it.”

When Moses got the call about the shootings, he noted that Andy Pelczar, the supervisory senior resident agent, and another Greensboro agent were competing in a golf tournament. That should put to rest any doubts that they expected serious violence in Greensboro, he argued.

“I don’t believe anybody in the Bureau had any reason to believe there was going to be a big confrontation and shooting between the Klan and the communist party,” Moses told Raw Story. “Andy assured me he had no information that there was going to be anything other than some hecklers.”

Evidence introduced at the civil trial suggested otherwise.

A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms memo leaked to the plaintiffs showed that the agency coordinated with the FBI on an investigation involving an undercover employee who infiltrated the Nazi contingent ostensibly to investigate potential violations of federal firearms laws. Bernard Butkovich, the BATF employee, would later testify at the civil trial that two days before the massacre he heard a Klansman say that pipe bombs “would work good thrown into a crowd of n-----s.”

Another warning came from Mordechai Levy, a Jewish Defense League activist who provided an affidavit for the plaintiffs stating that he had called in a tip to the Raleigh FBI office on Nov. 2 relaying that he had learned that North Carolina Nazis “planned to attack and possibly kill people at an anti-Klan gathering this week in North Carolina.”

The agent admitted under oath that he’d received the call, according to a 2024 book about the Greensboro Massacre by author Aran Shetterly.

Moses told Raw Story any present-day judgment on the FBI’s handling of such information needs to take into account that in 1976 U.S. Attorney General Edward H. Levi had imposed new guidelines on domestic security investigations. The guidelines came as a result of the Church Committee hearings, which revealed, among other things, that the FBI’s Cointelpro program had on occasion engaged in illegal tactics to disrupt both far-left and far-right groups.

“We were obviously frustrated we were ordered to be hands-off on such matters,” Moses told Raw Story. “We had zero jurisdiction.”

Lewis Pitts, who represented the survivors in the federal civil trial, told Raw Story he always believed the question of federal law enforcement complicity in the massacre was more important than that of the Greensboro police. As the federal government under President Donald Trump renews a campaign to crush the left, the FBI’s role in the Greensboro Massacre has become even more important, he argued.

“The larger and more important role that we’re trying to figure out — and it’s become such an existential issue — is the role of the federal government,” said Pitts, who still lives in Greensboro. “There is strong evidence that the federal government knowingly played a role to unleash the Klan and Nazis, with the highest knowledge that there would be death and injury — and did nothing to prevent it. Then, they lied like crazy to cover it all up.”

When Moses arrived in Greensboro on Nov. 3, 1979 to assess the situation, he asked police Chief William Swing if the slain demonstrators had a permit to march. Upon learning that they did have a permit, Moses made the decision to open an investigation into potential civil rights violations. Despite the acquittal of the Klan-Nazi defendants during the federal civil rights trial, Moses received a commendation from the agency, and was promoted to lead the FBI division in Birmingham, Ala.

The FBI’s initial reaction to the massacre, at least officially, is captured in a Nov. 3, 1979 memo authored by an unidentified special agent for the benefit of the special agent in charge in Charlotte.

After describing how nine to 10 people had jumped out of van owned by a known Klansmen and opened fire on “a peaceful rally,” killing five people, the memo delivers a jarring assessment: “FBI participation not requested at this time; no civil rights violation or racial overtones present.”

A Nov. 3, 1979 memo details the FBI's response to the Greensboro Massacre. (Courtesy FBI)

Aside from the obvious fact that Klan had a long history of racial terrorism and that the massacre took place in a Black public housing project, the assessment displayed a stunning degree of cluelessness. Nelson Johnson, the local leader of the Workers Viewpoint Organization, was Black and had been a target of FBI surveillance while leading community organizing projects in Greensboro’s Black community for more than a decade. Sandra Smith, one of the five demonstrators killed on Nov. 3, was also Black. She had graduated from Bennett College, a historically Black women’s college, five years earlier. Smith had been elected student body president at Bennett, which is located about a mile from the site of the massacre.

“I wasn’t aware of any racial overtones,” Moses told Raw Story.

“None of the key members of the Communist Workers Party were — they would not cooperate one iota,” he quickly added. “I want you to quote me on that.”

The records bear Moses out on that one fact.

A teletype from the Charlotte office to FBI Director William H. Webster reports that two agents went to the home of the widow of one of the slain organizers four days after the massacre. A young man met the agents at the door and told them the widow was “making funeral arrangements and not at her residence,” according to the memo, which is part of the recently released trove of FBI documents. The agents told the man they wanted to interview her.

A couple of hours later, the agents returned, met this time by two men. The FBI’s message had been conveyed to the widow, they said, and she had a message for them in return.

The memo duly reports that “her response is substantially as follows: The FBI killed her husband and she did not want the FBI on her property.”

CORRECTION: This story misstated former FBI official Cecil Moses as a defendant in the federal civil trial. He was dismissed as a defendant by the judge, as opposed to being found not liable by the jury.

Mystery swirls as far-right heavyweights scrubbed from school GOP hopeful founded

As Republican Zach Lahn launched his campaign for Iowa governor, the private school he founded in Kansas quietly scrubbed the names of controversial right-wing figures from its website.

The effort to paint over the influence of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, two men widely credited with mainstreaming white supremacist and anti-feminist ideas, took place as Lahn launched a campaign that has centered repeated attacks on what he calls a “sinister” agenda by the left to shape public education, while he vows to revoke the licenses of teachers seen as indoctrinating students.

“And education is one that they have targeted so deeply because they know that if they can get their hands on your children — on our children — that they can work to change their beliefs to alter society in the future,” Lahn said during a candidate forum hosted by the conservative group Moms for Liberty in January.

“It is one of the most sinister things you could imagine doing, because you’re taking an innocent, vulnerable child that’s there for curiosity, that’s there to learn new things and make friends, and you’re molding them for a specific purpose — an evil purpose, I’ll say.”

During the same forum, Lahn said he wants to “wipe out” the Iowa Board of Education Examiners “and put in place people who will hold teachers accountable for when they indoctrinate our kids, suspend their licenses, or permanently take their licenses, if we have to.”

Lahn often talks about his experience, over the span of a decade, starting schools, including one in Wichita, Kansas, that's called Wonder. Archived versions of Wonder’s “Who we are” section from September 2021 through March 2025 described the school “team” as including “fans of Elon Musk,” the world’s richest person, along with “a couple [of fans] of Jordan Peterson,” a Canadian psychologist with millions of YouTube subscribers and a large following among the so-called manosphere.

As of at least two weeks ago, the sentence mentioning Musk and Peterson had been removed from the school's website, replaced by a note that Lahn and his wife serve on the school’s board of directors. That means the names came down sometime within an 18-month span, which covered the period when Lahn announced his campaign in November 2025.

Lahn did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Musk has long attracted admiration as an entrepreneur responsible for developing innovative companies such as Tesla and SpaceX. When he acquired the social media platform Twitter (since renamed X) in 2022, he reinstated previously banned extremists such as white nationalist Nick Fuentes, while scrapping misinformation safeguards. Musk’s takeover of X coincided with his own increasingly outspoken posts on the platform, which alienated some political centrists while thrilling conservative and far-right fans.

In 2024, Musk wholeheartedly threw himself into politics by endorsing Donald Trump and spending more than $290 million to support his campaign. By the time Musk joined the second Trump administration in January 2025 as leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, where he slashed federal government jobs and gave a fascist-style salute, he had become a deeply polarizing figure.

Meanwhile, Peterson emerged as a popular and notorious figure near the end of the last decade as he promoted a message of male grievance that dovetailed with Trump’s crude misogyny and the male chauvinism of far-right extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and what was then called the “alt-right.”

Peterson appeared to defend Alek Minassian, an “incel” attacker who carried out a vehicle attack in Toronto in 2018, by telling a writer for a New York Times profile that Minassian “was angry at God because women were rejecting him.” Peterson added: “The cure for that is to enforce monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Peterson, who denies being a misogynist, has expressed some “sympathy” for those who admire Andrew Tate, the popular internet influencer who now faces sex trafficking and rape charges in the UK. Peterson said Tate represented “forthright aggression” as “a preferable alternative to a cringing defeat.” Peterson’s popularity was linked in one British study to a rising belief among Gen Z boys and men that feminism has done more harm than good.

Lahn’s silence on the school website revision leaves it unclear whether he was a “team” member who was a fan of Musk, Peterson, or both, or what he thinks about the two men. But Lahn has framed public education as a cultural battleground, while accusing the left of introducing “Marxism” into the curriculum. He complains that the left emphasizes the negative aspects of Iowa and American history.

“Look, when we were starting schools, one of my foundational principles that I said is, ‘We are going to strengthen the parent-and-child bond — not get in between it,’” Lahn said during the Moms for Liberty candidate forum. “Public school is to promote civic virtue — to understand the principles of faith and our country and our culture. And that’s what it will be when I am governor.”

Musk has entered the public debate over cultural identity, not just in the United States, but abroad. And there is little subtlety in his positions — often expressed by agreeing with other users on X — that white people are threatened by Muslims, non-white people and other perceived outsiders.

Following his apparent fascist salute at the time of Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Musk addressed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany, appearing to dismiss the country’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust by saying there was “too much focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”

At that time, the reference to Musk was still on Wonder’s website.

But Musk’s history of sympathy for far-right views predates his speech to Alternative für Deutschland, and one extremism analyst has said his statements are indistinguishable from those of any white supremacist.

Most notably, Musk endorsed a post on X in November 2023 that promoted the white supremacist great replacement theory.

“I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s--- now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much,” reads the post by a little-known X user that garnered Musk’s approval. “You want the truth said to your face, there it is.”

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied.

William Braniff, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security official who now leads the Polarization and Extremism Research Lab at American University, told the Guardian earlier this year that “the great replacement has been an especially important mobilizing narrative for highly lethal white supremacist attacks in the United States and elsewhere.”

“Great replacement” was cited by the perpetrators of numerous mass murders, including the Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh in 2018, the Walmart mass shooting targeting Latinos in El Paso, Texas in 2019; the 2022 mass shooting targeting Black people at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., and the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Some of Lahn’s campaign rhetoric has raised anxiety about cultural identity, albeit without blaming Jews or using language that specifically mentions race or immigration.

“We’ve watched — the same 20 years and more as a lot of the state that we grew up in has changed; some of it is unrecognizable,” Lahn said during a campaign speech in Ankeny, Iowa, in May. “But let me tell you this: When we started this, it was all about ideas…. It was all about what we could do to make the state of Iowa become — how we could bring back our culture and our heritage.”

Lahn did not respond to a question from Raw Story about whether voters should interpret his comments about “culture” and “heritage” as references to race or immigration status, or to an invitation to explain what “culture” and “heritage” he seeks to restore.

Other Republican candidates across the country have left little doubt about how they define those they see as threatening a vaguely defined culture defined by states or the country as a whole, including a former U.S. Senate candidate in South Carolina who endorsed a view that a Dallas suburb is replacing “white people” with Muslims and Hindus.

In Texas earlier this week, Bo French, the Republican nominee for state railroad commissioner, incurred outrage when he posted a photo of South Asian fans cheering the University of Texas football team on X, while writing that “Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” He added, “It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”

Pentagon insider smears antifascists who unmasked Nazi terrorists later convicted by DOJ

Days after the State Department designated an Italian tech group as a terrorist entity, thousands of antifascist sites on its web hosting service wound up on a searchable online research tool described as an “anonymous blog network that quietly powers antifa.”

Jennica Pounds, a Pentagon special government employee better known as Data Republican and the creator of the search tool, described the antifascist sites that she purported to expose as “a whole elaborate doxxing scheme that’s set to ruin people’s lives.”

Unveiling the search tool last month, Pounds boasted: “DataRepublican.com strikes again.” Pounds wrote on X that “the militant far-left has spent years hiding in plain sight on Noblogs.org,” the web hosting platform of Autistici/Inventati, which was sanctioned by the State Department. “So on my own time, for free, I scraped the whole thing,” she said. “Because I kick commie *** and need no government funding or sanction for it.”

But several of the sites and their associated social media accounts targeted by Pounds had unmasked violent extremists — long before the U.S. government targeted the same people for crimes ranging from doxxing and soliciting the murder of federal officials to plotting to attack the power grid and a foiled bank robbery.

One of the violent extremists outed by the antifascist accounts, Terrorgram Collective co-leader Dallas Humber, is now serving a 30-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists, among other crimes. Following Humber’s arrest, the State Department under former President Joe Biden named Terrorgram as a specially designated global terrorist entity.

Ironically, it’s the same designation that Autistici/Inventati has now received from the Trump State Department.

“I have no objection to people who accurately report on violent extremists,” Pounds told Raw Story. She added that otherwise she would be a hypocrite to call Andy Ngo, a conservative writer who focuses on “antifa” and the far left, “a good friend.”

Pounds said she archived and indexed more than 40,000 NoBlogs articles and found 1,717 “quotes” with personally identifiable information, including names and addresses of parents and children of the individuals targeted in the doxxes. In one example, she said a minor child’s name, date of birth and home address were published. In total, Pounds said she redacted 1,487 names, 483 street addresses, 327 workplaces, 151 phone numbers and 37 license plates from the website contents she included in her searchable tool.

Raw Story could not independently verify the numbers Pounds cited.

Past reporting by Raw Story has drawn upon information uncovered by two of the antifascist sites targeted by Pounds’ online search tool: Arelephanteau and Appalachia Research Club.

“You’re literally putting people’s lives at risk, because you disagree with them,” a co-host of the Patriot Source Network podcast said on a recent episode, in which Pounds appeared as a guest to provide a tutorial during the rollout of her search tool. The co-host, who goes by the handle PatriotDadEV, continued: “Because ultimately, what happens is it’s not just the people doing the doxxing on these criminal syndicate websites; then you have a bunch of crazy lunatics who are also on these sites that then take action on that…. This is literally an organized hit list, is what they’ve built.”

Perusing Asheville Anti Racism, one of the sites that Pound scraped and then plugged into her database while applying the “doxxing” label, another co-host known as Nom De Plume expressed astonishment at the plethora of information on a member of Goyim Defense League, a group the Anti-Defamation League has described as engaging “in antisemitic stunts and schemes to troll and harass Jewish communities and individuals.” Nom De Plume noted that the antifascist dossier on the GDL member included their PO box, personal email, vehicle make and model, license plate number and aliases.

“I mean, this is crazy,” he said.

Over the years, Goyim Defense League members have been hit with littering charges for distributing propaganda, and in 2025 one member was convicted of threatening to kill the top prosecutor in Nashville, Tennessee, based on screengrabs published by a contributor to GDL Exposed, another antifascist website flagged by Pounds.

The charging document against GDL member David Bloyed included two screengrabs from his Telegram account, with one post showing him warning that District Attorney Glenn Funk would be “getting the rope,” while another depicted an individual hanging from a gallows with the notation, “The ‘Rope list’ grew by a few more Nashville jews today.”

The screengrabs incorporated in Bloyed’s charging document were taken from a thread posted by an X user with the screenname “Trash.City” who is identified as a contributor to the GDL Exposed site.

Stephen Rowlett, a detective assigned to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s Counter-Terrorism Section, testified during Bloyed’s May 2025 trial that when he saw Bloyed’s screengrabs, he viewed them as a threat to lynch the district attorney, according to a transcript reviewed by Raw Story. Rowlett testified that he didn’t know who Bloyed was until he “had seen all of these posts being put” on the Trash.City X account.

Bloyed was found guilty and is currently serving a three-year prison sentence.

“The goal of GDL Exposed is to push back against the neo-Nazi organization Goyim Defense League by unmasking their activists who travel around the country harassing people,” a representative of the site told Raw Story. “The GDL is led by Jon Minadeo, whose primary source of income is video chatting with children and rebroadcasting those recordings to thousands of angry neo-Nazis, without the knowledge or consent of the children or their parents.

“These videos have included support for mass shooters such as the Antioch High School shooter in Nashville, who was found to have shared a GDL flyer. Data Republican is right. We do hope to ruin these people’s lives. They are predators who would kill every non-white and Jewish person on earth if they could.”

The unmasking of one of the most significant figures in the neo-Nazi accelerationist movement in the past five years was a collaborative effort by four anonymous antifascist research accounts, according to a report on Dallas Humber by HuffPost published in March 2023. Two of the accounts, SoCal Research Club and Fash Free NW, are targeted in Pounds’ NoBlogs search tool. A separate article about Humber that was published by the outlet Left Coast Right Watch a day earlier lists SoCal Research Club as a co-author.

The article co-authored by SoCal Research Club describes Humber as being “deeply involved with the online network of violent, militant bigots known as Terrorgram.” The article goes on to note that following a 2023 mass shooting that took the lives of two people at a LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia, Humber exploited the murder spree for propaganda purposes by recording an audiobook of the killer’s manifesto.

Eighteen months later, the government unveiled an indictment against Humber and co-defendant Matthew Robert Allison by charging them with a slew of felonies, including solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, doxing of federal officials, interstate threatening communications, distribution of information relating to explosives and conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, while identifying her as a leader of a transnational terrorist group.

“I am left with the troubling knowledge that me and my family were unprotected and completely exposed while there was literally a target with my name on it circulating among white supremacist groups on the internet,” a former U.S. attorney who is a Black woman told the court during Humber’s sentencing in December 2025, describing a kill list distributed by Terrorgram. “Thank God my family and I were not hurt or killed during this time. This knowledge has turned to near constant fear and anxiety.”

Before Humber received her sentence of 30 years in prison, federal prosecutor Christopher Perras told the court: “She was responsible for inciting a mass shooting in Bratislava, Slovakia at an LGBT bar, a mass stabbing outside a mosque in Turkey, and a school shooting in Aracruz, Brazil that left teachers and children dead. Because of this defendant, innocent men, women, and children around the world are dead.”

The first site listed on the dashboard for Pounds’ NoBlogs search tool is CV Antifa. In November 2022, the site identified two men, Michael Brown Jr. and Luke Kenna, while linking them to a Telegram channel called Aryan Compartmented Elements that posted photos of a technical institute and community college in Pennsylvania as seen through gunsights. The antifascist site assessed: “It seems clear that they intend to commit acts of mass violence.”

The following month, Brown and Kenna were charged by the FBI with conspiracy to commit bank robbery. Both men, described by the government as having “a professed allegiance to white supremacist and Nazi ideologies,” ultimately pleaded guilty and received sentences of 37 and 41 years in prison, respectively.

Following Brown and Kenna’s arrests, a bulletin by the South Dakota Office of Homeland Security Fusion Center flagged a Telegram post demanding the release of the two men, while warning that “failure to do so will result in more attacks on infrastructure.” The charges against the two men came less than two weeks after an attack on two electrical substations in North Carolina that left much of Moore County in darkness for four days.

In January 2024, the anonymous researchers published an article on SoCal Research Club’s NoBlogs site that identified a “3-D printing gunsmith” named Skyler Philippi as one of the men who had posted the demand for Brown and Kenna’s release. The other was Brian Tierney, who had been charged with conspiracy to commit bank robbery alongside Brown and Kenna at the time the article was published.

The article, which also credits Fash Free NW, along with two outfits that are not included in Pounds’ online research tool, cites Telegram posts by Philippi bragging that he left 80 pounds of the explosive Tannerite in the walls of a house in New Hampshire “as a last resort option in case of capture or kill.” The article warned that Philippi and Tierney “genuinely appear to be nihilistic, full-fledged believers in the need for accelerationist tactics to bring about societal collapse.”

Ten months after Philippi was unmasked by antifascist researchers, law enforcement arrested him as he was preparing to attach explosives to a drone and fly it into an electrical substation outside of Nashville.

Philippi ultimately pleaded guilty to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to destroy an energy facility. He is currently awaiting sentencing.

“Your three examples establish that NoBlogs doxxed some people who later committed serious crimes,” Pounds told Raw Story. “In my opinion, these three examples do not justify the existence of a full-blown doxxing global platform publishing the names and addresses and employers of thousands of people, many of them innocent.”

Pounds recently wrote on X recently that she “went out of my way to redact personally identifying information “in far-left doxxing of Patriot Front,” a white nationalist group. Patriot Front members were sued for defacing a mural of the Black tennis player Arthur Ashe, based on information uncovered by an antifascist infiltrator.

The FBI declined to comment in response to a query from Raw Story about whether federal investigators relied on any of the information published by antifascist researchers to build cases against Humber, Brown, Kenna and Philippi. But a statement of facts by an FBI task force officer with a background in counterterrorism investigations cites research by Atlanta Antifascists to support charges against a Jan. 6 defendant. The group’s site was hosted by NoBlogs, but is not included in Pounds’ online search tool.

With Autistici/Inventati shutting down in response to the State Department sanctions, the antifascist sites in the U.S. and elsewhere will need to find new hosting services, but those that spoke to Raw Story indicated they have no intention of quitting. In the meantime, volunteers are uploading the contents of some 60 antifascist sites to the Internet Archive.

“My goals are to make people aware of white supremacists, fascists and bigots who mean them harm, and to disrupt organized fascism and white supremacy,” “Arel,” the owner of the North Carolina-based Arelephanteau site, told Raw Story. “It sucks that those goals are not aligned with whatever this person [Pounds] thinks our world should look like. I am choosing to hope that they have not actually immersed themselves in the worldview of the people they are trying to protect. Antifascism is creative, resilient, and community-oriented, so while this repression tactic is annoying and politically dark, it isn’t insurmountable.”

In her post announcing the NoBlogs search tool, Pounds hinted that there may be a grander design to her project than publicly embarrassing antifascist researchers.

“In the course of building this website, a number of antifascists were identified,” she wrote. “I disclosed them — but not on the website. Directly to the USA government.”

'Here's my secret': Republican plot flagged as way to terrorize voters — and 'sow chaos'

When MAGA supporters fueled by conspiracy theories angrily protested Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona, it fell to Recorder Adrian Fontes to certify the results in Maricopa, the state’s largest county surrounding Phoenix.

“I’ve been through the fire in Arizona at the very basic gestation of election denialism,” Fontes, a Democrat, told Raw Story, recalling how election conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Jacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon Shaman, screamed his name outside his office.

“I’m not going to let the b-----ds intimidate me,” he said.

Fontes now serves as Arizona’s secretary of state and will be responsible for certifying the state’s election results in the upcoming midterm elections, with two congressional races on the ballot that could help determine the balance of power in the House of Representatives.

Fontes will also be on the ballot as a candidate for reelection, running against a Republican challenger with a history of pushing discredited election conspiracies in court.

Fontes said he’s confident he can handle any barbs his opponent throws his way and, at the same time, maintain public trust while certifying the elections of the winners of nine House races on the ballot.

“We are the chief truth teller and the level setter,” Fontes said of himself and his fellow secretaries of state around the country. “We’ve got to be able to communicate clearly why people should have confidence in the outcome, regardless of the political result. I was the Maricopa County Recorder in 2020, and I oversaw my own defeat. I was the secretary of state in 2024 when Donald Trump won Arizona, and I oversaw the certification of his victory without complaint.”

Now, democracy defenders see a new threat looming against free and fair elections. The concern is less about vigilante mobs and more about an alphabet soup of armed federal agents swarming polling places, with the active encouragement of local Republican officials and candidates, under the pretext of deterring a phantom problem of non-citizen voting.

Republican candidates in election battlegrounds such as Michigan and Maine have begun to clamor for armed federal agents at polling places, following unfounded claims about non-citizen voting that Trump rolled out during a primetime speech and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin amplified at a press conference in July.

The goal is “make people afraid and sow chaos,” said Anna Dorman, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that is suing to prevent the Trump administration from building a federal voter database. The point of the chaos, she said, is to lay the groundwork to challenge election certifications if, as predicted, Republicans lose the House, and possibly even the Senate.

“That certainly fits the playbook and strategy of sowing these lies so they can have these zombie issues that they can resurrect,” Dorman said. “Here are answers to questions that they manufactured to create chaos so they could use that to delay certification.”

Ed Martin, the former pardon attorney at the Department of Justice, told UK-based GB News on Tuesday that he had recently met with Trump to discuss the midterm elections, while predicting that “you’re going to see on election night, and around it, irregularities.”

Republican voters “need to be energized” to “protect the elections,” Martin said, adding that “we know that there are hundreds of thousands of illegals… on the voting rolls” in New Jersey alone.

A comprehensive review by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research found that instances of noncitizens registering to vote and casting ballots are exceedingly rare.

“While no system can ever be perfect, in every state, election officials and other agencies thoroughly investigate these claims whenever they arise,” the report found. “These investigations find extremely few cases of noncitizens registering and even fewer cases of noncitizens voting, even among the most far-reaching claims. When rare instances of potentially improper registration or voting are found, officials swiftly take action to ensure U.S. elections remain secure.”

Trump's Department of Justice has sued dozens of states to force them to turn over voter rolls, while Trump has attempted through an executive order to force the states to cross-check their voter rolls against a database of non-citizens maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. State officials argue that complying with the federal government’s demand would violate their citizens’ privacy. The courts have consistently upheld the state’s rights to retain control over their voter rolls.

Similar to Arizona, Michigan again finds itself in the middle of a firestorm of election conspiracies as state officials prepare to administer an election with a tight race between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers for U.S. Senate — one of six races rated “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report — and two competitive House races, in the Detroit suburbs and Lansing, respectively.

At the center of the maelstrom is Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a lightning rod for election deniers going back to the 2020 election, who will shoulder responsibility for certifying the winners of the Senate and House elections. Deepening the cloud of suspicion Trump allies have placed over Benson, she will also oversee her own election, where she is a candidate for governor.

John James, the Republican candidate in the gubernatorial race, has suggested without evidence that his opponent supports voting by non-citizens based on her refusal to turn over the voter roll to the federal government. “Of course, Benson and her cronies are ‘urging high court to reject ballot challenge,’” James posted on X earlier this month. “Voting rights for illegal immigrants? Absolutely.”

During an interview with James last month, the right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson baselessly accused Democratic secretaries of state of rigging elections.

“The problem that we have, John, is that we’ve kind of seen this play out before where a secretary of state runs a very dodgy election campaign that is rife with fraud, but they end up winning because of the magic numbers at the end of the night,” Johnson said. “How will you prevent that from happening on election night?”

James responded by invoking the name of FBI Director Kash Patel.

“I’ve already had a good conversation with my friend Kash Patel, who has said already that the FBI will have a presence leading up to Election Day in Michigan, in both west Michigan and southeast Michigan and southeast Michigan,” James said.

The FBI did not respond to an email from Raw Story seeking confirmation of plans to deploy agents at polling places or an explanation for why they would be there.

“Cheaters will not be allowed to cheat, and we will have our eyes out, because we know that Jocelyn Benson has a record of having her thumb on the scale,” James said.

Benson could not be reached for comment for this story.

Bobby Charles, the Republican candidate for governor in Maine, where there is a closely fought Senate race between Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson, has similarly indicated he plans to call on White House border czar Tom Homan to send federal agents to polling places in that state.

“Here’s my secret,” Charles told supporters during a campaign stop last month. “I have a friend named Tom Homan. Tom and I used to go on Fox News together. Tom’s an awesome guy. I’m going to ask Tom, I’m actually — three or four weeks before the election, maybe three — I’m going to make an appeal for ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths.”

An email from Raw Story to the White House seeking comment on Homan’s behalf went unreturned.

Dorman said there’s no downside for Trump and his Republican allies to talk about putting armed federal agents at polling places.

“It’s all part of a broader strategy of causing chaos, especially if they end up deploying agents,” she said. “Or there’s not, but people are under the impression that there will be ICE agents at polling places. People might be more hesitant to vote because it seems like it’s not going to be safe. I expect them to talk a huge amount about ICE at polling places.”

If the presence of armed federal agents isn’t sufficient to discourage voters from going to the polls, Dorman said she believes the point of the “chaos” engendered by the Trump administration is to build pressure on secretaries of state to withhold or delay election certifications.

At least two Republican secretaries of state in states with tightly contested Senate or House races have trumpeted their efforts to combat noncitizen voting.

“And for all the people who say there is no evidence of noncitizens voting — come to Florida,” its Secretary of State Cord Byrd testified to the House Administration Committee in 2024. “We have the evidence, because I’m required — my office is required — to report it to the governor and the legislature every year.”

In 2025, the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security, under the Secretary of State, referred 170 noncitizens for prosecution; the agency’s most recent report in January 2026 cited only five individuals who were actually charged. The report boasts that “Florida leads the nation in election security and integrity.”

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose likewise told the committee there should be “zero tolerance” for noncitizens registering to vote. His office has made hundreds of criminal referrals for alleged voter fraud, but the Associated Press reported in December 2024 that prosecutors were able to obtain indictments against only nine people for voting as noncitizens over a span of 10 years, one of whom was found to have died. LaRose boasted to the House committee that Ohio is “recognized as a gold standard for elections administration.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose signature will be required to certify a competitive U.S. Senate race and a closely fought House race on the southern tip of the state, has gone further by sharing a video that suggests he believes Democrats approve of noncitizens voting.

In 2024, Abbott shared a video on X that he captioned “Catholic nun speaking the truth,” which showed an unidentified woman saying, “I know that recently someone has made a motion that no one should be able to vote who cannot prove U.S. citizenship. I totally agree with that. But there are those in the Democratic Party who do not. So, we are up against not just an election, but an absolute war for good against good and evil.”

Byrd, LaRose and Abbott could not be reached for comment for this story.

Protect Democracy and other fair-elections groups have vowed, if necessary, to go to court to obtain orders to ensure that officials fulfill their duty to certify elections.

“The good news is the law is extremely clear around certification,” Dorman said. “It’s non-discretionary. They don’t have the right to evaluate and determine who the winners are. We feel very strongly on the legal basis that if you will not do this ministerial duty, then we will get a court order to ensure that it is done. We and other groups in the legal coalition can enforce certification.”

Fontes, the secretary of state in Arizona, told Raw Story he doubts that any of his Republican counterparts would bow to pressure from Trump and his allies to hold up certification of elections duly won by Democratic candidates.

“I think my Republican colleagues have enough strength to stand up against this administration,” Fontes said. “I think back to the Declaration of Independence that says government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Right now, this administration is not governing with the consent of the governed. The people will be heard at the polls. And I have no doubt that in this election the people will send a very pointed message.”

Terror move backfires as 'loser' Proud Boys' socialist hate collides with love for donuts

Dozens of Proud Boys showed up at a Democratic Socialists of America meeting in North Carolina over the weekend in a play for relevance by an aging fascist street gang amid a right-wing backlash against socialism as the GOP braces for heavy losses in the midterm elections.

An estimated 51 members of the fascist street gang known for powering the Jan. 6 insurrection and harassing drag shows showed up at a public library in Winston-Salem, N.C. on Aug. 29, and some filed into the back of a meeting room where the Piedmont Triad chapter of the DSA was holding a membership meeting.

The Proud Boys attempted to film the meeting while community allies blocked their view with multicolored umbrellas. Though they left without physical altercation, the appearance of the members dressed in the group’s customary black and yellow colors was clearly intended to intimidate the DSA.

Following the visit, a North Carolina-based Proud Boys Telegram channel warned that “socialism will not be tolerated, and it will not go unopposed.” The chapter also posted an image of the far-right Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came to power through a violent coup against the democratically elected socialist government of former President Salvador Allende. The post included a caption celebrating the Pinochet regime’s practice of carrying out extrajudicial executions against political opponents by throwing them out of helicopters.

The show of force appears to have been led by the Cape Fear Proud Boys, a media-savvy chapter based in the coastal city of Wilmington that was the subject of an Esquire magazine profile this summer. The Aug. 29 mobilization in Winston-Salem also drew members from Virginia and Georgia, indicative of efforts to build a regional network.

An email from Raw Story to the Cape Fear chapter for this story went unreturned.

The convergence of the Proud Boys from eastern North Carolina and two adjacent states on Winston-Salem, a small city built on the tobacco and textile industries almost 250 miles from the coast, can likely be chalked up to an effort to recruit in an area where they don’t have an active chapter, said Khaet Grindell, communications coordinator for the Piedmont Triad DSA.

“They were recording us the whole time; it was an attempt to intimidate us,” Grindell told Raw Story. “I think they were looking for moments to recruit, and we didn’t give them any. We didn’t give them the time of day. We didn’t fight with them. We didn’t give them a viral moment to use as a recruiting tool.”

The Proud Boys extended their in-person intimidation effort by uploading images of some of the attendees and security volunteers on their Telegram channel, with a particular focus on people who appear to be LGBTQ or don’t meet traditional gender expectations. One post questioned whether an individual was male or female, adding, “We are seriously considering sending our prospects up to do a squeeze check.”

“Proud Boys have been violent in the past,” Rachael Fugardi, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Raw Story. “When they show up and are not violent, but they’re showing up in large numbers and in colors, and they’re filming people, threatening sexual violence, it can have a chilling effect on political participation. People might see that and not want to get involved, seeing that it carries a personal risk to their safety.”

But Grindell said the Proud Boys’ intimidation efforts won’t dissuade DSA members from organizing and building support in the community.

“I think we have seen even more support and more interest from the community,” she said, “because I think people thought, ‘Well, if a group of losers like the Proud Boys are trying to shut the DSA down, maybe the DSA is doing something right.’”

The DSA members have tried to put a lighthearted spin on the encounter by noting that after the Proud Boys filmed them, some helped themselves to pumpkin spice donut holes at the snack table.

“We’ve been joking that they like free food, so maybe they like socialism,” Grindell said.

The meeting crashing in Winston-Salem was not the first time the Cape Fear Proud Boys have targeted the DSA in North Carolina. Members of the chapter reportedly stole a bus bench installed by the Wilmington DSA to accommodate public transit riders earlier this summer. After learning that the Proud Boys planned to come to Winston-Salem, Grindell said she thought they might attempt to vandalize a free community refrigerator that members maintain there.

“Showing up at our meeting is clearly an escalation,” she said.

Fugardi said she’s not aware of other Proud Boys chapters around the country challenging the DSA or mobilizing in opposition to socialism.

Since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, which involved roughly 100 members, the Proud Boys network has splintered into two rival factions, with one remaining loyal to former national chairman Enrique Tarrio and the other calling him a “fed” and a “rat,” Fugardi said. Tarrio dissolved the national leadership in June 2021, and since then the individual chapters have operated autonomously, with some degree of regional coordination.

Due to the vagueness of the Proud Boys’ political stance extolling “western chauvinism,” Fugardi said, there’s a wide variation among chapters, with some emphasizing white nationalism and others Christian nationalism. Some embrace Nazi symbols while others highlight their inclusion of men of color. As a result, the group now lacks a cohesive national focus.

Members of the Cape Fear Proud Boys chapter rally in North Carolina in 2022. (photo by Anthony Crider (used with permission))

“They’re also a dying organization,” Fugardi said. “They’re 10 years old, and they’re not very appealing to the younger generation of far-right activists. They’re seen as out of touch and not cool.”

The Cape Fear chapter stands out as an exception in some ways, Fugardi said.

“As we’ve seen nationwide a dramatic decline in the number of Proud Boys chapters and activity, Cape Fear has been pretty consistent — marching through communities, online doxing, harassment,” she said. “They’ve remained one of the most visible chapters of the Proud Boys in the country.”

Following the Proud Boys’ appearance, the Piedmont Triad DSA is assessing its practice of holding meetings in public libraries, which don’t typically allow groups reserving space to regulate access. Grindell said the Piedmont Triad DSA is fortunate to have partnerships with local nonprofits that would be willing to provide space for meetings in a more controlled setting.

The Cape Fear Proud Boys have signaled that it plans to continue harassing the DSA.

“Don’t worry, we have a lot more planned for the DSA!” the chapter posted on Telegram on Monday.

“Other DSA chapters in the region ought to take note of what happened, and strengthen their community partnerships with other organizations and allies,” Grindell said, “so they’re not caught off guard.”

'I'm shocked': Chris Christie's telling Trump moment among revelations in new Russia files

"Are the Russians bad?"

That, according to newly declassified FBI files, is what Donald Trump asked a counterintelligence agent during a 2016 briefing — the same trove the president ordered released to prove the Russia investigation was a hoax. "Because they have more numbers, are they worse than the Chinese?" he pressed.

Instead of exposing the "total weaponization" Trump promised, the latest batch of Crossfire Hurricane records serves up a string of awkward moments and does nothing to undercut the probe he has spent years branding a disgrace.

Trump promised that the American people would see that the FBI's investigation into potential collusion between Russia and his 2016 campaign was "total weaponization" and "a disgrace" when he signed an executive order declassifying the files. The 56th installment of batched records by the FBI last week, like previous releases, contains no information that undercuts the rationale for the FBI counterintelligence investigation known as "Crossfire Hurricane," which probed the campaign for evidence of coordination with the Russian government that would compromise national security.

Much of the information in the latest release of declassified files has already been revealed through extensive media coverage, the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and multiple congressional inquiries, but the files color in some vivid details about the tumultuous period between Trump's acceptance of the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016 and his inauguration in early 2017.

Here are five revelations from the latest document dump.

The FBI suspected a Trump campaign advisor of being a 'logical conduit' for the Russians to 'message' to the Trump campaign

The FBI met with an informant — subsequently revealed to be Cambridge University professor Stefan Halper — on Aug. 12, 2016, and tasked him with cultivating a relationship with Carter Page, a senior foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, to probe him on the campaign's alleged ties to Russia.

The FBI team explained to Halper that due to Page's "ties back to the Russian Federation," he would be "the logical conduit" for Russia "to message the Trump campaign," a report captioned "Crossfire Hurricane," "Foreign Agents Registration Act – Russia" and "sensitive investigative matter" reads.

The day before, according to the files, Halper had told the FBI that he had met Page and the two had discussed Page's "relationship with Gazprom," a Russian government-controlled energy company, along with Page's "views" on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the U.S. presidential campaign. Page reportedly told Halper that he had recently been in Abu Dhabi "representing Gazprom."

When the FBI asked Halper "if it was unusual for a senior policy adviser to a presidential campaign to still be advising a company like Gazprom," Halper reportedly said that he did, indeed, find it unusual.

Page would later admit to investigators in an inquiry by the U.S. House of Representatives that he had served as an adviser for Gazprom and at one time had held a financial interest in the firm, according to an NBC report. Page also released a 2013 letter in which he had described himself as an "adviser" to the Kremlin to help the Russian government prepare for a G-20 Summit.

Trump asked FBI during counterintelligence briefing: 'Are the Russians bad?'

One of the declassified reports released last week details the counterintelligence briefing given to Trump by the FBI and intelligence officials in a secure conference room at the FBI New York Field Office in August 2016.

The report, which was separately declassified by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe in 2020, describes a 13-minute briefing given to Trump by Joe Pientka, a supervisory special agent of the FBI's foreign counterintelligence squad.

Pientka warned Trump, who was accompanied by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that foreign intelligence services target U.S. officials to gain economic, energy, technology and military information to give their countries a competitive advantage over the U.S., according to the report. Pientka went on to say that foreign spy agencies use both intelligence officials working under diplomatic cover and operatives using non-official cover such as tourists, businessmen and students to get information.

"Joe, are the Russians bad?" Trump reportedly asked the briefing agent. "Because they have more numbers, are they worse than the Chinese?"

The report conveys that Pientka "responded by saying both countries are bad. The numbers of [intelligence officers] present in the U.S. is not an indicator of the severity of the threat." Pientka "reminded Trump the Chinese asymmetrical presence in the U.S. could be ten times as large as the symmetrical presence, yet we would not know."

The FBI used the counterintelligence briefing to gauge Trump's reactions

The report on the counterintelligence briefing, which is captioned "Crossfire Hurricane," includes Pientka's disclosure that he "actively listened" to Trump's responses during a presentation by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with a specific eye towards Russia.

Pientka noted that when the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center told him the United States is "the world leader in counterterrorism," Trump reportedly interjected: "Russia, too?"

The briefing turned to the issue of nuclear testing, with the official telling Trump's team that both Russia and China cheated on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

"Who's worse?" Trump asked.

The official's response is redacted, but according to the report, Trump and Christie turned towards one another, and Christie commented, "I'm shocked."

Putin concluded weeks before the 2016 election that Russian influence efforts had 'failed'

Another unnamed FBI informant, whose collection methods are consistent with those of retired British spy Christopher Steele, relayed to the FBI that a "sub-source" told him that Russian President Vladimir Putin had "admitted to senior intelligence officials" in the month before the 2016 election that the efforts of Russian intelligence services "to influence the U.S. presidential campaign failed and were 'f---ed up.'"

The Oct. 18, 2016, report was filed just days after WikiLeaks released an apparent transcript of a paid speech Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, gave to Goldman Sachs.

"Those involved were dismayed at the lack of traction of material leaked against Hillary Clinton," the report said. "They advised that the most compromising material has been put out but that they will 'drip-feed' the remaining materials through WikiLeaks."

The report also includes an assessment by an entity whose name is redacted "that Trump would not win the presidential campaign."

A DOJ official funneled information from an oppo research firm to the FBI

Two declassified reports released last week detail how Bruce Ohr, a senior Department of Justice official, passed along a thumb drive to the FBI that included research his wife conducted for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. One report shows the FBI received the thumb drive from Ohr on Dec. 12, 2016, during the period between Trump's election and his inauguration.

The report states that Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of Fusion GPS, hired Nellie Ohr, "a Russian linguist/analyst and a former Russian History professor" to conduct research for his firm, and that Bruce Ohr "voluntarily provided his wife's research to the FBI." The report notes that the Fusion GPS header was stripped from the documents on the thumb drive.

The transfer of information from Nellie Ohr through her husband to the FBI became controversial after it was learned that Fusion GPS commissioned the now-discredited Steele dossier. The dossier was compiled by Christopher Steele, who had earlier served as an informant on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Trump and his allies have cited the Steele dossier as a basis for claiming that the Russia investigation was a "hoax," but journalists have noted that it neither predicated the case nor sustained it.

Nellie Ohr was called to testify before Congress in 2018, and then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice alleging that she "knowingly provided false testimony" when she said, "I did not give the FBI my research."

A 2019 review by the FBI's Federal Public Corruption Squad backed up Meadows' claim by finding that Ohr "provided demonstrably false information in two aspects of her testimony." The report, which was released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) last year, concluded that "a plain reading" of the facts "leads to the inference that Nellie Ohr was aware of the FBI's Russia information and gave her Fusion GPS information because it related to the FBI's Russia investigation."

The Department of Justice, then led by Attorney General Barr under Trump's first administration, declined to bring charges against Ohr.

Embittered 'Stop the Steal' truthers train their fire on MAGA's saboteur: Trump

If President Donald Trump’s repeated accusations of Democratic election fraud and his contemplation of invoking a national security emergency have a familiar ring, it’s because the same rhetoric set the stage for the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

But as the 2026 midterms approach, with Democrats favored to retake control of the House, one key component in Trump’s election subversion machine appears to be missing: The network of “Stop the Steal” influencers, extremist groups and far-right media outlets that sprang into action to spread conspiracy theories and mobilize supporters following the presidential election six years ago.

“We must not accept this election,” Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist known for baselessly claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag, told his audience two weeks after the 2020 election. “I don’t even care if Trump concedes. I’m not conceding crap. This means revolution. This means war. This is a Chinese communist New World Order takeover and martial law COVID lockdown.”

Brandon Straka, a former hair stylist turned social media influencer whose #WalkAway Campaign encouraged Democrats to leave their party, insisted on Twitter that Trump’s supporters should not “allow a transition” to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden. The 74.2 million people who voted for Trump in 2020, he said, “know that something is horribly wrong and feel victimized by the politicians and the media orchestrating this scam.”

“Make peace right now w[ith] the fact that we are in a civil war,” Straka wrote in another tweet in late 2020.

During an impromptu rally with members of the far-right street gang the Proud Boys and Trump confidante Roger Stone in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 11, 2020, Owen Shroyer, an anchor on Jones’ InfoWars show, denounced the Supreme Court for refusing to hear a lawsuit challenging the election.

“This was never their revolution,” Shroyer said, after taking a swig from a beer and addressing Proud Boys itching to brawl with left-wing counterprotesters. “This is our revolution!”

Now, a new crop of influencers has emerged to amplify Trump’s baseless election-fraud claims, but major figures in the original “Stop the Steal” coalition are signaling disillusionment with the president and predicting that Republicans are poised to lose the midterms.

During his show on Aug. 22, Jones criticized Trump for telling his supporters to get over the crimes of the late accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and for the unpopular war he started with Iran.

“And now I think we’re going to lose the midterms,” Jones said.

Shroyer made a similar point during a guest appearance on Straka’s show on Aug. 19, arguing that if the Republicans lose control of the House, it will be due to the unpopularity of Trump’s policies.

“I think if the Democrats win, it’s because of Trump,” Shroyer said. “I think if the Trump administration, the Republicans can’t win, then that’s on them."

If Republicans are really serious when they say Democratic control of the House is a dire threat, Shroyer added, then they should “stop new wars.”

Speaking with Joe Kent, Trump’s former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, last month, Straka said he believes the success of some Trump-backed candidates in the Republican primaries is giving his supporters false hope.

“I think the real tale is going to be told in November,” Straka said. “And the thing I’m questioning more than anything is, are those voters under 50, under 40, under 30 going to turn out? Or the independents. Or the broader coalition. Are they going to show up for MAGA? Because I think a lot of people are feeling betrayed.”

Emily Rainey, a former Army intelligence officer who organized a busload of Trump supporters from Moore County, in North Carolina, to attend Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., told Raw Story she no longer supports Trump, although she still believes the 2020 election was stolen.

“I brought 100 people to Washington on January 6^th,” she said. “Everyone was Christian and Trump-loving. I assume many of them, like me, are no longer fans of Trump. At the same time, we were there to protest for election integrity.”

Rainey broke with Trump, she said, because of his “being actively involved in a genocide” in Gaza through U.S. backing of Israel. But that doesn’t mean that she wants to make common cause with the left: She also said she wants to see Trump “put a complete stop on immigration,” while claiming that immigrants from India and the “Third World” are incompatible with the “Christian principles” that the United States was supposedly “built on.”

“I think that Christians need to admit that we were duped” by Trump, Rainey said.

Ali Alexander, a former political operative who activated the “Stop the Steal” campaign after the 2020 election, has been conspicuously quiet about the 2026 midterms. Alexander reportedly told an associate he was “bowing out of public life” in 2023 after admitting to sending sexually explicit texts to younger men.

Unlike many of his fellow alumni from the election denier Class of 2020, Alexander doesn’t post on X because his account has been suspended. Recent posts on his Telegram channel chronicle his travels through Latin America, and he has only glancingly commented on the midterm elections.

Some of the figures recruited by Alexander to organize rallies to protest the 2020 election have moved into Trump’s orbit since the 2024 election and remain involved in Trump’s efforts to intervene in the 2026 midterms.

Political consultant Alex Bruesewitz was named by Alexander in a tweet published the day after the 2020 election to organize rallies in Wisconsin. Bruesewitz repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned by the now-defunct House Select January 6^th Committee, including whether he went to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Bruesewitz served as social media advisor to the 2024 Trump campaign and continues to work for a political action committee affiliated with the president.

Bruesewitz has reliably echoed Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud on his X account in recent months, by claiming the Los Angeles mayoral primary was “rigged” against Republican candidate Spencer Pratt, and accusing the Democratic Party of “rigging primaries.”

Bruesewitz and Scott Presler — a political organizer tasked by Alexander with backstopping “Stop the Steal” rallies in Pennsylvania in 2020 — have been pumping the SAVE Act on their X accounts. Trump has pressured Republican lawmakers to pass the legislation, which Democrats and voting rights groups warn would disenfranchise millions of voters.

Earlier this month, Trump told a host on the right-wing Real America’s Voice network that he wouldn’t rule out declaring a national emergency to require voter ID and proof of citizenship, along with a limit on mail-in voting, if he can’t get Congress to pass the SAVE Act.

Another figure recruited by Alexander for the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign was Ed Martin, then president of the conservative group Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagles. Alexander tagged Martin as a “national” organizer for the effort. Martin worked with Alexander to organize a “Jericho March” rally in Washington, DC, which is considered a warm-up for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a fellow organizer who spoke to the Jan. 6 Committee. On Jan. 6, Martin reportedly marched to the Capitol, although he was not charged with any crime.

Following Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the president appointed Martin as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, where he presided over the dismissal of about 1,500 cases following Trump’s pardon of those involved in the attack on the Capitol. After Senate Republicans balked at confirming him to the position, Martin served as the pardons attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and headed the department’s Weaponization Working Group, which sought to uncover Biden-era abuses.

Martin has used his X account to undermine confidence in elections by sharing a post about irregularities in the Wisconsin primary and by amplifying a post by another election denier that suggested establishment Democrats in Michigan unsuccessfully attempted to rig the vote against Abdul El-Sayel, the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate.

Last week, Trump announced on Truth Social that Martin is leaving the Department of Justice “to go outside to fight Legal Battles for the upcoming Midterm Election, and the Presidential Election of 2028.”

Outside of Martin, Presler and Bruesewitz, the original “Stop the Steal” team assembled by Alexander is far from a united front.

Mike Cernovich, an influencer who was tagged in Alexander’s 2020 post-election tweet, made the obvious observation in an Aug. 11 X post that “Democrats currently have the edge.”

Almost two weeks later, his outlook had taken a dark turn.

“One bad sign for the midterms is that the focus is on in-fighting, all done in preparation for losing the midterms and then blaming one another,” he wrote on Sunday. “Everyone has given up and is more interested in pointing fingers at who is responsible for the loss.”

Judge blasts ICE for hiding plans on potential polling place surge until after election

A federal judge excoriated ICE over the weekend after the agency reported it expects to turn over records about potentially deploying agents at polling places next June — well past the November midterm elections.

Judge Beryl A. Howell’s order, issued on Aug. 22, found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s report that it anticipates disclosure of the records by June 2027 to be “an unacceptable delay given the proximity of the 2026 midterm elections.”

Howell’s reprimand comes after ICE turned over 576 pages of worthless press clippings earlier this month to the Democratic National Committee, despite the party explicitly directing the government to exclude stand-alone news articles lacking commentary from officials.

Government lawyers had previously told the court ICE had zero documents responsive to the DNC request for records concerning the potential deployment of agents to polling places, despite widespread news coverage of agents entering a polling place in New York earlier this year to confront a local election official about a social media post decrying the killing of Renee Good.

ICE referred questions about the order to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to an email from Raw Story.

Last month, the judge ordered ICE, along with other federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, FBI and Department of Defense, to begin processing 1,000 pages per month. In a joint status report filed on Friday, the DNC noted that ICE set a schedule for itself on the seventh day of each month to turn over new documents — seven days after every other agency. As a result, ICE will only make two more productions before the Nov. 3 general election.

With 10,698 pages identified as potentially responsive to the DNC’s request, that means ICE will still hold more than 8,000 pages after the election.

“Yet ICE is the federal law enforcement agency that has appeared at active polling locations and even entered a polling place this year,” DNC lawyers told the court. “The status quo would leave DNC and the voters it represents without knowledge of any ICE plans or guidelines heading into Election Day.”

The Democrats renewed a request for ICE to turn over documents in batches every two days. Department of Justice lawyers responded that the request should be rejected because it would tie up the government’s resources with “the mechanics of finalizing, clearing and transmitting” the documents.

The judge has yet to rule on the request.

'Big threat': Battle plans drawn as Trump moves to make 'ridiculous' scenario reality

The U.S. Department of Justice once worked closely with states to assist with elections.

That was before Donald Trump’s presidency.

“For a long time, the federal government and the Department of Justice have helped states as partners [by] having election monitors and helping us respond to interference at the polls or destruction of ballot boxes — all those things,” Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown told Raw Story.

Brown speaks from experience, having served under former President Joe Biden as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, where he deployed officials from his office to help local and state officials troubleshoot problems.

In 2024, Brown successfully ran for state attorney general. Now, he chairs the election protection working group for the Democratic Attorneys General Association.

“The reality now is that our biggest adversary to running smooth elections is the president,” Brown said.

Over the past year, Brown and other Democratic attorneys general, along with secretaries of state, have been involved in an unprecedented effort to safeguard the 2026 midterm elections by coordinating legal research and strategies.

In May, they met in Milwaukee to game out various worst-case scenarios in which the election system might buckle under pressure from Trump and his allies.

“We’ve had a good set of tabletop exercises with those partners and with some others in the room to help us sort of walk through in real time these sorts of scenarios and sort of game-planning what might happen at the national level,” Brown told Raw Story, “or even if there’s just some rogue county election official who says, ‘I’m not going to certify this election in my county because the president said it’s corrupt.’

“These are no longer hypotheticals,” he added. “They’re real-life, current-happening situations because of the president’s misinformation and lies about election security.”

A county commission in rural New Mexico, one of whose members was convicted of illegally entering the U.S. Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, refused to certify primary election results in the 2022 midterms. Later that year, an Arizona county stalled on certifying results in an election in which Trump ally Kari Lake was running for governor and refused to concede her loss. In one California county, a majority of supervisors voted to declare the results in the 2024 election “under duress,” in response to unfounded claims by constituents that their voting machines were vulnerable to hackers.

The current phase of the Democratic officials’ efforts is focused on a battle to prevent the Department of Justice from accessing sensitive voter data, such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. Brown’s office represents Washington State Secretary of State Steve Hobbs in a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in one such case.

The Department of Justice continued an unbroken losing streak earlier this month with an adverse ruling from a federal judge in Minnesota, making it the 23^rd ruling against the federal government in its quest for sensitive voter data.

In the lawsuit brought against Washington state, U.S. District Court Judge Kymberly Evanson reportedly expressed skepticism about the federal government’s need for sensitive voter data during a hearing earlier this month, but has yet to rule on the matter.

“No, we can’t give you this voter data because Washington state law does not allow us to do that, and we protect voter information pretty closely, with good reason,” Brown told Raw Story, summarizing the state’s argument.

Brown’s office has also closely monitored Trump’s effort to prevent the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to voters who are not on a national list, which was blocked by a federal judge earlier this month. Washington, like other western states with widely dispersed populations in rural areas, relies heavily on mail-in voting.

“And that really direct, overt, obvious attempt to stop states like Washington from running their own elections is just a big threat to our system,” Brown said. “So, we as a state, and, more importantly, as a coalition of states, are just trying to do everything we can to keep the president from acting illegally, contrary to the interests of Americans.”

State officials are also on guard against the potential that Trump might order a federal agency to seize voting machines or ballots in the middle of the Nov. 3 general election.

“We’ve been sharing legal research around what happens if the president declares an emergency illegally and tries to stop an election from happening,” Brown said. “What is the proper legal authority to do anything like that, and what is the challenge that states could bring? We’ve had to think about what happens when the FBI shows up and demands voting machines, like they did in Fulton County, Georgia.”

State officials also play a crucial role in the final step of the congressional elections. Secretaries of state are responsible for transmitting documents certifying the election winners to the respective clerks of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. Attorneys general serve as counsel for their secretaries of state, as well as their states’ top law enforcement official.

Brown said he’s cognizant of the potential for Trump’s congressional allies to use procedural tactics to block Democrats from being sworn in as new members of the House, as highlighted in a recent Raw Story report.

“I think you’re right to raise that as a possibility,” he said.

“That point of certification, from the secretaries of state to Congress is obviously a very vital one,” Brown said. “It’s not subject to much debate; it’s fairly procedural. I would hope that would continue.

“I think it would be remarkable in the worst sense to imagine that the House would somehow reject certification from a state,” he added. “But I think these things that used to be totally ridiculous hypotheticals are now much more imaginable.”

Rampaging Butler shooter targeted Trump foes days before assassination attempt: FBI

Thomas Crooks was spotted ripping anti-Donald Trump signs from cars at a political event three days before attempting to assassinate the presidential candidate in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, the father of a former classmate told the FBI.

Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper after the 20-year-old fired eight shots at the former and future president from a nearby rooftop at a campaign rally, elevating Trump to a near mythic status days before he accepted the Republican Party nomination for president. Corey Comperatore, a rally attendee, was killed in the shooting, and two others were seriously injured.

Three days before the Butler rally, one of Crooks’ former high school classmates and his father encountered Crooks near an event center. After dropping his son off for work at the venue, the father told FBI task force officers he saw a young man “who he was 99% sure to be Thomas Crooks” in a parking lot removing “signs” from cars.

It’s unclear whether the signs were poster board placards or car stickers, but the father paraphrased the messaging as, “Keep Trump out of office.”

The father also told investigators an unidentified male with Crooks who was sitting in a truck nearby made a remark about “commies” — a derogatory reference apparently aimed at those opposing Trump.

The former classmate who was working the event told the FBI he ran into Crooks in the parking lot while taking trash out. The two had not seen each other since high school, and the former classmate described Crooks’ demeanor as “energetic and excited.”

The FBI report indicates investigators confirmed through a separate interview that the setting of the former classmate’s encounter with Crooks was “a peaceful democratic political event.”

Screenshot of FBI interview with Thomas Crooks associatesCourtesy FBI

The interview notes, alongside other FBI reports and handwritten notes, and community college and employment records, were released by the agency last week in response to a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit by the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch.

Two years after the attempted assassination, Crooks’ motive remains unknown. Previous reporting on his political stance has presented an ambiguous picture of a person who didn’t hold particularly strong views or obvious extremist ties.

The tranche of files released last week does not include any other references to the individual who was allegedly yelling “commies” while he was with Crooks. It is unclear whether the FBI ever identified him and spoke with him. But former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino told Fox News Digital last November that following “one of the largest mobilizations of FBI resources in history,” the agency concluded that Crooks acted alone.

The FBI responded to an email from Raw Story about this story by declining to make a fresh statement.

The newly released FBI files also include an interview with an unidentified friend from middle and high school who described Crooks as a conservative-leaning person.

“Thomas called himself a Republican,” the report says. “Thomas did not like the Welfare State and was against the ‘woke’ ideology but never really espoused the Republican ideology.”

The friend, who grew up nearby in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, told investigators that the two “did not feel strongly one way or another politically,” and their conversations would typically lead to them “just making fun of the politicians.”

Despite his opposition to “woke” ideology, Crooks appears to have been far from a MAGA partisan: The friend told the FBI that Crooks “expressed shock over the events surrounding the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021,” and “did not believe the 2020 presidential election was rigged.”

The friend told the FBI that he and Crooks frequented a gun range, where Crooks honed his marksmanship skills. Both the friend and Crooks’ father, whose FBI interview is also included in the newly released files, told investigators that they each “introduced Thomas to shooting.” Crooks’ father revealed that he sold his son the DMPS Panther Arms Rifle that he used to shoot at Trump.

Crooks’ interest in distance shooting made an impression on his friend, who told investigators Crooks would show him targets from 50 to 150 yards when he came back from the range.

Crooks told the friend “he wanted to see how far he could shoot with rudimentary sights after” the friend questioned why he was “going out so far,” the report says.

Crooks’ father similarly told investigators that his son expressed interest in “action shooting” and participating in a special program at the range for shooting distances of more than 200 yards.

When Crooks opened fire at Trump from the rooftop of the nearby AGR International building, he was reportedly about 147 yards away.

Crooks’ father told the FBI his son took a hunter’s safety class, but never went hunting.

Crooks also took a shooting class at a firearms superstore outside of Pittsburgh, with the final session taking place roughly three weeks before the assassination attempt. A couple who attended the class with Crooks told the FBI they were impressed with his aim, describing a paper target riddled with 50 rounds tightly clustered together.

The records also include a Myers-Briggs personality test completed for Crooks in 2018, when he was 15 years old. The test listed some of Crooks’ possible strengths and blind spots in his “interpersonal negotiating style.”

Among his possible strengths, the test identified Crooks as a “creative problem solver; often gifted at devising innovative options” and a “brilliant strategist.”

But the test flagged a handful of blind spots. Crooks “may not communicate clearly; what makes sense to him may be confusing to others,” the test found. And he “may be impatient with others who are not as quick or smart as he is.”

Dread as 'disaster scenario' threatens to give GOP stolen House despite Dem win

Imagine for a minute it’s Jan. 3, 2027.

At noon, the U.S. House of Representatives for the 119^th Congress, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), officially dissolves, as is determined by the Constitution.

Under the rules of the House, as set out in the U.S. Constitution, before the new members can even be sworn in, they must elect a speaker. The clerk — the one House official whose powers carry over from one term to the next — calls a roll based on a list prepared from certificates of election submitted by state officials in advance.

As the new 120^th Congress begins, it's widely understood that the Democrats have a razor-thin majority and will retake the House. After the roll is called, the members-elect vote in Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as the new speaker.

But before Jeffries can administer the oath to the new members, a Republican with a history of coordinating with President Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election rises and objects to swearing in Will Lawrence, a Democrat who flipped a Republican seat in central Michigan, and Jared Moscowitz, a Democrat who fended off a challenge in his Atlantic coast of Florida district. The Republican invokes an obscure measure last used in the House in 1985 to force Lawrence and Moscowitz to “step aside,” citing concerns surrounding the legitimacy of their election which must be addressed before they are seated.

With 433 members seated, and two Democrats in limbo, the Republicans now have a 217-216 majority, and they call for a new election for speaker, angling to restore Johnson to the post. Faced with what amounts to a legislative coup, Speaker Jeffries is hard pressed to not rule the motion out of order — but if he does, it’s all but certain to unleash procedural chaos.

The scenario described above is fictional, albeit with some factual details. But it’s one of a handful that House Democrats have reportedly contemplated as they game out the various ways the system could break down following the Nov. 3 elections.

The prospect of Republican lawmakers, goaded by Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, seizing on doubts raised about one or two races that determine control of the House to essentially overturn the 2026 midterm elections is also remarkably similar to a scenario described in a 2021 article for the Marquette Law Review by Michigan State University professor Brian C. Kalt.

Instead of referencing Democrats and Republicans as the two major parties, Kalt’s hypothetical describes a “Silver Party” as winning a 218-217 majority, with a “Purple” party challenging two members-elect from the majority party and then attempting to elect one of their own as speaker.

“It would be outrageous for a party to try to seize control of the House this way,” Kalt writes. “Unfortunately, if conditions were just so, it is not hard to imagine either party launching such an attempt.

“Things could unravel further,” he warns. “Contending for ultimate control, both sides could level motions, appeals, and tit-for-tat pre-oath challenges against each other’s members-elect. The proto-House could degenerate into a chaotic mass of votes, meta-votes (about who gets to vote), and meta-meta-votes before anyone has even been sworn in. Instead of the House being controlled by the party that won the most seats in the election, it might go instead to the party that is more disciplined and unified — or failing that, to the party that is more adept at parliamentary machinations.”

Asked about the potential for an effort by Republicans to thwart the transfer of power, Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries' staff pointed Raw Story to a comment he made on a podcast last week in which he said Democratic leaders are working with civil society groups to ensure "that results are properly certified so that when the American people give us an opportunity to govern the majority, those results are actually brought to life on January 3 of next year."

Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL), the ranking member on the House Elections Subcommittee, is a key member of a squad of Democrats troubleshooting potential election challenges.

"House Democrats are taking President Trump's threats to interfere in our elections extremely seriously," Sewell told Raw Story. "We are working diligently to prepare for and defend against those threats, while protecting the right of every eligible American to cast their ballot and have it counted fairly."

Kalt has flagged the “step aside” procedure as a key vulnerability in the election process. Kalt argues that the procedure, which was instituted after the Civil War as a mechanism to enforce a prohibition against office-holding by anyone who had supported the Confederacy, is obsolete and should be ended.

House Democrats are also girding against a potential scenario even more worrisome than challenges to swearing in members-elect in contested races.

The House clerk, Kevin McCumber, was appointed to his position by Johnson in 2025, but is generally regarded as nonpartisan, having worked off and on in the Office of the Clerk under the leadership of both parties over the past three decades, and having served as deputy clerk under former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

House Democrats are reportedly worried about one particular “disaster scenario” in which Johnson fires McCumber after the Nov. 3 election if it becomes apparent that Democrats are winning a majority of seats, and replaces him with a partisan who is pliant to Trump’s wishes and assembles a roll that eliminates Democrats whose races were subject to the president’s fraud claims to arrive at an artificial Republican majority.

“The role of the clerk and making the roll of new members — that’s the most vulnerable part,” Kalt told Raw Story. As described in Kalt’s article, under current practices, the Clerk’s office begins to communicate with state authorities in September — well before the election — about what they “must do to certify and submit their election results properly.” After the November election, the states submit their certified results to the Clerk’s office, which “reviews them to ensure they comply with state law.” If there are any inadequacies, the clerk typically notifies the states and gives them an opportunity to correct the paperwork.

Rep. Joe Morelle, the ranking member on the House Administration Committee, described the worry that Johnson might fire the clerk to legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin for an opinion piece published by the New York Times last month. Morelle has been traveling around the country to hold shadow hearings on election security.

“It’s close enough to a realistic scenario that there are Democrats concerned about it,” Toobin told Newsweek in a video interview on Aug. 10. “And interestingly, since my piece came out… I have subsequently heard from Democrats, like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you knew about this, but we’ve really been worried about this for some time.’”

Morelle told Raw Story: "We have been preparing for what is certain to be Donald Trump's next assault on democracy. He will not succeed in subverting the will of the American people. We are ready, legally and legislatively, to ensure the 120th Congress will be seated without incident."

Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, who chairs the Democratic Attorneys General Election Protection Working Group, told Raw Story that he hopes the process of transmitting election results from the states to the House clerk remains boring and ministerial, but it warrants attention.

"I think it would be remarkable in the worst sense to imagine that the House would somehow reject certification from a state," he said. "But I think these things that used to be totally ridiculous hypotheticals are now much more imaginable."

Many Democrats argue that a blue wave election is the best insurance against potential meddling by Trump and his congressional allies.

"I have full confidence in our democracy and in the American people to make their voices heard loud and clear in November," Repo. Sewell told Raw Story. "By turning out in historic numbers, we will make this election too big to rig."

If a new clerk — potentially a MAGA hack — appointed by Johnson were to assemble a roll of members-elect predetermined to ensure a specific party or faction assumed control of the new House, it wouldn’t be the first time in American history.

As detailed in Kalt’s article, in 1863, a clerk who resented President Abraham Lincoln’s policies of emancipation and reconstruction hatched a conspiracy with one of the president’s legislative opponents to rig the vote for speaker. When the new House convened, the clerk kept 16 Republicans supportive of Lincoln off the roll and added three conservative Republicans more skeptical towards his policies.

During that procedural scuffle, the Lincoln Republicans responded by voting to restore their exiled colleagues to the roll. But if the rebels had maintained discipline, Kalt writes, “they could have controlled the majority and chosen the speaker.” In the aftermath, the House could have been faced with protracted procedural fights, and even an effort by partisans “to remove the clerk by force.”

Johnson and members of the Republican leadership team did not respond to emails from Raw Story about whether the possibility of firing the House clerk is being actively considered or has been discussed. They also left unanswered a question about whether they will honor the results should Democrats win a majority of the seats.

When he was first elected speaker in 2023, Johnson batted away questions about Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and Republican members’ actions to stall the certification of Joe Biden as president on Jan. 6, 2021 as Trump’s supporters overran the Capitol.

Johnson has also repeatedly amplified Trump’s election conspiracies, while expressing in softer language what critics charge helps lend legitimacy to the president’s unhinged rants.

During a February 2024 news conference in support of a restrictionist election bill, Johnson told reporters: “We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not something that is easily provable. We don’t have a number.” (A ProPublica report last week revealed that the government has only charged 41 alleged noncitizens with voting since January 2025, compared to 150 million people who voted in the most recent presidential election, despite an unprecedented effort to task Homeland Security Investigations to identify offenders.)

Johnson has repeatedly complained about Republican candidates falling behind as late-returning ballots favor their Democratic opponents — a commonly understood phenomenon known as the “red mirage” — while saying he can’t prove fraud “because it’s so far upstream.”

When Trump said in February that Republicans “should take over the voting” in “15 places” — a number roughly aligns with the number of states with House or Senate races considered to be toss-ups — Johnson defended him.

“What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections,” the speaker said.

As recently as June, when Trump ended a televised interview after being challenged on his baseless accusation of a “rigged election” and “cheating” in the California primary, Johnson again came to the president’s defense.

“They are counting votes weeks after the election,” Johnson said. “I’m not saying it’s rigged. I’m saying it stinks to high heaven, and everybody knows that.”

Outrage as Trump admin accused of 'inventing' terror threat to target charities

A new report issued by the State Department lays out an alarming blueprint for criminalizing dissent against the Trump administration through a dubious link to Cuban foreign subversion, critics say.

The July 20 release of the State Department report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" comes on the heels of a global gathering of counterterrorism officials in Washington hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to enlist U.S. allies in cracking down on a perceived global left-wing terrorism threat.

The Cuba report posits that “a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States” by the beleaguered communist nation through espionage and terrorism is responsible for sustaining and shaping the political left in the United States today, including “antifa” and a host of “leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, social groups and Marxist militant organizations.”

In a chapter titled “Front Groups & Fellow Travelers,” the report spotlights an array of domestic leftist groups calling on the U.S. to lift the embargo against Cuba and opposing the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort through militarized surges by federal agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.

While raising the specter of terrorism and espionage in two chapters dedicated to each subject, the report highlights a range of activities by U.S. activist groups, including registered charities.

None of the activities are criminal. They include organizing initiatives, political advocacy, aid convoys, work stoppages, campaigns for political office, monitoring of law enforcement, and raising bail funds to support protesters.

Rubio asserted a link between Cuba and domestic protest groups during his remarks at the opening of the July 16 Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Violence.

"The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere,” he said. “And it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West."

Critics charge that the report, coupled with Rubio’s effort to mobilize a global counterterrorism coalition against the left, poses a threat to Americans’ constitutional rights. By tying domestic dissent to national security, critics say, the Trump administration could justify more robust surveillance measures, along with sanctions, that aren’t available under the constitutional safeguards that typically limit domestic law enforcement.

“I think the concern is they’re hyping fears of a foreign threat to tie in actors here on domestic soil,” Tom Joscelyn, who served as a senior professional staff member on the House Jan. 6^th Committee and helped write its final report on the attack on the U.S. Capitol, told Raw Story. “Whether they can do that with Cuban communists or a foreign antifa group, they can use counterterrorism tools on American people: surveillance, de-banking, and other strong counterterrorism tools.”

Joscelyn added that there is no evidence of an actual “foreign nexus” to justify deploying counterterrorism measures against domestic opponents of the Trump administration, so “they’re inventing one because they don’t have one.”

The State Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Among other U.S. organizations, the State Department report targets the National Network on Cuba, which it describes as “a key node for coordination between the Cuban regime and the American far left.” The report raises an alarm about a “National Rapid Response Plan” distributed by the network in June, which the State Department describes as “a detailed strategy for activating and launching ‘coordinated nationwide actions’ against federal institutions, U.S. military bases, and ICE detention centers and field offices in the United States within 24 hours of U.S. military action… against Cuba.”

But the State Department report omits any mention of the types of actions that are outlined in the plan. Far from being terrorist strikes as the report insinuates, they are familiar protest activities, including rallies, meetings, art builds, flyering, and banner drops. Also belying any notion of a call for criminal violence, the document recommends: “Make your plan now and start publicizing it.”

In another example, the report targets the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, a registered charity which has a history of sending humanitarian aid and solidarity delegations to Cuba. The report claims that the foundation “facilitates radical agitation within the United States” through a separate fiscal sponsorship program.

The report lists five groups accused of “radical agitation” that receive donations through the fiscal sponsorship program. One, a Black women-led organization, advocates for Haitian refugees, currently facing deportation following the Supreme Court decision upholding the Trump administration’s decision to end temporary protected status. Another is described as advocating for the abolition of the police, ICE and prisons, and fighting “gentrification” and “police violence” in Brooklyn. Yet another group, described as a “Black Queer Feminist led, abolitionist organizing project,” is engaged in a mission of “reimagining and rebuilding our own systems towards liberation.”

Nowhere in the short bullet points for each group, which appear to be drawn from their websites, does the State Department allege any specific criminal misconduct.

The anti-ICE, police abolitionist and pro-LGBTQ+ positions of the targeted groups mirror the focus of National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, a directive issued by President Trump last September to “investigate and disrupt” leftist movements motivated by, among other things, “extremism on migration, race and gender.”

The report assails the People’s Forum for partnering with the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America “to recruit up to 4,000 ‘rapid response’ activists to counter ICE enforcement operations in the city” and helping to organize a “nationwide anti-ICE school and business shutdown” in January.

Following the State Department report, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), subpoenaed the People’s Forum to probe it for alleged foreign influence.

The People’s Forum decried the State Department report as advancing “false and sweeping allegations that everyone opposing the criminal blockade of Cuba or supporting social justice movements are left-wing terrorists.” The organization went on to describe the State Department report and congressional probe as being “part of an escalating crusade against all progressive organizations and any group or person who expresses opposition to the ultra-right, racist, and pro-war policies of the Trump White House.”

The National Lawyers Guild, itself a target of the State Department report, flagged the document as a signal that the administration is “consolidating its legal architecture of fascist repression,” part of an escalation that also includes stiff sentences handed down to anti-ICE activists in Texas who were present at a protest that turned violent and the ongoing prosecution of 15 anti-ICE activists in Minneapolis charged with conspiracy for blockading a federal facility and tracking immigration agents in the field.

The Global Project Against Hate & Extremism, meanwhile, said the State Department’s recent moves appear to build on previous efforts by the Trump administration to punish perceived enemies by ordering investigations of former officials such as Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, and prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey.

“None of these actions required the pretext of the ministerial or a report about Cuba,” the group said in a recent report. “Instead, those just serve as justification for the administration to dig deeper. The administration appears to be creating a framework that recasts constitutionally protected speech, protest, and association as foreign-directed extremism, making the next round of investigations and prosecutions easier to sell to the public.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the July 16 ministerial on leftist political violence that, following Trump’s direction in NSPM-7, the Treasury Department is “expanding its efforts to identify organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures as vehicles for illicit finance.

“We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, where charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign-influence activity and how those entrusted with stewardship of these organizations have instead enabled violence,” Bessent said.

Code Pink, another registered charity and one of the groups named in the State Department report, received a “Request for Information” letter from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control seeking information about a humanitarian trip to Cuba in March to deliver medical supplies for children’s hospitals, the group confirmed to Raw Story.

The State Department accused Code Pink of “brazen and overt propagandizing on behalf of several hostile regimes” while describing it as exemplifying “domestic American ‘anti-imperialist’ and Third Worldist organizations” serving as “vectors of subversive foreign influence.”

Melissa Garriga, a spokesperson, told Raw Story, “Code Pink does not work on behalf of any foreign government; our actions and campaigns are influenced by deadly U.S. foreign policy funded by our tax dollars.”

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate & Extremism, told Raw Story the most troubling aspect of the State Department report is that it vilifies First Amendment-protected activities.

“Solidarity trips, aid convoys, and anti-embargo advocacy are constitutionally protected speech and association, not evidence of foreign control,” she said. “By blurring compassion for Cubans into ‘being directed by Cuba,’ the report revives a familiar Cold War tactic, effectively demonizing dissent as foreign-directed subversion.”

Anger as ICE dances around judge's demand to reveal polling place plans

Nearly 10 months after Democrats demanded records of ICE’s plans for deploying agents to polling places, the agency has turned over 576 pages of press clippings.

The batch of useless — and already easily accessible — documents produced by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee represents the agency’s efforts to comply with an order issued by Judge Beryl A Howell last month to produce 1,000 pages per month.

By handing over a stack of press clippings compiled for the Department of Homeland Security’s “daily briefing,” ICE “has circumvented the court’s orders” and is hiding its plans from the public, the DNC argued in a joint status report submitted to the court late on Friday.

The DNC noted that its FOIA request specifically asks ICE to exclude stand-alone news articles and press clippings that don’t contain discussion by agency officials.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Vaden told the court in response that he was calling “ICE’s attention to the proviso,” but he rejected the DNC’s charge that the agency is “queuing… nonresponsive documents before responsive ones” to hide its plans.

ICE did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment for this story.

ICE has repeatedly frustrated efforts to uncover internal discussions, despite public statements by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that they are open to deploying agents to polling places. A statement by Homeland Security to Raw Story last month went even further by saying the government wouldn’t rule out arrests at polling places in response to “an active public safety threat.”

The hundreds of pages of press clippings delivered by ICE as its first batch of documents produced in response to the DNC request came after the agency gave itself an extra week to meet the monthly quota set by Howell.

Noting that the agency had not produced “a single page of responsive materials” in response to the DNC’s October 2025 request despite the fact that the 2026 midterms were less than four months away, Howell’s July 13 order directed ICE “to immediately begin processing” responsive materials “at a rate of at least 1,000 pages per month, including the month of July.”

The government informed the court last month that ICE was setting Aug. 7 as a deadline “so as to include a greater number of responsive, non-exempt records” in its first production.

The flood of useless documents also comes after ICE initially told the DNC in early June that it had zero responsive records, prompting the Democrats to accuse the agency of “a remarkable lack of diligence.” In response, the DNC flagged news reports about the presence of ICE agents at polling places in Texas and California during primary elections in those states in May and June, respectively, along with Mullin’s testimony during his Senate confirmation hearing.

“Shockingly, ICE agents also entered an active polling place in New York to confront a poll worker over a month-old Instagram post addressing the killing of Renee Good,” DNC lawyers said in a filing calling the government’s bluff.

Gruesome criminal history 'rampant' as probe exposes multiple immigration agents

David Brouillette, the ICE agent who fatally gunned down a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant in Maine last month, is far from the only immigration agent with a history of domestic violence, according to a new report.

The Ohio Immigration Alliance flags the cases of 25 federal immigration agents or contractors criminally charged or credibly accused since President Donald Trump returned to power. The cases reveal a pattern of domestic violence, sex offenses against children, abuses of authority and corruption among the federal agents responsible for carrying out the administration’s mass deportation campaign.

While the Department of Homeland Security has claimed it is targeting the “worst of the worst,” some of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers charged are accused of predatory behavior against women who are vulnerable because of their immigration status.

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance took notice after Samuel Saxon, an assistant ICE field office director in Cincinnati, was arrested last December for assault and strangulation against his partner, who was revealed to be a non-citizen less than half Saxon’s age when they met.

Saxon’s arrest came on the heels of the federal prosecution of Andrew Golobic, a former ICE deportation officer in Columbus, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for abusing his authority and forcing undocumented women to have sex with him while they were under his supervision in an alternatives-to-detention program.

“After noticing a trend of Cincinnati ICE agents committing sexual or violent offenses against women, the Ohio Immigrant Alliance began looking deeper into the criminal backgrounds of other agents,” Executive Director Lynn Tramonte said. “An inordinate number of ICE and Border Patrol agents committing sex offenses against children. Rampant domestic violence. Oftentimes, these acts were committed by agents with 10 and even 20 years on the force. There’s been something rotten at these agencies for a long time.”

While ICE is the agency most closely identified with Trump’s mass deportation campaign, the review by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance found that nearly three-quarters of the agents with criminal histories worked for Border Patrol, ICE’s sister agency under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security.

While ICE officers are responsible for the deaths of Johan Sebastián Durán Guererro in Maine, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Renee Good in Minneapolis and others, one of the agents accused of killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis was employed by Border Patrol while another worked for Customs and Border Protection.

Over the Border Patrol’s troubled history, agents have committed serial murder, serial rape, and child molestation. One, Juan David Ortiz, confessed to killing four sex workers in Texas in 2018. Another, John Daly III — dubbed the “East Valley Rapist” — was arrested in 2021 and charged with raping eight women in Arizona between 1999 and 2001. A third, Dana Ray Thornhill, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2020 after pleading guilty to repeatedly molesting two children between 1995 and 2007. Thornhill was hired by the agency despite having been arrested at the age of 13 for the sexual assault of a young girl.

The agency’s chief, Michael W. Banks, abruptly resigned in May, six weeks after publication of a story by the Washington Examiner citing allegations by former Border Patrol employees who said he had “bragged” to colleagues about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions from Raw Story about whether Banks' departure was connected to the allegations in the Washington Examiner story or whether he faced an internal investigation over the allegations.

But an agency spokesperson told Raw Story, "We thank U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks for his decades of service to this country and congratulate him on his second retirement after returning to serve during one of the most challenging periods for border security. During his time as chief, the border was transformed from chaos to the most secure border ever recorded."

Banks’ short tenure as chief began with his appointment by Trump in January 2025, after previously serving as “border czar” for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and rising through the ranks of Border Patrol before that.

During the second Trump administration, a host of federal immigration agents and contractors have faced criminal charges, including Luis Uribe, a Border Patrol agent accused of forcing his way into different hotel rooms to rob and sexually assault women of Chinese descent in the Chicago suburbs; Malik Daley, a Border Patrol agent in Vermont charged with sexual assault of a girl under age 16 (he has pleaded not guilty), and David Courvelle, a contract detention officer who pleaded guilty to having sex with a female detainee at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance is calling on Congress to freeze funding to ICE and Border Patrol, and to insist that the workforce be re-screened for histories of domestic violence and extremist ideology.

“Officers who abuse women at home are not safe to carry guns in public,” the report said. “Officers who prey on children are not safe to interact with communities. Officers who use their authority to coerce sex cannot be trusted to hold any authority at all.”

Concerns about the federal agencies’ vetting procedures only compounded with the arrest in February of a Department of Defense contract worker tasked with performing background checks for ICE and Homeland Security Investigations. David Brashad was charged with solicitation of prostitution after responding to a decoy ad on a website during a sting operation conducted by local police in the Minneapolis suburbs.

“A recurring theme throughout these examples is the abuse of authority,” the Ohio Immigrant Alliance report found. “These are not simply individuals who happened to work for DHS — many of them used their positions of power to commit, conceal, or contribute to their crimes. Some committed violent and sexual offenses during their terms of employment, yet remained employed and were even promoted.”

Following his arrest for assault and strangulation on state charges, Samuel Saxon, the assistant ICE field officer in Cincinnati, was federally charged with lying about the matter to a federal investigator. A federal prosecutor arguing for Saxon’s pretrial detention presented evidence of years of physical abuse and threats against his partner.

In one of the videos presented in court, a man believed to be Saxon can be heard yelling at a woman: “You stupid f------ b----,” “You got a fat lip, b----,” and “If I see you here in three days, you will be executed.”

Saxon’s partner of eight years was reportedly not a citizen at the time of his arrest. They had met when she was 18 years old and Saxon was more than twice her age, the prosecutor told the court, The woman said she had tried to leave the relationship, but was financially dependent on Saxon.

Police and EMS responded to 911 calls to the address where Saxon and his partner lived in Cincinnati at least 22 times, the prosecutor said. In April 2025, emergency crews transported the woman to the hospital, where she was found to be injured with a fractured hip, bruises all over her body and ligature marks around her throat. Doctors said she could have died or become permanently disabled, according to the prosecutor.

The prosecutor’s presentation during Saxon’s detention hearing suggests ICE missed significant red flags.

Prior to moving to Cincinnati, Saxon was assigned to an ICE field office in San Diego, and his boss there called the police to do a welfare check on him 16 hours after he didn’t show up for work. A police report indicates officers found him naked on the toilet while holding a knife to his own neck. Saxon’s supervisor in Cincinnati reportedly told prosecutors that he had a bad temper and would “go off” for no reason, while describing him as a “loose cannon.”

“There’s no way ICE was unaware of Saxon’s history of violence,” Tramonte said. “His victim had broken bones that required surgery…. The police came to his home 23 times in less than a year and a half. He had a DUI.

“This went on for years, ICE knew about it, and they kept promoting Saxon instead of firing him,” Tramonte added. “That’s not how a law enforcement agency should operate.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded, "The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulation, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors."