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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 119th 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 120th 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. 6th 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."

GOP maverick triggers alarm as surprise Iowa visit signals party ripping apart

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who was defeated by a Trump-backed primary challenger earlier this year, made a visit on Sunday to Iowa — a traditional destination for candidates exploring a presidential run.

Massie, who broke with Donald Trump in opposing the Iran war and defied the administration through his sponsorship of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, has emerged as a leading figure, alongside former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, of a new anti-interventionist, populist faction challenging the GOP.

Addressing Gun Owners of America’s annual gathering in Des Moines, Massie thanked the organizers “for having this event in Iowa,” adding, “There’s no place I’d rather be — maybe New Hampshire or South Carolina. Just kidding.”

The remark was met with only tentative applause as Massie laughed at his reference to other early-primary states, hastily adding, “Some people got my joke.”

While Massie’s presidential tease received a muted reaction in Iowa, it’s not the only indication that he’s laying the groundwork for a potential presidential run.

A photo posted by Greene on X on Aug. 1 — and re-posted by Massie — shows the two seated around a table with Carlson and Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, at Carlson’s cabin-studio in Maine. Greene’s post accused Trump of betraying MAGA by pursuing foreign wars, while concluding, “The movement has begun.”

After he and Greene both announced they were breaking with the Republican Party, Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review last month that he’s committed “to help build a third party,” while stipulating that he doesn’t intend to be a candidate.

Massie could not be reached for this story, but Kent described discussions among the group at Carlson’s cabin during an appearance on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on Monday as “the initial phases” of a movement to give voice to a growing bloc of voters across the political spectrum who are “sick and tired” of both political parties and “want us out of these foolish wars.”

Kent, who resigned from the Trump administration over his opposition to the Iran war, said during a podcast interview last month that Republican candidates face bleak prospects in the November midterm elections — in part, he said, because many Trump voters feel betrayed by the war.

“There are a lot of people who I think really kind of, you know, crawled through broken glass for President Trump who are pretty frustrated right now,” Massie told Brandon Straka, an election denier who volunteered for the Stop the Steal campaign to overturn the 2020 election and was convicted of misdemeanor disorderly conduct at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “I think November’s going to be rough, just to be honest.

“I think a lot of people who were really inspired to vote for President Trump in 2024, they were already low-propensity voters who probably don’t participate in primaries, they don’t participate in midterms,” Kent continued. “To get them to come out now, because Trump endorsed somebody or they have an R next to their name, I just think that’s going to be a very, very hard sell.”

Looking forward to 2028, Kent predicted that the political fight within the right will “be MAGA versus America First,” with someone like Secretary of State Marco Rubio representing the new MAGA “establishment.”

But even outsider candidates who tell voters they are “America first, but I mean it this time,” will face a credibility challenge, Kent said.

“One of my big concerns is that we had so many low-propensity voters, people who had never voted before, younger people who came out and voted for President Trump and then they feel like they’ve been betrayed,” he said. “And they have good reason to feel that way. Now, they’re going to say, ‘I don’t care. I don’t even want to hear it.’”

Scrambling DOJ rushed to shut Epstein case as 'flag list' surfaced big names: new docs

Days after an explosive meeting at the White House Situation Room last July to address a crisis threatening to engulf the Trump administration, FBI Director Kash Patel sought clarity on how the scandal might implicate powerful men linked to Jeffrey Epstein.

Addressing Patel as “Boss” and citing a prior discussion between the two, an FBI official from the bureau’s Information Management Division responded by sending the director an email with a collection of spreadsheets named “Flagged Items Lists.”

Based on guidance calling on FBI personnel tasked with redacting materials from the Epstein files to “flag items of interest for discussion with DOJ attorneys,” the FBI official informed Patel that “the list included public figures, potentially classified information, potential CSAM [child sex abuse material], etc.”

The guidance to flag these sensitive items from the Epstein files came from the Department of Justice, Assistant Director Shannon Parry informed Patel. Heading the effort for the Department of Justice was Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general and formerly President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer. Blanche is now awaiting confirmation as attorney general from the U.S. Senate.

The email from Parry and other documents about sensitive items flagged for review by the DOJ, including references to public figures, was quietly released by the FBI last week and are being reported here for the first time.

The materials in the “Flagged Items List” had already been turned over to the Department of Justice four months earlier, Parry told Patel in the July 21, 2025 email.

“These items were produced as part of the approved Project Plan per DOJ’s guidance to flag items of interest for discussion with DOJ attorneys as we redacted."

The internal discussion at the FBI about public figures potentially implicated in the scandal was starkly different from an awkward public memo jointly released with the DOJ exactly two weeks earlier that cited “an exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein” and the federal agencies’ “commitment to transparency.”

The materials, the agencies said, “did not expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing” and “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

A DOJ spokesperson told Raw Story that “any guidance on how or what to flag was given for the purpose of general awareness in preparation for disclosure.”

The spokesperson’s statement is jarringly at odds with the July 7, 2025 memo that was a product of the document review. The memo specifically stated that it was the “determination” of the DOJ and FBI “that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

The DOJ did not respond to a request for clarification on the statement.

Email from FBI Information Management Division Assistant Director Shannon Parry to Director Kash Patel, July 21, 2025Courtesy FBI

Two weeks after the release of the DOJ and FBI memo attempting to put concerns about Epstein to rest, Parry was forwarding Patel materials specifically flagged so top administration officials could scrutinize possible links between powerful men and the notorious sex trafficker’s most heinous crimes.

The email included a list of six criminal cases linked to Epstein, among them an FBI investigation launched by the Miami Field Office in 2006. That case file includes a video file capturing a 2009 FBI sting operation resulting in the arrest of Alfredo Rodriguez, the former house manager for Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, on suspicion of selling a so-called “black book” containing phone numbers of young women and girls that Epstein abused.

A description of the video capturing the conversation between Rodriguez and an FBI undercover employee that was flagged for the DOJ’s review contains just the sort of details about potential involvement by Epstein associates that Trump’s supporters had avidly sought.

“The two talked about the girls (victims), others employed by Epstein and Epstein’s associates,” the description reads. “The two discussed things that happened between the girls (victims) and Epstein’s associates. There are associates named during the conversation.”

Aside from Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner who was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021, the description does not name any of the associates cited by Rodriguez. But when the video was released along with millions of other records through the Epstein Files Transparency Act in January 2026, the associates mentioned by Rodriguez were revealed to be former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and attorney Alan Dershowitz, among others.

“Here, Mr. Epstein says, ‘Mr. Barak, I’ll fly you to New York.’ And some of the girls that came along the way,” Rodriguez says in the video, which Raw Story reviewed. “You can bring this guy down like in no time.”

Barak told the Wall Street Journal in 2023 that he met with Epstein at his various mansions, but “never participated in any party or any other ‘inappropriate’ event with him” and “never met with girls or minors, not even with adult women in the context of any inappropriate behavior.”

Rodriguez told the FBI undercover employee that Dershowitz would typically sit at the pool with a glass of wine. Although there was “hanky-panky” upstairs, Rodriguez said he never saw any indication that he took part, although there were sometimes naked or topless girls around the pool.

Rodriguez was convicted of obstruction of justice in 2012 for hiding the “black book” and attempting to sell it. He died from cancer in 2014, after serving his sentence.

“Rodriguez’s testimony has been completely discredited,” Dershowitz told Raw Story. “He was a criminal. I never saw any females at the pool — naked, topless or otherwise. Complete fabrication.”

Dershowitz was also flagged by the FBI as a public figure linked to Epstein around the time of the controversial memo and the meeting of top officials at the Situation Room to strategize about how to insulate Trump from the furor surrounding the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

Leslie Backshies, a special agent in charge at the New York Field Office sent an email to FBI colleagues on July 10 alerting them that Dershowitz was “referenced in the Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking investigation” in two FBI witness interviews. Minutes later, Charles Yarbrough, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division, forwarded the email to Patel.

“Dershowitz was not considered a subject in this investigation and no evidence was uncovered during the investigation to suggest Dershowitz was involved in the abuse of minors,” Backshies wrote. She went on to summarize the two witness interviews.

In one, a former employee of Epstein’s said Dershowitz received a massage from an unnamed person, but that the massage was considered “to be more professional and different than the massages the girls provided.”

Another witness told the FBI that they met Dershowitz at Epstein’s home when he was alone without his wife and he received a massage — in contradiction to a public statement previously made by Dershowitz.

“Both proffers are provably false,” Dershowitz told Raw Story. “I never had sexual contact with anyone other than my wife since the day I met Jeffrey Epstein. I never did anything improper with regard to Epstein. I have been the victim of disprovably false accusations. I asked the FBI to investigate the false allegations against me.”

The FBI did not respond to a detailed set of questions for this story.

Blanche, who is up for confirmation as attorney general, wrote in response to a question posed by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) that “the FBI pursued all investigative leads in its investigations into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.” To Hirono, Blanche wrote: “Consistent with the long-standing principles of federal prosecution as outlined in the Justice Manual, several experienced prosecutors and investigators have reviewed the materials and determined that additional prosecutions are unavailable at this time.

In response to questions from senators, Blanche refused to comment on whether the Department of Justice has initiated any new investigations related to Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring since the beginning of the second Trump administration.

The documents were released by the FBI in in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Democracy Forward Foundation.

"Despite the Trump-Vance administration's attempts to forestall transparency into its handling of the Epstein files with delay tactics, Democracy Forward will keep fighting in court to ensure the public has access to more of these important documents," said Dan McGrath, special counsel for oversight at the nonprofit.

DHS admission suggests sham emergency will justify ICE arrests at midterm polls

ICE won’t rule out making arrests at polling places during the November midterm elections in the event of “an active public safety threat,” the Department of Homeland Security admitted to Raw Story.

The details of what would constitute such a threat were left vague.

The statement comes as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement faces an Aug. 7 deadline to begin turning over some 11,000 documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic Party, and Secretary Markwayne Mullin is threatening prison time for election officials who refuse to go along with a demand by the Trump administration that states purge alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls.

“ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” the department said in an email to Raw Story last week that was attributed to a “DHS official.” “ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.”

The statement from DHS is the strongest signal yet of the administration’s intentions to potentially deploy federal agents or soldiers to polling places — an intimidation tactic promoted by Trump ally Steve Bannon that has raised alarms among Democrats and democracy advocates.

ICE had previously told the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, it had no records in response to its FOIA Lawsuit seeking documents from DHS, the Department of Justice and Department of Defense on potential deployment of federal forces to voting sites and other election locations.

But the agency was forced to take a second look after the DNC pointed to media reports on ICE agents showing up at voting sites during primary elections in Texas and California, and entering a polling place in New York state to question a poll worker about a social media post she made that was critical of the agent who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Separately, the government disclosed that the Department of Justice’s FOIA office is consulting with “other DOJ components and Executive Branch agencies,” suggesting a high-level review of 55 pages of “potentially responsive records,” according to the government’s report to a federal judge overseeing the case. The government has committed only to “issuing a response” on those documents by Saturday.

While Democrats brace for the presence of ICE agents and other federal officers at polling places in November, the Trump administration is making wide-ranging claims about supposed foreign interference in U.S. elections and trumpeting a claim that DHS found 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

David Becker, executive director of the pro-democracy group Center for Election Innovation & Research, cast doubt on that claim.

“The public voter files used by the federal government do not have any unique identifiers, so no matter what list they compare to, there’s no methodologically sound way to get valid voter registration matches,” he said, adding that it’s impossible to accurately match names from public voter lists with commercial data if either is missing a Social Security number.

“All you would get — and this may have been the intent — is a boatload of false positives,” Becker continued. “I suspect this is why DHS is hiding the ball, refusing to share its list with the states or even disclose in detail its methodology, even as they threaten the states. This number has no bearing on reality and may just as well have been made up.”

DHS’s statement to Raw Story about ICE potentially making arrests at polling places echoes Mullins’ comments during an interview last month with CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“ICE agents are there to flex, if we need to,” Mullin said. “You saw ICE at TSA lines, not processing, but in the soft areas. If a threat were to arise, for whatever reason, at a polling station — say a bomb threat would be called in — our ICE agents are more than just immigration customs enforcement; they’re also trained to have SRT, which means that we can have an emergency team respond quickly.”

Mullin added that agents would not engage in “voter identification.”

Todd Blanche, who is up for confirmation as attorney general, has also expressed support for deploying ICE agents to polling places.

“Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” Blanche asked during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. “Illegals can’t vote.”

The White House did not respond on the record to an inquiry about whether Trump or other White House officials have held discussions with Mullin, Blanche or other leaders about the possibility of deploying federal agents to voting sites during the midterm elections.

During his July 17 press briefing, Mullin invoked “national security” as a component of election administration, moving the midterm elections into a realm in which courts have historically granted the executive branch more deference. Mullins’ remarks dovetailed with Trump’s argument — contradicted by the very declassified intelligence files he cited — that the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden was marred by foreign interference from China and Venezuela.

Mullin has a history of entertaining conspiracy theories about Venezuelan election interference, going back to before his confirmation as homeland security secretary in March.

As a U.S. senator, Mullin arranged for a group of election conspiracists pushing the unfounded claim that the Venezuelan government electronically manipulated votes in the 2020 election to meet with the Trump campaign, according to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. The meeting at Mar-a-Lago in October 2024 — first reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen — brought together Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil and Trump campaign co-chair Susie Wiles, now the president’s chief of staff.

Mullin demonstrated a familiarity with the ideas promoted by Rodil, Byrne and their associates during a December 2025 appearance on the “The Benny Johnson Show.”

“Venezuela has been a hub for this,” Mullin told Johnson. “There’s also a relationship between China and Russia that’s also involved in this. And we know that they have been trying to get in our elections…. We also allowed those investors to be part of some of the stuff we thought was impenetrable, which had been some of our election cycles and our election machines and the way we look at to it.”

During his July 17 press briefing outlining plans to address supposed election vulnerabilities, Mullin went a step further.

“Foreign adversaries have parts that are vital pieces in our voting machines,” he said. “We know that they can access what they consider the key to the back of these machines. We know they can change voter registration and your vote. We know it’s possible. There’s not a question. It’s not even for debate.”

Mullin’s claims are contradicted by a CIA report released by the White House in tandem with Trump’s national address reflecting that the agency developed intelligence showing that the Venezuelan government never developed the capability to manipulate elections outside its own borders. Smartmatic, an election technology company at the center of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, cut ties with the Venezuelan government in 2018. And in January 2026, the U.S. military deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, leaving in place his former vice president Delcy Rodriguez to lead the country.

Lawyers for the Democratic Party have questioned the government’s inability to produce a single record, to date, on the potential for the deployment of federal agents and soldiers by pointing to Mullin’s public statements on the topic and the fact that ICE agents have already been spotted at voting sites around the country.

The previous assertion that ICE “did not locate any responsive records” demonstrated “remarkable lack of diligence,” the Democrats said in a joint status report filed earlier this month. “Following receipt of a no-records response, the DNC flagged repeated ICE deployments to polling places and Secretary of Homeland Security Mullin’s testimony on the subject.”

CIA head gored for 'playing fast and loose' with agency data to back Trump lies

CIA Director John Ratcliffe lent credence to President Donald Trump’s wild claims about Venezuelan election manipulation during his national address last week, hinting at plans for federal intervention in the midterm elections.

Ratcliffe’s statement, posted on X as Trump was winding up his speech on Thursday, cited intelligence “showing that Venezuela’s government had developed capabilities to manipulate electronic voting systems, raising serious concerns for U.S. election security.”

Trump’s statement on the subject raised concerns about “whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or cheat on these terrible machines,” before citing declassified documents showing intelligence obtained by the CIA about the Venezuelan government’s handling of elections, and arguing that the “intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised, like it was in the past.”

Trump’s use of the phrase “like it was in the past” suggests a claim that the Venezuelan government manipulated vote totals in U.S. elections” — but that’s not what the declassified CIA document suggests.

Ratcliffe’s statement would be more accurate if he had clarified that Venezuela developed capabilities to manipulate its own elections, which raised theoretical, as opposed to serious, concerns about U.S. election infrastructure security, Kevin T. Carroll, a former CIA case officer who served as senior counsel to former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, told Raw Story.

“Ratcliffe’s description of the analytical finding here is misleading, and this kind of inaccuracy erodes public trust in the Intelligence Community’s judgments,” Carroll said. “Playing fast and loose like this is dangerous for the agency, and more importantly the country, when a CIA director is speaking about a subject regarding domestic politics, such as election infrastructure security.”

The CIA did not respond to questions submitted by email by Raw Story for this story.

Trump’s claims during his July 16 speech have been widely debunked, but Democrats and fair elections advocates view his inflammatory rhetoric as an attempt to create a national security pretext for federal interference in the midterm elections — or set the stage to claim the election was stolen if Republicans lose.

“From a national emergency to seize control over elections, to sending ICE or FBI agents to the polls to seize ballots or voting machines — tactics that once felt outlandish or near-impossible —must be considered as possibilities as an unhinged, corrupt president becomes increasingly desperate to tip the scales in 2026,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action. “The same people who tried to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss with false claims want to use those false claims to try to seize control of the 2026 midterms.”

The false claim that the Venezuelan government manipulated vote totals in the 2020 U.S. election was at the heart of a series of failed lawsuits brought by lawyer Sidney Powell attempting to overturn the election. The claim hinged on the purported role of Smartmatic, an election technology company. Smartmatic has a pending defamation suit against Fox News seeking $2.7 billion in damages for statements the network aired by Powell and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer at the time. Rival network Newsmax has already paid Smartmatic $40 million to settle similar claims.

Trump’s remarks bypassed Smartmatic, but the CIA intelligence released last week by the White House noted that the company “ceased operations in Venezuela” in 2018 “after publicly accusing the Maduro regime of inflating voter turnout” in a national election the previous year.

Trump’s false claim that the Venezuelan government of former President Nicolás Maduro manipulated vote totals in a U.S. election is based on a grain of truth: The Venezuelan government under Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, appears to have explored the idea.

But intelligence gathered by the CIA indicates the regime never developed the capability or attempted to put it in motion.

A declassified CIA note states that in April 2004 “intelligence reporting indicated Chavez stated his objective was to prevent the reelection” of President George W. Bush. Regardless of Chavez’s wishes, Bush won reelection.

Chavez’s antipathy towards Bush is well-documented: During a 2006 speech at the United Nations, Chavez called Bush “the devil” and claimed the podium, where the U.S. president had spoken the day before, still “smelled of sulfur.”

The CIA Note confirms that intelligence gathered by the agency raised concerns that Venezuela was developing capabilities to manipulate elections in other countries, but that’s as far as it went.

“Intelligence Community reporting from 2004-2020 documented persistent concerns about Venezuelan government manipulation of electronic voting systems and the potential national security implications for U.S. election infrastructure,” the document states.

In 2006, the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Smartmatic’s acquisition of the American election technology company Sequoia posed a “moderate threat” to U.S. national security, according to the declassified document.

As a case officer, Carroll was assigned to a joint CIA-FBI Cuba-Venezuela foreign counterintelligence squad from 2007 to 2009.

“I do not recall any intelligence about Venezuela seeking to interfere in the 2008 U.S. election, nor being tasked by CIA or FBI headquarters to collect any intelligence on this subject,” Carroll told Raw Story. “If that threat had been a serious concern, my partner and I would have been directed to ask sources, and develop further sources, about it.”

The CIA note, entitled “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Voting Manipulation Capabilities,” directly contradicts Trump’s claims, almost point for point. The document is dated June 29, 2026, and was declassified by Ratcliffe two days later, suggesting it was drafted in preparation for Trump speech and the coordinated release of declassified files related to foreign election influence and interference.

A jumble of non-sequiturs with awkward phrasing that invites conflation and confusion, Trump’s statement begins by asserting that “many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals on these terrible machines,” before announcing that the White House was “releasing documents that actually show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela.

“And that’s exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020,” Trump continued.

Trump’s statement went on to reference CIA reporting that Venezuela developed a plan “to digitally alter voter totals in ways that could not be detected even with an audit,” while suggesting without explanation that Venezuela also interfered in U.S. elections. “This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action,” Trump said, “to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised, like it was in the past.”

The CIA note says nothing about Venezuela manipulating vote totals in any U.S. election, stating only that in September 2020, the agency received intelligence that on “a specific technical approach to election manipulation” that “would, in theory, allow the Venezuelan government to monitor and adjust results in real-time during and after the election.” The election manipulation technology, the CIA said, could be paired with another technology to evade “detection through standard audit procedures.”

The CIA note doesn’t even say Venezuela manipulated vote totals in its own 2020 election.

Contrary to Trump’s statement that the CIA uncovered “a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela — and that’s what they did,” the declassified CIA Note states that the Venezuelan government “did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted and the regime had already co-opted opposition party leadership.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Trump admin lawyer denies backing Tate brothers via 'politically driven prosecutions' post

A Trump administration official with a history of advocating for Andrew and Tristan Tate is backing away from his association with the social media influencer brothers facing criminal charges for sex trafficking in the UK — after making a post on X denouncing “politically driven persecutions.”

Paul Ingrassia, the acting general counsel for the U.S. General Services Administration, posted on X on July 19, a day after the brothers were arrested by federal marshals in Miami. “Politically driven prosecutions based on one’s personal beliefs are completely antithetical to a democratic society," he wrote.

Ingrassia’s post did not mention the Tate brothers by name, but his admiration for them and past history with them is well documented. In 2023, Ingrassia posted on X, “Stop the war on masculinity. Stop the war on [Andrew Tate] and [Tristan Tate]. #FreeTate.”

Users on X immediately drew the connection, with one responding to Ingrassia’s July 19 post, “He was charged with RAPE and INDECENT IMAGES OF A CHILD, Paul.”

In a second X post, also on July 19, Ingrassia invoked the due process protections under the U.S. Constitution, again without mentioning the brothers by name.

Ingrassia texted a statement to Raw Story reading: “Mr. Ingrassia has not mentioned the Tate brothers in any of his statements and has had no association with them for years. To suggest otherwise is to indulge in speculation untethered from fact. As an attorney, he takes seriously his duty to uphold the Constitution — including the presumption of innocence and due process for the accused.”

Ingrassia declined to discuss the matter further.

Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ), a MAGA loyalist who has previously worked as a prosecutor, expressed opposition to the U.S. government extraditing the Tate brothers in an X post on Monday that used language strikingly similar to Ingrassia’s legal arguments.

“The U.S. Constitution is the greatest protection in the world for its citizens,” Hamadeh wrote. “The Tate brothers are American citizens, and they deserve full American Constitutional protections — which means innocent until proven guilty. No American court has charged them with a crime despite years of false alarms and innuendos. They’ve been deplatformed, debanked, arrested, and still no convictions — something President Trump has endured for years.” (Contrary to Hamadeh’s assertion, Trump has been convicted of falsifying business records in New York state.)

“There should be no extradition of American citizens when the charges are unclear and political,” Hamadeh continued. “The US government should either charge them with a crime or protect them from reckless court proceedings in the UK and Romania."

Hamadeh offered no evidence to support his claims that the prosecutions are “reckless.” A call to his office for this story went unreturned.

Ingrassia was involved in the Tate brothers’ relocation from Romania, where they were under house arrest on sex trafficking charges, to Florida in early 2025, shortly after Trump returned to the White House.

As reported by Heidi Blake for The New Yorker, Romanian prosecutors lifted travel restrictions on the Tate brothers in February 2025 after U.S. special presidential envoy Richard Grenell raised their case with the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference.

When the brothers arrived in Florida by private plane, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials under the Department of Homeland Security seized their electronic devices. Ingrassia reportedly intervened on the White House’s behalf to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security returned the brothers’ devices.

In 2023, while Trump was gearing up his presidential campaign, Andrew Tate had appeared in a profanity-laced video promising, “If Trump wins, I’ll move to America. That’s how back we are. We’ll make it the global seat of power again.” Ingrassia reshared the video, writing, “[Andrew Tate] can book his flight for Tuesday, November, 5, 2024, because we’re going to make this happen!”

Ingrassia served as White House liaison to the Department of Justice and then to the Department of Homeland Security. In May 2025, Trump nominated him to lead the Office of the Special Counsel, but his nomination foundered in the Senate following revelations about his ties to Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, allegations of sexual harassment and racist texts. Last October, Ingrassia’s nomination to the Office of the Special Counsel was withdrawn, but he was later assigned to the General Services Administration, where he now serves as acting general counsel.

Less than a week before their arrests, the Tate brothers reportedly attended a party in Washington, D.C. hosted by Paolo Zampolli, a State Department official who serves as special envoy of the president of the United States of America for Global Partnerships.

Zampolli appeared as a guest on Andrew Tate’s podcast, where he called him a “true patriot,” in May. Tate reciprocated by praising Zampolli’s business acumen.

A former modeling agent, Zampolli is known for having introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump. Zampolli frequently crossed paths with the late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in the early 2000s, and one of the models employed by Zampolli went on to work for Epstein as an assistant, while another alleged that Epstein sexually assaulted her.

Trump's primetime claims already shot down — by his own CIA chief's investigation

When President Donald Trump gives a televised address Thursday night in which he is expected to claim that the Chinese government interfered in the 2020 election, CIA Director John Ratcliffe is expected to be standing at his side.

Details of the speech teased to major news outlets include some variation on shopworn claims that election deniers have long promoted about supposed manipulation of voting machines and foreign meddling, with CBS News citing unnamed “sources familiar with the matter” as saying the speech will “touch on previously unreported alleged Chinese meddling in U.S. elections,” including that “Beijing compromised U.S. voter data.”

These extraordinary claims lay at the heart of a feverish effort by Trump’s allies to overturn the 2020 election, and addressing such findings would have fallen directly under the responsibility of Ratcliffe, who was then serving as director of national intelligence.

Under Presidential Executive Order 13848, which was issued by Trump in 2018, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is required “to provide an assessment on foreign election influence and interference within 45 days of federal elections.” The deadline for the assessment of the 2020 election was set for Dec. 18, 2020, but an agency spokesperson announced two days in advance that Ratcliffe had been “notified by career intelligence officials” that the intelligence community would not meet the deadline because intelligence agencies had “not finished coordinating on the product.”

The CIA declined to comment in response to questions from Raw Story about why Ratcliffe was unable to meet the deadline for the assessment on foreign election interference, what if anything he may have known about the matter, whether he reported any information directly to Trump, or whether Trump sought his opinion at the time.

While Ratcliffe remained an obscure player in the tumultuous saga unfolding at the White House in the weeks leading up to Congress’ Jan. 6, 2021 certification of the election, a trio of outside allies led by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, made a surprise visit to the White House on Dec. 18. The delegation, which also included lawyer Sidney Powell and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, was specifically focused on the provisions of Executive Order 13848, and the assessment on foreign election interference on which the agency that was led by Ratcliffe was conspicuously silent.

The three visitors presented Trump with a draft memo that called on the government to seize voting machines in states narrowly won by President-elect Joe Biden.

“I drafted the foreign interference findings if I remember correctly, or at least had a hand in writing those, to support the use of Executive Order 13848 on cyber security to secure the voting machines hopefully in three to five cities where the voting irregularities were the worst,” Powell said in her deposition before the now-defunct House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The meeting devolved into shouting, with Trump’s White House lawyers pushing back on the plan proposed by Powell, Flynn and Byrne. Ultimately, Trump did not carry out the proposed plan to seize voting machines. Instead, he sent out a tweet in the early morning hours of Dec. 19 calling on his supporters to assemble at the Ellipse on the day Congress was set to meet to certify the election.

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump wrote. “Be there, will be wild!”

The assessment on foreign interference eventually came out on March 15, 2021, and it did not confirm what Trump’s allies hoped — or what the president is expected to say tonight.

Instead, the assessment said: “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election.”

The report went on to say that intelligence analysts assessed that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.” The report included a “minority view” reflecting that a national intelligence officer for cyber concluded that China “took at least some steps to undermine President Trump’s reelection chances,” primarily through social media and official public statements.

Ratcliffe did weigh in on the question of Chinese meddling in the 2020 election, but not until Jan. 7, 2021. Ratcliffe issued a memo one day after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, and then Congress reconvened in the evening to certify Biden as the winner of the election. By then, it was too late to lend credence to Trump’s outlandish claims that the election was stolen, or change the outcome.

Ratcliffe raised questions in his memo entitled “Views on Intelligence Community Election Security Analysis,” by citing a report by the Intelligence Community’s Analytic Ombudsman. The ombudsman report found that “China analysts were hesitant to assess China’s actions as undue influence or interference. These analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.”

Notably, Ratcliffe’s memo did not express disagreement with the assessment’s core finding that China did not interfere in the election. Ratcliffe only differed with the consensus view in his assessment that China sought to influence the 2020 election while others concluded that China had no preference between Trump and Biden.

After Trump won the 2024 election, he appointed Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director.

The claims that Trump is expected to make tonight about Chinese meddling in the 2020 election have been at the heart of election deniers’ arguments all along. Two weeks after the election, Powell claimed during a press conference with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that she and others had uncovered “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” while describing an “algorithm” that purportedly switched votes from Trump to Biden.

Fox News eventually agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems almost $800 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over airing claims made by Powell and Giuliani during appearances on the network that the voting machines switched votes.

Trump’s allies continued to push the claim that China interfered in the election through manipulation of the voting machines after the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting at the White House. Denver Riggleman, who served as the senior technical advisor for the Jan. 6 Committee, has described EO 13848, which was supposed to have triggered an assessment on foreign interference, as the “operational planning document” for the effort to overturn the election.

Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel whom Riggleman identified as the source of the theory promoted by Powell and Giuliani, submitted a document to Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff called “National Asset tasking request to support EO 13848,” according to Riggleman.

A PowerPoint circulated by Waldron before Jan. 6, 2021 called “Options for 6 JAN” featured the claim about Chinese interference front and center in its “talking points.”

“The Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency,” the document reads. “The electronic voting machines were compromised and cannot be trusted to provide an accurate count.”

In contrast, the memo issued by Ratcliffe around the same time only went so far as to claim that China sought to influence the outcome of the election. Ratcliffe qualified his assessment by accurately describing himself in his role as director of national intelligence “as the individual who consumes all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence on the People’s Republic of China.”

Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight, a Georgia-based nonprofit advocating for free and fair elections, said the American people “can expect a truckload of lies” from Trump,” adding that it’s critical for the news media to avoid legitimizing them by repeating them without independent verification.

“Trump has thrown everything at the wall to influence the next election — two executive orders blocked in court, the SAVE Act rejected repeatedly even by a Republican-controlled Congress, calls on GOP states to rig their maps — and none of it has given his party a safe enough cushion against the will of the people,” Groh-Wargo said.

“Now he is desperate, and he is about to use lies as the pretext for an extraordinary abuse of power to try and change how Americans vote. He’s scared of the American people having the freedom to use their power to hold him accountable — we will make our choice at the ballot box, and he will fail.”

The most elaborate Trump assassination plot yet bucked his own script

The White House released its long-delayed counterterrorism strategy in May, identifying “violent left-wing extremists” as a major terror threat, following a directive from President Donald Trump last September ordering the FBI to investigate antifascists based on a wildly varied set of characteristics that include “extremism on migration, race, and gender.”

Then, as Trump was preparing to celebrate his 80th and the country’s 250th birthdays with an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn last month, local law enforcement in Ohio uncovered an extraordinary plot by a national network to carry out a drone attack, with snipers positioned on rooftops to kill “high-value targets" including the president, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk.

The wide array of grievances and political beliefs of the defendants who spent weeks training with rifles and coordinating efforts to acquire drones are an awkward fit for the counterterrorism strategy authored by White House aide Sebastian Gorka, and a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM-7, issued by Trump in the weeks after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

One of the UFC terror plotters, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, who told his mother he was mapping locations in Washington, D.C. for “hit and run missions,” had recently “made sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler” on Facebook, according to the government’s criminal complaint.

The counterterrorism strategy doesn’t even mention white supremacist violence — or “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism,” in the federal government’s preferred nomenclature. In contrast, the Biden administration made confronting white supremacist terrorism a top priority.

“The UFC plot clashes with the administration’s decision to downplay far-right extremism,” Jacob Ware, co-author of God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, told Raw Story. “That’s a political choice that I don’t think is being followed by the rank-and-file FBI agents who stopped this terror attack.”

Another defendant, a 32-year-old California man named Michael Alan Thomas, expressed views that appear to be a twist on the QAnon conspiracy theory, which originally positioned Trump as a hero maneuvering to vanquish a shadowy cabal of global elites perpetrating horrendous crimes against children.

According to his charging document, Thomas told FBI agents “that he believes that the U.S. government is run by an elite group of individuals who sacrifice and consume infants who also were deeply involved with Jeffrey Epstein and are now protected by President Donald Trump.”

That grievance doesn’t appear anywhere in NSPM-7, which instead singles out antifascists for harboring “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”

Rather than respond to questions from Raw Story about whether the Trump administration should reassess its prioritization of terror threats, the White House referred questions to the FBI.

To be sure, some of the grievances and ideologies expressed by individuals tied to the alleged terror plot do align with the criteria in NSPM-7. A TikTok account for William Lee Falkner, one of the defendants, includes a bio stating, “F--- ICE,” which is in line with NSPM-7’s focus on threats against federal immigration enforcement officers. Another man who is not accused of direct involvement in the terror plot but is alleged to have communicated online with one of the defendants identified himself as “antifa” in his TikTok bio.

But the most recurrent themes uniting the defendants and others ensnared in the FBI investigation of the UFC terror plot is a concern about the Epstein files and a belief that political elites are protecting pedophiles, coupled with anger about Israel’s perceived influence over U.S. foreign policy.

“The key tenets of this plot are anti-elite, anti-government, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel,” Ware said. “Those are not new, and they belong to a true American far-right, anti-government extremist movement that goes back decades in our country, and is probably the deadliest domestic terrorism movement in American history.”

Eight men were indicted last week on charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the alleged plot. In contrast to recent indictments against 15 anti-ICE activists in Minnesota, the government hasn't designated the UFC prosecutions as an NSPM-7 case.

The case has flummoxed extremism researchers, who note how quickly the alleged plotters from five states across the country coordinated online and put in motion a credible plan to attack the seat of U.S. government.

Beyond those accused of direct involvement in the terror plot, federal investigators have pursued leads based on contacts found in the defendants’ phones, prompting a widening investigation into a larger universe of people with a host of grievances against the government.

The plot first came to light when police officers and sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home of Tycen Proper in rural Knox County outside of Columbus, Ohio, in response to a “disturbance” call four days before the June 14 UFC Freedom 250 event.

Proper’s father told the police that his 19-year-old son had quit his job and spent all his graduation money on a rifle, ballistic plates, ammunition and camping gear. His mother told investigators that Proper “had recently begun interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based.” Talking to his online friends, his mother said, had “caused Proper to lean heavily into his religion, and she believed that those individuals were using religion to influence her son.”

Sheriff’s deputies transported Proper to a mental health facility, where they got him admitted through an emergency application based on his homicidal ideations, according to court records. The following day, during an interview with the FBI, Proper told investigators that he reported to “Fulcrum,” whom the FBI later identified as Daniel Eskridge, a 32-year-old man from rural northwest Missouri.

Eskridge suggested in a group chat with Proper and others in late May that the plotters should select targets that “can’t easily be turned into a right vs. left thing.” The criminal complaint against Eskridge states that he suggested a business leader as “a very good target” because “he fits the bill for someone both sides would cheer and support us for taking out.”

The name Eskridge suggested is redacted from the complaint, but the superseding indictment unsealed last week identifies Elon Musk, the trillionaire owner of SpaceX, as one of the targets of the attack.

Proper identified Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Jim Justice (R-WV), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Reps. Carol Miller (R-WV) and Riley Moore (R-WV) as targets, based on their support for Israel, according to court filings.

Despite portraying itself as anti-establishment outsiders, the MAGA movement has essentially become the establishment, and anti-government extremists recognize Trump and his allies as such, Ware said. For decades, anti-government extremists have expressed hostility towards Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

“This is a reversion to the mean, where far-right extremists include Republicans in their crosshairs,” Ware said.

Court documents reveal Eskridge using language that wouldn’t have sounded out of place among the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Trump’s behalf five years ago.

“Our goal is to in a general sense ‘restore the old republic,’” he said. “Our constitutional republic has been stolen by corporations, politicians and foreign actors.”

Eskridge wrote that he was “tired of being ruled over by treasonous pedophilic criminal politicians and foreign agents.”

In another post, Eskridge predicted that the UFC attack would be “the first battle of the second American Revolution.”

When investigators accessed Proper’s phone, they also discovered a user with the nickname “Shepherd,” who they later identified as Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, 31, of Omaha, Neb. Court records detail extensive posts by Alvarez in a “Hunters” Signal chat that appear to provide instructions for the planned UFC attack. The FBI has reportedly determined that Alvarez was responsible for planning, organizing and directing the thwarted attack.

Describing Alvarez as the “alleged ringleader,” a Department of Homeland Security press release highlights the fact that Alvarez came to the United States as a child with his parents and was accorded temporary legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program during the Obama administration.

Court documents don’t shed much light on Alvarez’s political beliefs, but they reference a TikTok account that he posted in an online chat with the other alleged plotters. Investigators determined the TikTok account was registered to a woman who shares the same residence with Alvarez.

As a possible indication of Alvarez’s political beliefs, videos posted on the account promote Landback, a global movement calling for the return of ancestral lands to indigenous stewardship. The videos also highlight environmentalist themes and include depictions of Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman and John Brown, the insurrectionary abolitionist — both heroes of the left.

A man who identified himself as a friend of Alvarez’s since high school told Raw Story that he “is not mentally well and should have never been a part of what happened.” The friend declined to comment further out concern that anything he said would aggravate Alvarez’s legal challenges.

Proper’s mother told the FBI, according to court filings, that the group “expressed ultra-religious and anti-government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions.”

A concern about data centers also surfaced in court filings related to the arrest of a 20-year-old Chicago man, Alexander Mercado, who is alleged to have been an administrator of Signal groups that included some of the plotters involved in the planned UFC attack. After an FBI agent attempted to question Mercado, the government alleges he uninstalled the Signal application on his phone, leading to his arrest for obstruction of justice.

In support of its successful motion to hold him in detention to protect community safety, the government submitted a message in which Mercado allegedly mentioned the planned UFC attack on Signal, adding, “I got word several other factions are attempting to strike, breach, and rescue operations on [ICE] camps and data centers.” (The message included an ice-cube emoji.)

The ideological span of the individuals linked to the plot and their range of targets should be cause for government officials and independent researchers to reassess threat prioritization, Matthew Ivanovich, a senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Raw Story.

“Seeing such a decentralized group that crosses ideological boundaries, I do think it drives that there is a need to be thinking about the grievance-based side of things, like data centers and AI in general,” he said. “We need to be thinking more about grievance-based motivators to violence, and less about ideology.”

The FBI’s access to the UFC terror plotters’ electronic devices has prompted agents to cast suspicion on an array of people who communicated with them online, leading to at least one other arrest only tangentially related to the thwarted attack.

The government alleges that Trevon McDaniel, 19, of Elk Grove, Calif., exchanged TikTok messages with Alvarez, the alleged UFC attack ringleader.

“We need to gather as many heroes before the 22,” Alvarez allegedly told McDaniel, who posted videos of himself dressed in a superhero costume on TikTok under the name “Wolf-Spider.”

In another conversation cited by the government, Alvarez told McDaniel: “July is the month.”

“Fourth of July,” McDaniel replied. “Use subliminal messaging so people understand what you mean, but basically fireworks it’s a good distraction and good use for ICE and cops.”

The government does not allege that McDaniel had any involvement in the UFC terror plot, but he was charged with “threats concerning an attempt to damage or destroy” the John Moss Federal Building in Sacramento “by means of fire or an explosive.”

The criminal complaint cites a June 22 TikTok video posted by McDaniel in which he says, “You know, Fourth of July is coming up, guys. Make sure you hold on to all your fireworks…. It’d be a shame if fireworks were going off near generators so certain federal buildings were losing their, uh, power.”

Olaf Hedberg, McDaniel’s lawyer, declined to comment.

Shortly after the first wave of arrests in the UFC terror plot, FBI agents attempted to question a TikTok user in north Texas about the planned attack, according to a recent story in the Intercept. The TikTok user, who goes by the moniker Doberman and identifies as an “armed leftist” and “Antifa,” reportedly told the agents she didn’t know anything about the plot.

Two weeks later, the FBI returned with a search warrant and breached Doberman’s front door with a flash-bang, pointed rifles at her, and led her to a police cruiser in handcuffs. The agents seized her cell phone. When the agents returned her phone, she said they offered her hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a confidential informant.

Doberman told the Intercept she has no interest in helping the government. In a new TikTok video last month, she posted screenshots of the search warrant, writing: “Yes, I was raided. No, I won’t quit.”

Bannon hints Trump will smear Dems as 'jihadists and foreigners' in bizarre TV address

Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist and intellectual avatar of the MAGA movement, offered a potential preview of the declassified intelligence reports purportedly showing foreign interference in elections that President Donald Trump is expected to discuss during his speech on Thursday.

Discussing an effort by John Solomon, a conservative journalist appointed to a White House task force attempting to uncover evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, Bannon predicted during his “War Room” podcast on Monday that there would be “revelations that get to the heart of the administrative state and the Deep State.”

Bannon went on to claim, without evidence, that Democratic Socialist-based congressional candidates who won primaries in New York and Colorado are tied to the Chinese Communist Party. He also absurdly compared left-leaning metropolitan regions, which he said “are controlled by Marxist jihadists and foreigners,” to John C. Calhoun, the antebellum senator whose nullification theory provided the intellectual foundation for the Confederacy and helped pave the way for the Civil War.

“You now have the nullification project in these cities with the John C. Calhouns of the DSA and the Working Families Party, and others, and their dark-money, offshore sponsors — people writing checks that are all Marxist, and some of them directly tied to the Chinese Communist Party,” Bannon said.

Bannon condemned a “corrupt Deep State” for alleged actions “to steal elections” and “to assist foreign entities” in purportedly meddling in U.S. elections. And while insisting that Democratic Socialist-backed congressional candidates shouldn’t be seated, Bannon acknowledged they are all but certain to win in their deep-blue districts, undercutting his innuendo that their elections will be marred by fraud.

Multiple lawsuits, along with state and federal investigations, uncovered no evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election, in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump.

David Becker, a former Department of Justice voting rights attorney, told MSNOW that he doesn’t expect Trump to present evidence that would cause any serious reassessment when he speaks to the nation Thursday.

“I have no fear of anything being released,” he said. “We already know what happened in the 2020 election. That’s the most scrutinized election in world history. I do have a fear that the White House and the federal government have become perhaps the primary amplifier of disinformation that seeks to delegitimize American democracy in our election process.”

Bannon highlighted Solomon’s role as “special government employee for a couple hundred days heading up a task force to look into this,” while noting that acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte is overseeing the effort.

Trump is expected to be joined for his speech on Thursday by Pulte, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel.

The White House did not respond to questions from Raw Story about what evidence Trump might present to show foreign interference in elections.

Bannon addressed Blanche and Patel directly during his podcast, telling Blanche that if he wanted MAGA support for his Senate confirmation hearing, he had “better be on point on this.” To Patel, he said: “Here’s what we care about: Breaking the back of the government gangsters, breaking the back of the Deep State, perp-walking these people.

“We have to hit ’em — and hit ’em now,” Bannon added. “Expose them, but then take action to drive them out of our government and then to prosecute them. And then to either imprison or throw them out of the country. Let me repeat that: Either imprison them or throw them out of the country.”

Bannon also reprised a call for the Trump administration to deploy federal immigration enforcement agents at polling places during the midterm elections.

“We are not going to allow elections to be stolen, including this election in the midterms,” he said. “And that may require ICE agents showing up at the polling booth to make sure illegal aliens and other aliens can’t vote in American elections.”

Jessica Marsden, counsel and director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, said she fears that “Mullin could have Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conduct raids in heavily Democratic areas of Texas, Georgia or other swing states… which could drive down turnout by naturalized American citizens who fear arrest,” according to the MSNOW report.

The White House did not respond to an email seeking clarification on whether the administration intends to deploy federal immigration agents at polling places.

Trump is trying to imprison Americans for joining internet chats he doesn't like

The 94-page indictment unsealed against 15 anti-ICE activists in Minnesota last month as part of the Trump administration’s latest “antifa” prosecution includes page after page of accusations that defendants attended meetings or joined Signal groups.

Among the 15 people accused of participating in a criminal conspiracy to impede immigration enforcement operations during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis earlier this year, the allegations against at least two defendants — Erik Davis and Brian Stillwell Apland — largely amount to attending meetings and participating in Signal group chats.

Another defendant, Treasure Thoreson, is accused of carrying a homemade shield to block traffic during a protest near the Whipple Building, a federal ICE facility, in January. The indictment also accuses her of using her Subaru to tow a trailer to and from the federal building. There’s no mention of the trailer being used for a so-called “hard blockade” the government alleges was used to forcibly obstruct federal immigration enforcement operations.

The indictment outlines Thoreson, a special education teacher, and other defendants’ alleged involvement in a second blockade at the Whipple Building, including 22 specific references to her allegedly moderating a meeting; coordinating on Signal to organize volunteer marshals; and then on the day of the March 1 protest handing out radios, carrying a bullhorn, and getting detained by local sheriff’s deputies. The Hennepin County District Attorney dismissed Thoreson’s charge of disorderly conduct three weeks later.

“These charges are brought months after the federal forces were forced to retreat by the people of Minnesota,” Bruce Nestor, Thoreson’s lawyer, told Raw Story. “They rely heavily on Signal chats that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Minnesotans took part in to coordinate the monitoring and observation of ICE.

“It’s very much a crackdown on the right to dissent and the right of citizens to oppose their government’s policies,” he added. “It occurs in the context of the administration being defeated in Minnesota, and retaliating months later by going after this group of defendants.”

A motion filed last week by Nestor seeking to modify Thoreson’s bond conditions argues that the “last alleged act of actual ‘impeding’” was the street blockade on March 1. The remaining 64 “overt acts” in the alleged conspiracy “consist of public observation of law enforcement officials… speaking tours, and statements of political opinion,” the motion said.

Xavier T. de Janon, the National Lawyers Guild’s director of mass defense, told Raw Story that even “blockades” aren’t typically the focus of federal prosecutions.

“In terms of blockades, there is a long history of that in this country that have enjoyed protection, and have been celebrated,” he said. “It wasn’t called ‘blockades’; it was called ‘civil disobedience’ or ‘conscientious objection.’ The act is the same as walking across a bridge during the Civil Rights Movement.”

The indictment describes more than a dozen categories of activity to argue that the defendants engaged in a criminal conspiracy to impede ICE operations. Beyond blockading the Whipple Building, the government alleges the conspiracy included coordinating rapid response networks and using “commuting” tactics — commonly known as “ICE verifying” — to hamper immigration enforcement, as well as advocating direct action.

Federal prosecutors openly acknowledge that the prosecution is a response to National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, a White House directive calling on federal agencies to target antifascists as a domestic terrorist threat based on “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” and other seemingly arbitrary beliefs.

De Janon told Raw Story he believes the federal government is utilizing a formula to crack down on dissent through an “antifa scare” by building a criminal conspiracy case around Signal communications.

“The majority of the indictment is Signal chat statements,” de Janon said. “The concern is based on how reality works in protest cultures: People join Signal chats, leave them, delete them.

“That is antagonistic to the First Amendment, because this is freedom of association at its purest form,” he said. “After you associate and assemble, you have speech. Once you gather, this government thinks you’re committing a crime.”

Thoreson and her co-defendants argue that the prosecution is politically motivated.

“This is not a normal criminal trial,” defendant Isaac Sant, a healthcare worker, told the outlet Unicorn Riot. “This is a political case. This is political repression against organizers. And this is a case that’s going to be won in the political realm.”

Thoreson’s motion accuses the government of engaging in viewpoint discrimination through the prosecutions, while citing NSPM-7.

The conspiracy count in the indictment includes no allegation that a federal officer was injured as a result of the defendants’ actions, Thoreson’s motion notes. It’s ironic that she’s being prosecuted “by an administration that has pardoned convicted criminals” involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the motion argues, adding that many of them “actually injured and impeded federal officers, but had the good fortune to share the political views of the administration.”

“The President’s memorandum is focused on investigating, disrupting, dismantling, and prosecuting individuals and entities engaged in organized political violence and domestic terrorism — specifically the sophisticated and organized campaigns that necessitate a new law enforcement strategy," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Raw Story.

"Left-wing organizations have fueled violent riots, organized attacks against law enforcement officers, coordinated illegal doxing campaigns, arranged drop points for weapons and riot materials, and more," she added. "The Trump administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities, and the president’s executive actions to address left-wing violence will put an end to any illegal activities.”

The defendants' "actions created a dangerous environment that threatened not only their intended targets, but the community as a whole,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said last month. “These arrests demonstrate the department’s commitment to law and order and stopping organized political violence in Minneapolis and beyond.”

The indictment accuses the defendants of working with “rapid response networks to identify and harass federal immigration and law enforcement officers… to prevent officers from performing their official duties.” The indictment describes a sophisticated by a network of volunteers coordinating to identify federal law enforcement vehicles, log the information into a database, and then utilize “dispatchers” to relay “verified” information to “commuters,” who respond to locations where federal officers are attempting to arrest immigrants.

“Monitoring law enforcement is and should be legal,” de Janon said. “That’s what ICE verifiers do — they monitor law enforcement. I think this is attempting to criminalize and scare people from engaging in this advocacy that is popular.”

The case “is about quelling dissent in Minneapolis,” Sant said. “And it’s about coming after the movement that rose up against ICE during Metro Surge in December and January. If the things that I’m accused of doing are part of a criminal conspiracy, then 350,000 people who participated in the resistance here would also have to be part of that conspiracy.

“This is a naked attempt to silence our voices, to squash dissent, and to have a chilling effect on organizing here in the Twin Cities,” Sant said. “And I’m here to tell you it’s not going to work.”

The indictment cites a statement allegedly made by one of the defendants at an “Anarchist Speaking Tour” event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to characterize rapid response networks as “inherently militant.”

“That is so fictional, because across the country ICE verifiers who are part of rapid response networks are teachers, retirees and clergy,” de Janon said. “The most harmless people in society are doing ICE verifying. But this indictment calls them ‘militant.’ That is the narrative the government wants to create.”

'The irony': Trump social media guru whines as 'hysterical' influencers turn on president

The online “troll” credited with manufacturing support for Donald Trump is upset that the right-wing discourse on social media surrounding the agreement to end the war in Iran appears to be manufactured — and not by him.

Alex Bruesewitz, a 29-year-old social media strategist who now works for one of the president’s political action committees, went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in late June to try to mend fences with the breakaway MAGA faction angered by the war with Iran — while suggesting that critics of the plan to end the war are part of “coordinated influence campaigns.”

“I believe there definitely is a coordinated effort to put pressure on the president and the administration to continue the conflict in Iran,” Bruesewitz told Carlson. “And I believe there is even potentially foreign influence involved.”

Bruesewitz also used Carlson’s platform and an appearance the same day on a podcast hosted by David Freiheit to defend the administration’s disastrous handling of the release of files related to the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. As with criticism of the plan to wind down the war with Iran, Bruesewitz suggested that right-wing anger directed at the administration over the Epstein files has been manipulated in some way.

“I think giving control of the government process to a handful of hysterics on social media is bad,” Bruesewitz told Carlson. “I think it was bad for Epstein — with the Epstein files. I think it’s bad right now for all of the hawks who are continuing to press the administration to continue the war.”

Bruesewitz lamented to Frei that there are “a lot of low-IQ, hysterical takes on social media that pollute discourse,” while complaining to Carlson that “there’s a lot of money from special interest groups, from foreign countries that have poured into [the] internet ecosystem, and I don’t think it’s been healthy for our democracy, for our country.”

Left unsaid on either podcast was that Bruesewitz’s firm, X Strategies, receives $25,000 a month from Never Surrender, a political action committee affiliated with the president, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Neither of the right-wing podcasters highlighted the fact that Bruesewitz has a history of running the same kind of coordinated influence campaigns that he now appears to be decrying.

As Trump’s social media advisor during the 2024 campaign, Bruesewitz reportedly encouraged JD Vance, then the vice presidential running mate, to promote the baseless and racist claim that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets. Bruesewitz told Freiheit last week that he got involved in political consulting as a conservative kid in Wisconsin “through trolling.”

“Eleven years later I’m still trolling in some capacity,” he added.

Shortly after Vance pushed the claim about Haitians eating pets on X, Trump infamously jumped on the racist conspiracy theory.

“They’re eating the dogs; the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said during his debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in Philadelphia on Sept. 10, 2024.

Bruesewitz had a “war room” of influencers at the ready to amplify Trump’s messaging during the debate, as previously reported by Raw Story.

Before the debate had even started, Chaya Raichik — owner of the Libs of TikTok account and one of the influencers assembled by Bruesewitz — posted a link to a story purporting to substantiate the claim by citing a call to police reporting about Haitian migrants carrying geese. The post, which was viewed 3 million times, concluded: “The media has been telling us this is all a lie.”

During a campaign rally in Pennsylvania later that month, Trump told supporters “you have to get them the hell out,” and soon pledged to rescind temporary protected status for Haitian migrants.

Last summer, the Trump Department of Homeland Security announced it was ending temporary protected status for roughly 520,000 Haitians living in the United States. And in late June — one day before Bruesewitz appeared on Carlson’s show to complain about “a handful of hysterics” exercising control over government — the Supreme Court issued a ruling upholding the Trump administration’s authority to deport Haitians.

Bruesewitz is also credited with arranging for Trump to appear on a slate of podcasts during the final month of the 2024 campaign, helping the president boost his performance with young, male voters.

Bruesewitz’s apparent effort on Trump’s behalf to mend fences with Carlson suggests the president and his allies recognize they’ve lost control over the discourse on right-wing social media, and are seeking to reassert influence.

Bruesewitz explained to Freiheit that he decided to intervene in the MAGA schism over the Iran war because he’s seeing it tear Trump’s political coalition apart.

“And I’ve watched it splinter this once unbeatable juggernaut,” Bruesewitz said. “We used to have this unified movement on social media that was used to focus on the real mission at hand that was saving our country from the communists and the radical left lunatics that want to destroy it.”

Bruesewitz’s appearance on Carlson’s show came only days after the popular conservative commentator announced he will not support the Republican Party, as it fights to maintain control of Congress during the upcoming midterm elections. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former congresswoman who hired Bruesewitz to work on her 2020 campaign, followed Carlson’s lead.

Bruesewitz and Carlson did not discuss Carlson's withdrawal of support for the GOP, but Bruesewitz told Carlson he was “slightly disappointed with Marjorie’s recent pivot.”

To Freiheit, Bruesewitz swatted away concerns that the defections could hurt Republican candidates during the midterms.

“At the end of the day you’re either going to ride with Trump and us for the next two years, or you’re going to let the radical left lunatics take back control,” he said.

Vance has also attempted to mend fences with MAGA’s non-interventionist wing through an appearance last month on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” while counter-signaling Israeli officials following the announcement the U.S. had reached an agreement with Iran to end the war.

Bruesewitz could not be reached for comment for this story, but he told Freiheit: “I’m supporting the Trump administration. JD Vance is the president’s vice president, and he is promoting the president’s [memorandum of understanding]. Period. Full stop. So, I am supporting the president’s MOU.”

The White House did not provide an on-the-record response to Raw Story’s questions about Bruesewitz’s media tour, and emails to Never Surrender, the Trump political action committee that is paying Bruesewitz’s firm, went unreturned.

During his appearances on Carlson and Freiheit’s podcasts, Bruesewitz singled out a pro-Israel influencer named Eyal Yakoby, who campaigned for Trump during the 2024 election, while suggesting Yakoby is part of a broader influence operation.

“Many of those same accounts who have spent the last many months criticizing Tucker and Megyn all turn against the vice president and the president’s MOU almost in a coordinated effort,” Bruesewitz told Freiheit. “So, of course that raises some suspicion.”

Eyal Yakoby, now a pro-Israel influencer, speaks in support of Donald Trump at the Republican Jewish Coalition Leadership Summit in Las Vegas in 2024- YouTube www.youtube.com

Bruesewitz said Yakoby has made about 1,200 posts that are critical of Carlson.

“He’s certainly been paid for some of his tweets,” Bruesewitz told Carlson, adding that he didn’t have evidence that Yakoby has been paid specifically for posts that criticize Carlson or the memorandum of understanding to end the war with Iran.

To Freiheit, Bruesewitz asked whether it was Yakoby’s “full-time job” to post about Carlson.

Yakoby acknowledged to Raw Story that he has received payments from marketing agencies, which he declined to identify, for some of his social media posts. But he said he hasn’t received compensation from any entity for posts criticizing Carlson or raising questions about the MOU.

“Every single thing that Alex has accused me and others of, he is literally guilty of,” Yakoby told Raw Story. “That’s the irony of it.”

During his appearance on Carlson’s show, Bruesewitz repeatedly alleged that “foreign influence” is behind online posts pressuring Trump to prolong the war with Iran, while citing information previously reported by the Intercept that Trump’s former campaign manager has been paid by the Israeli government to push pro-Israel views through conservative media. But Bruesewitz acknowledged to Carlson that he has no evidence that Yakoby is involved in that campaign.

“I think what’s funny about the whole thing is he says very carefully that he doesn’t know if I’m receiving money from a foreign entity,” Yakoby told Raw Story. “I’ve told him directly three times that I’ve never received money from any government, domestic or foreign. That’s why he’s a coward when he asks that question: He doesn’t want to get sued for defamation.”

Knives out as scandal-scarred Republicans pile into one Florida race: 'You went to prison'

Despite a colorful slate of contenders that includes candidates who have served federal prison sentences, previously left Congress under clouds of scandal, or tried and failed to run for Congress elsewhere, the contest to replace Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida’s 19th Congressional District has so far remained relatively quiet.

The potent combination of wealth and conservatism makes southwest Florida an attractive spawning ground for Republican candidates aspiring to national, or at least statewide, prominence.

Donalds’ victory in the 2020 congressional race propelled him onto the national stage, where his track record as a loyal MAGA soldier briefly put him in contention as President Donald Trump’s running mate during the 2024 election. Now, with Donalds running for governor, 11 candidates are scrambling to fill his open seat.

Matt Gaetz, a former House member who himself was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sex trafficking when he left Congress, introduced one of the candidates during his show on One America News Network earlier this year with a telling quip.

“They say if you want to be rich, go to New York. If you want to be famous, go to LA. If you want to be powerful, go to Washington, D.C,” Gaetz said. “And if you want to be someone else, go to Florida.”

The 19th district, near the southern end of the Gulf Coast, is an attractive target for candidates who have their sights set beyond Congress, pollster Ben Galbraith told Raw Story.

“Just as aspiring entrepreneurs go to Silicon Valley to raise funds for their companies, aspiring political figures go to Naples to raise funds for their campaigns,” he said. “That’s the real superpower of FL-19 — it’s fundraising potential. Of course, that can be extremely useful when running for higher office.”

The leading candidate in the race, according to a polling report authored by Galbraith for Victory Insights, is Jim Schwartzel, a 50-year-old Florida native who owns a conservative talk-radio station and media company.

Schwartzel is trailed by Jim Oberweis, an 80-year-old former dairy owner who previously served in the Illinois state Senate.

The poll found that 12.8 percent of voters said they would vote for Schwartzel, who has loaned $1 million to his campaign, followed by 11.9 percent for Oberweis, who has put up $4 million of his own money for his run.

No other candidate broke double digits, and 53.8 percent said they remain undecided less than two months out from the Aug. 18 primary.

“This race is wide open,” the report concluded.

Galbraith said the 2020 Republican primary won by Donalds is likely the best guide for how this year’s race will unfold.

“Several candidates had big money, but ultimately, Donalds won by making the most compelling appeal to voters,” he said. “The concept of a self-funder walking into FL-19 and buying it with a couple million dollars is a thing of the past.”

Some of the candidates have tried, with limited success, to boost their name recognition by attacking rivals.

Catalina Lauf, a former advisor in the U.S. Commerce Department during the first Trump administration, took to social media on Wednesday to react to the primary victories by socialist candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, warning that “the threat of communism has infiltrated every aspect of our culture and politics.”

Lauf went on to lament that in her own race “there are two people who have spent time in jail,” adding that “the Republican Party needs to get out of its way.”

Lauf’s takedown was aimed at John Strand, a former “international underwear model” and anti-vaccine activist who was convicted of obstruction and other offenses for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Chris Collins, a former congressman from New York who was convicted of insider trading and lying to the FBI. Both men received full pardons from Trump.

Collins, in turn, has unleashed a broadside against Lauf and a host of other rivals by highlighting their losses in past congressional runs elsewhere in the country.

Lauf unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the Chicago suburbs in 2020 and 2022.

Oberweis defeated Lauf in a Republican primary in 2020, but lost in the general election. He previously lost a 2014 challenge to Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin.

Madison Cawthorn served one term in Congress representing a district in North Carolina before losing his 2022 primary to a Republican challenger. His scandal-plagued term included the revelation that he lied about getting accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, accusations of sexual harassment, and citations for carrying loaded guns through airports.

Cawthorn was also investigated by the House Ethics Committee for insider trading on cryptocurrency, resulting in a finding that he violated the chamber’s code of conduct and an order to pay $14,237 to charity. Since leaving Congress and relocating to Florida, Cawthorn has rear-ended a state trooper in a traffic accident, and last year, he was jailed for failing to appear on a driving while license suspended or revoked charge.

Ola Hawatmeh, a former congressional aide, unsuccessfully ran for a U.S. House seat from New York in 2020.

“So, you think about these people,” Collins told a Florida news site earlier this month. “I know how to win. I win. They know how to lose. Catalina Lauf — she’s lost twice. Ola’s lost once or twice. Oberweis has lost so many times they call him Milk Dud. Madison Cawthorn couldn’t win his own primary.”

“Chris, you went to federal prison,” Lauf responded. “I’m not sure how much lower the bar for ‘loser’ can possibly get.”

Lauf has also claimed, with corroboration from a Florida conservative news outlet, that Collins dozed off and then fell out of his chair during a Republican luncheon in Naples last month.

Lauf chastised the Florida GOP for excluding Mike Pedersen, a retired Marine Corps flight officer and former youth boxing coach, in a debate scheduled for Saturday. Pedersen should have been invited “instead of liars & criminals like [Madison Cawthorn] and Chris Collins,” Lauf said. “Both should be disqualified from even running for office due to all the dirt on them. Florida GOP, our Founders are rolling in their graves, and both ‘candidates’ are embarrassing Florida.”

Sean Tyler Ewing, an assistant professor of political science at Florida Gulf Coast University, said the scandals might not hurt Collins and Cawthorn that much in the Republican primary.

“It’s not that voters want a candidate with scandals, but in this polarized political environment, scandals can be turned by candidates into ‘the left is targeting me, and you should support me,’” he said. “There’s research that indicates candidates don’t pay a penalty for scandals like they used to, say 30 years ago.”

Cawthorn, an unabashed imperialist who favors conquering other nations and extracting their resources, has leveraged engagement with influencers and podcasters to get his name out.

Last month, Cawthorn sat for an interview with Andrew Tate, who has been the target of criminal investigations for rape and sex trafficking in three countries.

“My message is we need a moral, masculine class in this country of young men who are willing to hone their mind and hone their ability for violence, and also have a moral just cause where they say, ‘Hey, I reject evil,’” Cawthorn said, as Tate murmured in agreement.

“There are evil dragons and leviathans that need to be slain,” Cawthorn continued, elaborating on a theme of male grievance and conspiratorialism that he shares with Tate. “And it’s gonna get really dark. Because we’re in the death throes of the machine trying to hold on to power.

“And they tried to arrest you,” Cawthorn said, gesturing towards Tate. “They tried to arrest me. They tried to destroy our names. Because you try and get a good, positive message out.”

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