Up until this week, House representative and Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens’s campaign shared a mutual consultant with far right tech surveillance company Palantir, new reporting reveals, bringing renewed attention to Stevens’s record on ICE as she faces a contentious race against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim reported on Thursday that the consultant…
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already earned a reputation as the most scandal-plagued U.S. Senate candidate in recent memory, though the Republican’s troubles have managed to take a turn for the worse.
Just over the last couple of weeks, Paxton has been accused of using an address where he did not live while voting in recent elections and faced allegations that he and his estranged wife declared three separate homes as their primary residence in mortgage documents — a practice that his party has, in other situations, characterized as an outrageous abuse.
Complicating matters, property records now suggest the state attorney general, either in his personal capacity or through his trusts, now owns at least 15 properties worth roughly $9 million.
The good news is, Paxton finally held a press conference Tuesday — a “rare” occurrence for a politician who doesn’t seem to care for questions — offering journalists an opportunity to ask the Texan about his many controversies. The bad news is, Paxton didn’t want to answer any questions about his many controversies, and he then abruptly abandoned his own event when reporters treated him like a Senate candidate.
Wow — Ken Paxton and his team abruptly shut down a news conference and bail after journalists try to ask him about his various scandals— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-07-21T18:41:31.642Z
“General, I wanted to give you a chance to respond to [Democratic state Rep. James Talarico] and his campaign,” one reporter said. “They’ve made a lot about the reports that have come out, one in The New York Times about you acquiring properties worth—”
At that point, Paxton, surrounded by 22 local sheriffs who support his
For decades, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee operated as the quiet enforcer of a bipartisan consensus: Politicians of both parties supported Israel — AIPAC made sure of it — and the U.S.-Israel relationship was widely understood to be a non-issue in campaigns.
That arrangement publicly ruptured this week with a House floor vote that split Democrats, including their leadership, on whether to cut off military aid to Israel over its actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
The amendment was symbolic. Lawmakers in both chambers have rejected similar versions for years, and this one, like the others, was never going to pass.
But the numbers voting in favor of such measures have surged in tandem with the mounting Democratic primary wins by candidates who built their campaigns on opposing Israel’s war in Gaza, often over AIPAC-backed opponents.
In May, a record 40 Senate Democrats voted against further military aid to Israel, a roll call that would have been unthinkable two cycles ago. On Wednesday, 103 out of 211 Democrats voted similarly on the House amendment.
Some of those voting against the amendment to cut $3.3 billion in security aid to Israel, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said they had concerns about its scope and political ramifications but agreed with its message.
Some of those voting in favor of cutting off aid, including Democratic Whip Katherine Clark and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said they didn’t actually want it to pass but cast their votes to mark the need for a fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward Israel.
“For the good of the Israeli people and the Palestinian people, it is clear that U.S. policy must change,”
RAPID CITY, S.D. — On the night President Donald Trump walked into the East Room of the White House and once more undermined faith in elections, many of the people responsible for running those contests were standing at Mount Rushmore, waiting for four famous faces to light up against the dark.
Few offices in the Trump era have proved as consequential, or as politically exposed, as that of a state’s chief election official. And it was by chance that most of the nation’s secretaries of state were in South Dakota for a long-planned conference on the same day Trump spoke — trading notes on their work, then scrambling to navigate the latest turn from the man who has fundamentally remade it.
Faces of former presidents offered them a brief distraction in granite, after the current one threatened to upend their work all over again.
“There’s a disconnect between the White House’s obsession with old grievances and the real facts and reality on the ground among those who actually oversee elections,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state. “That’s the bottom line to me. There’s a real disconnect. It’s unfortunate. It’s ugly. It’s political.”
In a naked political sense, whatever Trump had said would be derided by Democrats and navigated with differing amounts of unease and acquiescence within Republican circles.
Election officials don’t have that luxury. Once the rhetoric comes down from on high, they are the ones left trying to convince voters that their ballots still count — a case each of them is eager to make in their own state, about their own system.
“There’s no third world country that has elections like we
President Donald Trump stood in the East Room of the White House on Thursday night, his top law enforcement and intelligence leaders assembled before him, and told the country that its elections had been left open to being “rigged.” His administration released intelligence that, he suggested, would prove it.
The documents did no such thing.
The roughly 25-minute prime-time address, delivered with just under four months until the midterm elections, was less a disclosure than a reprise: nearly six years after losing to Joe Biden, and five-plus years after pressuring his own vice president to reject the result, Trump returned to conspiracy theories that his own intelligence agencies have repeatedly examined and rejected.
“Great damage has been done to our country,” Trump said. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost.”
While simultaneously ordering the declassification of intelligence documents in parallel to his primetime address, the material newly released by the administration did not prove that Trump won the 2020 election. Instead, the president overstated the details, and made claims that did not match the actual conclusions by the intelligence community.
The material his administration released was heavily redacted, and included documents that dealt with China’s ability to influence elections and included a CIA analysis finding that Venezuela had “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” — though in Venezuelan elections, not ones in the U.S. Nothing in the release indicated that either country had hacked or accessed critical American voting infrastructure. Trump nevertheless claimed the material had been “buried and covered up,” though his own intelligence leaders had access to it during his
The White House hosted about two dozen Trump-aligned activists this week ahead of President Donald Trump’s primetime address on the 2020 election. The session was convened by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell and attended by figures who have spent years promoting the conspiracy theories Trump has invoked in falsely claiming the race was “stolen” from him.
At least some of the activists engaged in conversations around Thursday’s planned announcement were told to sign nondisclosure agreements, according to a person familiar with the White House’s arrangements and granted anonymity to speak candidly, and attendees of the Monday meeting were told the proceedings were confidential.
“I’m allowed to say that I was at a briefing,” Charles Faltenovich, the director of PA Fair Elections, later told members of his own group in a recording obtained by MS NOW. “It’s basically sworn to secrecy what was said.”
He then described it. Faltenovich said the information provided “was basically all the media reporting that John Solomon and others have done already.” Solomon, a conservative media figure who joined the White House in June as a special government employee, is driving a push to declassify documents alongside Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, MS NOW has reported. Those documents are expected to contain details about voting machines and alleged efforts by foreign nations to interfere in U.S. elections.
Faltenovich suggested to his group, however, that “apparently” there is “a whole tranche of stuff, like tens of thousands of pages, maybe hundreds of thousands, that have been declassified, but have not been published.” The briefing did not provide insight into any new information that could be inside that raw material.
“The