US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday threatened state election officials with prison time if they do not comply with the Trump administration’s “mandatory” changes to how they run their elections. During a press conference, Mullin said that the Trump administration was making so-called “security enhancements” to US elections “mandatory,” adding that any uncooperative…
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Sen. John. Fetterman, D-Penn., has broken from and criticized his own party so often over the past year that in May, he felt compelled to write an op-ed in The Washington Post clarifying that he had “no plans to leave” the Democrats. He said he valued being an independent voice within the caucus and that he believed he’d be “a terrible Republican.”
But in an interview Thursday with NBC News, Fetterman appeared to change his tune. He laid out for the first time a specific reason he would leave the party: Israel policy.
“If they put that in our platform — no aid for Israel — and officially become the anti-Israel party, then yeah, that’s a red line for me,” Fetterman said. “Democrats, we always should support Israel [sic], that’s our special ally, you know? … In the only democracy in the entire region, that’s Israel. So I’m always proud to stand with Israel.”
Fetterman’s warning foreshadows a tectonic shift on the electoral left — and a positive one.
Fetterman did not say whether he would become an independent or join the Republican Party if he were to leave. But his departure from the party in order to support Israel would still be a remarkable development for a politician who was once widely — and, in my opinion, misguidedly — hailed as an exciting exemplar of populist progressivism. His threat of an exit also reflects how quickly the Democratic Party is reorienting on Israel policy, and growing less hospitable to those who advocate for backing the country’s government unconditionally.
There’s been no indication that the Democratic Party plans to add cutting off aid to Israel
2026 has been a difficult year for President Donald Trump. He is losing a deeply unpopular war. Gas prices are still painful. Federal law enforcement officers have killed multiple people in cold blood. His approval numbers have reached historic lows ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
In his address to the nation Thursday, Trump returned to a favorite topic: conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. The president made sweeping claims about a broad Chinese campaign to access voter records, agitate against his candidacy and interfere in the election. But the claims are not borne out by the evidence, including the intelligence documents he declassified as “proof.” The speech was a desperate attempt to undermine confidence in our democratic system and lay the groundwork for an unprecedented and illegal attempt to control elections from the White House itself.
The U.S. intelligence community, researchers and journalists have recognized China as a threat for years.
Americans who might be confused about the president’s claims should know a few things. First, the U.S. intelligence community, researchers and journalists have recognized China as a threat for years. China is one of our country’s most advanced cyber adversaries and is constantly probing IT systems of the U.S. government, the private sector and influential individuals for vulnerabilities. Beijing also deploys influence operations to attempt to change American policy in its favor.
However, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2020 Election Threat report assessed with high confidence (the highest level of confidence assigned) “that China did not deploy interference efforts” — attempts to change voter rolls or tallies — “and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to
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
The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), a bipartisan panel that manages the elections process in the Badger State, has referred two felony-level complaints against Elon Musk to a local prosecutor’s office after he handed out checks to voters, encouraging them to vote in the 2025 state Supreme Court race. The world’s first trillionaire (whose net worth recently slipped into multi-billionaire…
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