Search results for "Whistleblowers"

Whistleblower warns Trump’s secret voter program violated state laws

The New York Times reported Monday that federal agents may have broken state laws when the Department of Homeland Security ordered them to use private information to access voter records in state databases.

President Donald Trump's effort to find noncitizens on state voter rolls may be relying on questionable data, rushed reviews and even investigative practices that could have violated local state law.

The “Unlawful Voter Initiative” is a Trump administration operation that has reportedly deployed hundreds of federal agents to search voter-registration records for evidence that noncitizens are voting in mass numbers. It was exposed in a New York Times report last month, in which the whistleblower alleged that hundreds of federal agents have been ordered to sift through voter rolls in a widespread hunt to find voter fraud.

“This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (R-N.Y.) said in an interview.

“We’ve never seen anything quite like this. They come up with so many different ways to try and steal the election, to try and jaundice the election, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do," he added.

Democratic senators sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding that the operation be stopped while they seek answers. The whistleblower said that agents are required to complete at least 40 reviews in eight hours, giving them little time to search each voter's citizenship and voting history.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor sounded the alarm Monday in a column, saying that the software used to control a national voter database hands any hacker the key to flip a switch and nullify voters' eligibility to cast a ballot and have it counted.

One of the pieces of information revealed by the whistleblower is that the federal agents are looking through personally identifiable information that comes from both internal government information as well as external sources, including things like birth dates and even partial Social Security numbers while they're searching through records.

The whistleblower questioned whether it's legal.

"The agents plugged those names and personal data into public-facing state websites to find a subject’s voter history," the report said. "Some states, such as Virginia, declare explicitly that only individual voters may use the search tool to look up their own records. Others, such as California, require specific information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number in an effort to limit the use of the tool to individuals."

It's one of the reasons that the whistleblower said that they flagged it for those leading the investigation within Homeland Security's Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. They were told that agents could use the database for operations in the voter search initiative. "Yet leadership appeared to acknowledge the potential for legal liability..." the report said.

The leadership told the whistleblower that agents “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented.”

“This statement suggests that there may be legal implications for accessing these websites,” said a report produced by the government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund. They have been working with the whistleblower and providing them with legal representation. “Yet they are still requiring officers to engage in this illegal activity with promises of personal liability protection.”

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Whistleblower claims ‘cocaine for gift cards’ plot at Philly Health Dept.

A former employee of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) is calling for the resignation and revocation of the medical license of PDPH’s current director, Dr. Kathleen Brady. Ernest Owens, an award-winning journalist and CBS Philly News contributor, shared the news on his Instagram account, revealing that Ervin Malik Simmons, a former Community Engagement and Marketing Coordinator within the Division of HIV Health (DHH) at PDPH, sent a department-wide open letter detailing an alleged toxic workplace environment riddled with drug trafficking and various forms of abuse that culminated in what he said was his wrongful termination when he raised concerns.

In the six-page letter, Simmons says he was employed from May 2026 until October 1, 2026, when he was terminated in what he calls a retaliatory firing after he requested ADA accommodations. He says he experiences workplace harassment and personal turmoil from a romantic relationship with a colleague that bled into his professional life. Simmons says everything took place under Dr. Bradley’s leadership and that she failed to act in a way that he felt protected.

According to Simmons, the department has a reputation for a hostile work environment, which he says a colleague warned him about on his first day. He also says management is ill-equipped in their diversity training and efforts, which impacts how they handle employee issues and even how staff is able to do their jobs. Simmons says marketing campaigns intended to reach minority demographics - specifically Black and brown individuals and those who identify as LGBTQ+ - were helmed by primarily cisgender white women, causing a disconnect in messaging. Upon providing feedback or proposing ideas he thought were more effective, he says he was pulled from certain marketing projects overall.

Simmons also says there are undertones of racism and sexual misconduct within the department. In one part of the letter, he mentions a fair-skinned Latino colleague named Pablo Souble calling Afro-Brazilians “Chocolates,” and saying they all have large penises.

Simmons says things went from bad to worse when he began dating a man named Antonio “Toni” McFadden, a field coordinator within the department. Simmons says he immediately disclosed his relationship with Toni to a co-worker, who then relayed the information to Dr. Brady. Per Simmons, his relationship with Toni was volatile and abusive, and he says he was subjected to intimate partner violence, was introduced to cocaine use, and witnessed Toni abuse drugs and use drugs as an incentive to clients.

Simmons claims Toni’s recruitment method involved cocaine trafficking, alleging Toni told him that he worked out an arrangement with a drug dealer who would accept $50 gift cards that research participants are given for participating in studies managed by Toni and the department as payment for cocaine. Toni would allegedly then tell the participants that if they participated in the research study, they could use the gift card to buy cocaine from Toni's dealer. He also claims that Toni informed him he had sexual relationships with some of the research study participants. Simmons says cocaine and other drug use are contributing factors in behaviors that impact people who are later diagnosed with HIV, which is why he says he was alarmed by Toni’s methods.

Simmons says he tried to warn Dr. Brady and HR about Toni, but his warnings were dismissed, and there was also a brief investigation into his abuse claims against Toni that he was not kept abreast of. He was reportedly told whatever occurred between him and Toni outside of the workplace was not relevant to their jobs or the investigation.

After ending things with Toni, he says he sought help and was diagnosed with PTSD and eventually requested the ADA accommodation to be rid of Toni’s alleged ongoing abuse and harassment in-office, but was terminated instead.

This is yet another call to action for Philadelphia Mayor Cerrelle Parker to act on. As the 100th Mayor of the city, residents were excited when Mayor Parker made history as the first woman to hold the position. However, Mayor Parker has come under severe criticism since her inauguration in January 2024. Some of the biggest pushback from residents involves her administration's approach to existing DEI efforts, tax increase proposals, and a return-to-office mandate for city workers. There have also been internal complaints from former employees, some of whom have filed federal lawsuits against the city and Mayor Parker.

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‘Hunting down enemies’: The explosive whistleblower report on Trump’s DOJ

President Donald Trump’s politicized Department of Justice has abandoned major white-collar prosecutions in favor of waging legal war against Trump’s perceived political enemies. But a White House whistleblower from Trump’s first term says there will be no way to hide Trump’s lawfare from investigators when he leaves office — no matter how much paper he shreds.

“[T]he Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. ‘Fraud’ just happens to be the easiest label to apply,” said former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyst Miles Taylor.

Trump’s DOJ used “welfare fraud” as the “thinly veiled pretext” to launch a massive political shakedown in a state that Taylor points out is led by Democrat Tim Walz, who dared to challenge Trump for the White House in 2024. Before it was halted by a federal judge, Trump’s DOJ tried to investigate Walz for allegedly impeding the president’s immigrant crackdown.

“The true nature of Trump’s ‘anti-fraud’ plans came into view last year, as the White House pursued retribution against New York Attorney General Letitia James, the woman who won a nine-figure civil fraud judgment against Trump,” said Taylor. “In September, the president publicly demanded on social media that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Weeks later, a former White House aide indicted James for alleged ‘mortgage fraud.’”

But look to the money to see Trump’s true motivation, said Taylor.

“A White House genuinely obsessed with protecting taxpayer dollars would not be spending nearly a billion of those dollars (much of it raided from other agencies) to gild the White House and build a ballroom, or just as much to retrofit a luxury jet from Qatar. You cannot loot the treasury with one hand and call yourself its guardian with the other.”

But Trump’s presidency is already nearly halfway through. When he’s gone, he will be a powerless target.

“[W]hen power changes hands, which it eventually will, we will seek all the documents, including every criminal referral memo, target list, email between the White House and the task force, hand-written notes from the vice president’s fraud meetings, and so on. All of it will be subpoenaed and reviewed, whether by a new Congress next year or a new Justice Department after that,” said Taylor. “And guess what? They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves.”

Paperwork, emails and private notes, assured Taylor, is the lifeblood of the prosecution process.

“If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens,” said Taylor.

“That’s when the real fraud trials will begin,” he added.

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Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

Is Putin running America through Trump, is Trump just a “useful idiot” for the Russians, or is he the worst traitor America’s seen since the days of Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday morning, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to announce to the world (and a bit earlier to people who give him $100,000 a month for market-moving information) that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” telling the world “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy responded that the deal was “news for me,” and the Kremlin spokesman said three days earlier that Russia wasn’t interested in any sort of a limited truce like Trump announced. But Trump made an identical announcement back in September, which was also a lie, and the night of his announcement both countries continued to bomb each other’s refineries and power plants.

I’m guessing that Trump’s announcement was designed to shift the news cycle away from reporting on the most nakedly pro-Russia act by any American president in our nation’s history that happened on Friday.

After one of his regular roughly-every-two-weeks-since-he-was-inaugurated phone calls with Putin, Trump announced that he’d just suspended our worldwide sanctions against any country that buys oil or refined products from Russia so that country could put millions of tons of diesel on the world market.

Every past sanction suspension — there have been a few — have lasted just 30 days, but Trump extended this one for six months, giving Russia billions they’re desperate for to keep up their violent, illegal war against our democratic ally, Ukraine.

As if to give Ukraine, Europe, the free world, and every American who believes in democracy instead of naked autocracy, Trump stood in front of the White House and told reporters:

“I want to thank President Putin.”

This won’t do a thing for American diesel prices, although Trump is hoping that angry truckers and farmers believe it will. Even if every drop of that diesel ended up here — and most of it won’t — it would only cover about nine days of what we burn here.

But in reality this is simply Trump bailing out his mentor, owner, blackmailer, or whatever Putin is. Russia’s diesel output right now is down 30 percent and Putin’s hold on the country is getting shaky, as Terrence Goggin (The West Point History Professor) argues so cogently. With prices this high, this deal will give Putin billions.

Following Trump’s announcement, Putin showed America and the world exactly how seriously he took Trump’s Friday statement: Saturday morning, Russian guided bombs killed at least 20 people, three of them children, in a residential neighborhood in Zaporizhzhia.

Trump’s response that afternoon, instead of calling Putin out, was to blame our diesel prices on Zelenskyy for hitting Russian refineries and to declare:

“I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In fact, diesel is high because refinery capacity in the Gulf states has crashed due to being hit over and over again by both Iranian and Houthi missiles. While Ukraine’s strikes are hurting Russian diesel supplies, as Putin noted two weeks ago at his annual Valdai forum in Moscow, that has nothing to do with America; we refine virtually all of our diesel right here at home.

Prices are high here because of scarcity-driven pricing around tight international supplies, and our oil companies are using those international rates to price-gouge American drivers on both diesel and gasoline. The industry that Trump said he’d do anything for if they gave him a billion dollars is now making tens of billions in windfall profits every week.

But this is just the beginning of Trump’s most recent anti-American crime spree.

Remember the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act? It passed and was signed into law a mere three weeks ago and gives the Trump administration until Sunday of this week to begin punishing countries that still buy Putin’s oil.

He’s breaking that law right in front of us all.

And that’s on top of the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act that flat-out banned all imports of any Russian energy products to the United States. If Trump wanted to issue waivers in a way that would comply with that law — which has been on the books for four years now, dating back to the Biden years — he’d first have to give Congress 45 days advance notice, certify in writing that Russia has withdrawn all of its troops from Ukraine and stopped all bombing, and then wait a full 90 days for Congress to give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

As Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted, Trump and his lickspittles have totally bypassed every one of those requirements; Republican Senator Thom Tillis said yesterday that the deal is both illegal and will put more American lives at risk.

Which provoked former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — a frequent guest on my radio/TV program — to say:

“Trump is a traitor to the free world.”

Walsh used to be a lonely voice in his old party, but now he’s rapidly getting company. Mike Pence called the deal a “betrayal” of Graham’s legacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressmen Don Bacon and Michael McCaul have all condemned it.

Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has warned Mike Johnson that he’ll use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill he’s calling the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act that would block any purchase of Russian oil (even though two other laws already make it illegal).

Which caused Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to ask out loud the question a lot of Americans are wondering:

“Whose side is Trump on?”

I can think of two possible answers, and both are insane.

The first is that Putin is actually steering Trump’s presidency. First, weaken America and gut our military, and then give Putin whatever he wants:

Put an alcoholic B-list weekend TV guy in charge of the Pentagon, a plumber in charge of DHS, a fracking guy in charge of Energy, a wrestling billionaire in charge of Education, a brain-worm-disabled former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of our nation’s health, let a ketamine-addled trillionaire rip apart our federal government and destroy our soft power around the world by taking down USAID, shut down our pro-democracy propaganda operations (VOA, etc.), put a weight-loss “miracle pill” hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, a C-list former reality TV star in charge of our airlines, his own criminal defense lawyer to run the coverup of Epstein at the Department of Justice, etc. The list is virtually endless.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented that Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also passing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer while running the campaign and the two of them worked on a plan to hand eastern Ukraine to Moscow. Then there was Helsinki where Trump humiliated our intelligence service while all but shining Putin’s shoes on live TV.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.
“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s first presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said. (emphasis added)

Then there was the red carpet in Alaska last year, where Russia’s foreign minister showed up in a sweatshirt reading “CCCP,” as if to announce who’d won the Cold War after all. There’s the invitation to Putin, a man under indictment for war crimes and stealing children from Ukraine, to come to Mar-a-Lago for the G20 in December. Historian Heather Cox Richardson walked through that whole history Saturday night and closed by asking “how much more evidence is necessary” before we conclude that this president is working for Russia.

The second possibility is that nobody’s blackmailing or threatening Trump and he’s doing all of this of his own free will because he thinks it’ll make him richer.

The midterms were 25 days off when he made that call, diesel prices are killing Republican candidates, and Trump desperately needed a positive-sounding headline.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin personally pitched Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on the sale of Lukoil’s $20 billion in overseas assets to a group led by a Trump megadonor and including business partners of both the Kushner and Witkoff families.

Selling out your country for money and advantage has a name in American history, Benedict Arnold, who offered to hand West Point to the British for 20,000 pounds because — like with Trump and the Nobel Prize — he felt underappreciated.

But Arnold, at least, had been a real patriot before he turned. He’d been shot in the left leg storming Quebec and then had that same leg shattered leading the charge that won the Battle of Saratoga. There’s a monument on that battlefield today, a single carved boot honoring the leg while pointedly leaving off the name of the man it was attached to.

Unlike Arnold, Donald Trump used a diagnosis of bone spurs to stay out of Vietnam that the podiatrist’s own daughters say was a favor to Fred Trump, who just happened to be the doctor’s landlord and patron.

My dad was a Republican activist in Michigan. The Republican Party he loved defined itself by standing up to the Kremlin.

I can’t imagine what he’d make of a Republican president publicly thanking the man in the Kremlin for suggesting that America bankroll his bloody, unprovoked war, or of the Senate’s number two Republican going on Sunday television to defend this insanity.

US intelligence agencies have determined — and told Trump — that Putin has provided Iran with the satellite data and intelligence that country’s IRGC used to attack our bases and troops in the Gulf, killing at least 21 and sending hundreds of others to the hospital. And now Trump’s handing him billions while cutting off our ally Ukraine from American-made Patriot missile interceptors?

I’ll leave it to the lawyers and the impeachment committees to determine if that fits the definition of treason in the Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

But whatever it is, when a president knowingly breaks his own country’s laws to send billions to a hostile nation’s dictator who’s slaughtering the people of a nation we promised — in writing in 1994 — to protect, most Americans know in their gut what to call it.

Whether Putin is giving the orders or Trump is freelancing to hustle more money into his kids Uday and Qusay’s investments, Ukraine’s children end up just as dead and America’s word and reputation ends up just as worthless.

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The press chokes on its own dead weight while America burns

The news was chilling Tuesday, as the beleaguered citizens of the United States of America continued to be buffeted by the icy blast of fascism blowing hard off of Capitol Hill.

An anonymous official in the U.S. Postal Service has alleged that the agency is aiding the Trump Administration’s stepped up attacks on America as it seeks to dismantle voting ahead of this November’s make-or-break elections, which will determine if the 250-year-old country falls under authoritarian rule.

This latest breaking news is bolstering the most significant and horrific timeline in this country since the Civil War. There can be no more dire occurrence than the President of the United States using his enormous power against the people he is supposed to work for by battering the bedrock of our democracy: the sanctity of our vote.

By assaulting mail-in voting like he has so many women, Donald Trump is making it clearer than he has since January 6, 2021, when he called for an attack on America ahead of the certification of the 2020 vote he lost, that he intends to see to it the people of this country have no say in how they are governed (ruled) going forward.

Given what I see are irrefutable facts buttressing Trump’s treason, let’s take a look at how three of the nation’s leading newspapers and print services handled this jarring news Tuesday. Here are the lede paragraphs accompanying their reporting of Trump’s ongoing attack on November’s vote. I also remind you, because you seldom see this much-needed context in most reporting, that Trump is a convicted felon, who has lied tens of thousands of times to the American people:

-ASSOCIATED PRESS: The U.S. Postal Service is poised to launch a hastily built, error-riddled computer system that could jeopardize the process of mail voting relied upon by one-third of all voters, according to a whistleblower statement released Tuesday by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

-THE NEW YORK TIMES: A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.

-THE WASHINGTON POST: An anonymous federal official warned in a disclosure to Congress that a rushed and insufficiently tested U.S. Postal Service system could prevent large numbers of Americans from receiving mail ballots this fall if courts approve President Donald Trump’s plans for the midterm elections.

Now I respectfully ask that you take another look at my lede to this piece. Try to be objective, and tell me which one of the four offerings most accurately reflect the gravity of this moment in America?

An anonymous official in the U.S. Postal Service has alleged that the agency is aiding the Trump Administration’s stepped up attacks on America as it seeks to dismantle voting ahead of this November’s make-or-break elections, which could determine if the 250-year-old country falls under authoritarian rule.

I render all three of the offerings from those news services as accurate, but also completely inadequate in addressing this worrisome situation.

I continue to contend that all three of these journalistic institutions once again failed miserably to alert their readership of the danger Americans are facing, and the stakes of Trump’s repeated anti-America actions. And isn’t it odd how similar the ledes to their stories are? To be clear: I am not contending that they are working in unison to minimize this enormous news, but I do think there is a malaise and incompetence across almost the entirety of our corporate media that is crushing them under their own dead weight, and regular readers will know it is impossible for me to process how this is happening.

(And, yes, I do understand that crooked ownership in many of these places is to blame. CBS News for instance, is completely dead as a trusted journalistic outpost, which is almost too sad to type. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is still occasionally capable of turning around important work, but it has been undermined by grievous editorial decisions that have badly damaged its credibility.)

This attack on our vote and our country is well into its 11th year eliminating even a shadow of a doubt that this hasn’t been a planned and coordinated assault on our country right from the start. Even before his improbable win in 2016, Trump let it be known that if he were to lose he wouldn’t concede, and contend that the vote was “fixed” against him.

Even after winning that election but losing the popular tally by almost three million votes, Trump put together a ridiculous, costly commission that was chartered to search out voter fraud that would proved he had actually won a majority of the vote.

The commission found nothing, of course, saying, “There’s no real evidence of it anywhere.”

Since coming on the scene, Trump has done everything in his power to diminish people’s greatest power in a Democracy: their vote.

It continues to just blow my mind how shoddily our national media is failing us in this terrifying moment of need. Make no mistake about it: We are smack in the middle of a national emergency right now, and these incompetent, dangerous fools continue to treat it all as if one of the two major parties setting fire to our national elections is some normal part of the political game.

It is not. Here is what is:

AN ATTACK ON AMERICA.

I could also stand to hear more from the opposition party on an hourly basis framing these anti-American actions. Because make no mistake about it: Nothing is more anti-American than attacking a citizen’s right to vote.

If Trump, with the support of his bought-off radical right Supreme Court and repugnant subservient party are allowed to get away with this, WE ARE DONE.

OVER.

Trump will be a convicted felon, serial liar, and America’s first king, and not even the press will be able to normalize that, because he will be busy rounding them up, and jailing them.

I am past tired of screaming my head off about this, but my God, man, what can they possibly be seeing as they report this ongoing assault that I (we) aren’t???

We have never been here before. We have never had a president openly attacking our vote and our country. This alone makes it gigantic news by definition.

And just for good measure, I ducked into the 24/7 TV news that I generally can’t stand, and while there was some reporting on this latest attack in two of those places — MSNOW snd CNN — neither gave the enormous story the heft it deserves.

The Fox Propaganda Service was ignoring it best I could tell, and still going on about Joe Biden. No, I’m not kidding.

Why aren’t the onscreen chyrons at the other two places screaming this:

REPUBLICAN ATTACK ON AMERICA

I watched PBS with my dinner to see what kind of treatment they were giving this hair-raising story, and they were predictably even-keeled, because why get too upset at the possibility of being yanked off the air for good in three months?

Seriously … why not start reporting the dire consequences we face if Trump outright kills the vote, as he has shown us in action and words he intends to do? Don’t Americans deserve to see this kind of hard-hitting reporting?

Republicans are now employing our Postal Service to act against us, recklessly gerrymandering, tampering with voter rolls, closing voting locations, threatening to place military members at our polling places, attacking poll workers, and doing everything they possibly can to diminish the credibility of our vote.

They are enemies of America, plain and simple, and for the life of me I don’t understand why it is so hard to report that.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

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Trump’s 'tin-foil hat' plan to seize the midterms is underway: whistleblower

With the midterms right around the corner and President Donald Trump relentlessly pressing his conspiracies about voter fraud, an insider and whistleblower from his first term has revealed that his “tin-foil hat” plan to “interfere in the democratic process” is underway. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first administration and exposed a number of its secrets. On Wednesday, he sounded the alarm that a plot Trump began nearly a decade ago is coming to its most dangerous phase.

Over the course of the past year, Trump and his allies have been asked repeatedly whether federal troops will be stationed at polling places during the midterms. They have tended to dodge the question, saying there are “no plans” to do so without ruling it out. But “evidently,” writes Taylor, “all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”

Taylor is referencing new bombshell reporting by the Washington Post, which revealed on Tuesday, writes Taylor, “that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.” Despite the fact that they are being intentionally obscure about this, says Taylor, “the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for ‘illegal’ registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.”

It’s all part of a wider effort, asserts Taylor, to convert “the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build ‘approved’ lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.”

All of this began under Trump’s first term, according to Taylor, who writes, “I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.”

He notes that thousands of DHS agents and federal prosecutors have been reassigned from their actual responsibilities and directed to help the president “seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot.” For example, “the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of ‘noncitizen voters.’ But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185, then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.”

According to Taylor, “Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”

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Whistleblower reveals the real goal of Trump’s 'revenge' task force

While President Donald Trump claims he’s been waging a war against fraud, one of his former officials asserts that the White House-led anti-fraud task force is really a “ruse to prosecute political foes.” This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security Deputy Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term and at the time penned an anonymous article exposing the dysfunctional inner workings of the administration.

As Taylor wrote on Thursday, according to reports from the New York Times and other outlets, the Trump administration has been leveling claims of fraud against targets ranging from immigrant-owned ice cream trucks to Democratic governors. “The goal was not to take down serious criminals,” argues Taylor. “It was storytelling. Trump says his enemies are grifters. Accordingly, he’s reorienting the federal government to prove — whether they’re governors or immigrants — that his political and societal opponents are rotten right down to the food trucks from which they sell.”

Taylor says there is a clear giveaway to the president’s intentions, writing, “As DOJ is building these types of cases, it’s simultaneously abandoning major white-collar prosecutions. Corporate investigations (which can uncover billions in theft and billions in restitution for victims) have fallen to their lowest level in decades. In fact, the Times found that the volume of such cases is literally thousands below the Biden administration and far below Trump’s own first term. Meanwhile, the president has been pardoning wealthy executives and dropping cases left and right against friendly corporations. So no, the Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. ‘Fraud’ just happens to be the easiest label to apply.”

Trump’s actions in Minnesota, says Taylor, offer a clear example. As he writes, “Late last year, welfare fraud was used as the thinly veiled pretext for the Trump administration to launch a massive immigration crackdown (and political shakedown) in a state led by Democrat Tim Walz, who challenged Trump for the White House in 2024. Thousands of ICE and CBP agents flooded into Minnesota to address a problem that — if the reasons were genuine — should have required not more than a few dozen accountants. It certainly didn’t need gun-toting agents. While Trump was forced into retreat, his team first tried to coerce state leaders to forfeit their voter rolls, which critics pointed out had precisely nothing to do with the original fraud claims. Of course it didn’t; from the start, the whole exercise was about political leverage.”

“To understand what Trump’s task force is actually meant for,” says Taylor, “just look at how it’s being managed. The DOJ’s new fraud division doesn’t report to some expert in criminal investigations. It reports directly to Vice President JD Vance, an arrangement without precedent, especially since it effectively circumvents the Attorney General himself…In June, he personally made the criminal referral against Walz. Asked where the ‘war on fraud’ goes next, Vance answered: California. (Surely it’s just a coincidence that they’re going after the blue state led by the man Trump most fears will try to succeed him.)”

Taylor notes other examples, such as charges of mortgage fraud leveled against New York Attorney General Letitia James — who had previously won a nine-figure civil fraud case against Trump — Senator Adam Schiff (D-NY), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. According to Taylor, “‘Fraud’ has become the administration’s codeword for ‘revenge.’ The term is a respectable-sounding wrapper for criminalizing the political opposition. And now that Trump’s team has systematized the plan with a task force — making the issue a top priority for all U.S. attorneys in the country — we will see more and more cases brought, like the recent cases against left-leaning nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The reality, asserts Taylor, is that Trump’s White House is rampant with fraud, the scale of which will be exposed by a future Democratic administration. While Trump and his allies will attempt to conceal their crimes, “They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves. If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens. That’s when the real fraud trials will begin.”

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Whistleblower reveals how Trump 'sold out' to US adversaries

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly upended U.S. foreign policy over the course of his second term, a whistleblower from his first administration warns that over the past few days, the commander-in-chief may have “sold us out to our enemies” once and for all. This is according to Miles Taylor, who during Trump’s first term served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and famously revealed the existence of a resistance group within the administration. “The president,” wrote Taylor on Monday, “is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.”

“Start with Korea,” said Taylor. “On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is ‘inappropriate and hostile’ to our friends in North Korea, which he called ‘unthreatening and respectful.’ Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so ‘unthreatening’ that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so ‘respectful.’ By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.”

“Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific,” wrote Taylor. “This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a ‘grand bargain.'"

Instead of opposing China, warns Taylor, “his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire.”

“Finally,” says Taylor, “take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack.”

“Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening,” Taylor predicts. “Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.”

With all this in mind, Taylor arrives at a grim conclusion, writing, “Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.”

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Leaker reveals Trump using US adversary for help with midterm 'meddling'

On Friday, a whistleblower from President Donald Trump’s first administration alleged that China is integral to his plan for “meddling in the midterms.” According to security analyst Miles Taylor – who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and leaked a number of White House secrets during Trump’s previous term – the president is counting on the threat of Chinese electoral interference to provide a pretext for his election denial schemes.

Taylor’s claims come as Trump is in the middle of a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in D.C., during which the president’s decorum has been questioned as “weirdly” deferential to the U.S. adversary. “It’s worth noting,” reminds Taylor, “that this is the same Donald Trump who told us over the summer — breathlessly in a primetime press conference — that China had compromised our electoral system and that the communist nation was assaulting American democracy. It was a serious accusation. But then he did nothing about it. No sanctions. No expulsions. No consequences of any kind. Not a peep since. Odd, right?”

But according to Taylor, this makes perfect sense from the perspective of Trump, who is desperate to sow doubt about election integrity. “After years in the intelligence community, I know that the worries about the Chinese Communist Party trying to manipulate American democracy are very true and very alarming,” writes Taylor. “So should Trump. But he doesn’t care much about that. What he cares about is that the threat is convenient for storytelling. To him, the China scare is the perfect pretext for his own meddling in the midterms, a threat to be invoked when useful and forgotten when not. How else do you explain that his answer to the supposed attack on our elections from China is to roll out the red carpet at Joint Base Andrews and grovel?” As many have noted, it is unusual for a U.S. president to greet visiting heads of state anywhere but the White House, but Trump met Xi at the airport personally, where he had U.S. service members on their hands and knees smoothing the red carpet.

Later at the White House, as American billionaires gathered for a lavish party Taylor notes was on par with Gatsby, in his estimation, “The widest smiles and biggest laughs may have come from the visitors. Honestly, maybe they were the only ones in the room who saw the whole picture. For two years this administration has made China the convenient villain for things Trump cares about — they’re the threat to our elections, the ones stirring up panic over data centers, the ones creating a trade imbalance that Trump must fix. Yet Xi’s delegation has long known what others are just starting to figure out. Trump doesn’t believe any of it. He uses Beijing as a foil for his own projects…. to take control of the elections… to profit from the data center boom… to run the American economy by brute force.” As Taylor concludes, ”The man who rails against communism on Fox News — and runs ads against it! — spent the evening rhetorically bear-hugging the communists scattered around his dining room. Everyone at every table was in on the joke.”

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Total meltdown: Trump insiders say he’s out of control — and unstoppable

President Donald Trump's latest outbursts are a sign of how much his worst excesses are coming to the forefront, and as two prominent insiders told MS NOW, he has created an administration around himself that leaves allies powerless to stop him.

On Tuesday, MS NOW's Nicole Wallace hosted two guests with close past connections to Trump's inner circle: author and reporter Maggie Haberman, who has written extensively about his political career and gotten close access to the president; and Miles Taylor, who worked as a major Homeland Security staffer in the first Trump administration and famously blew the whistle about the internal efforts to rein him in.

Wallace pressed the pair about Trump's recent press ban, which blocked MS NOW, CNN and Politico from accessing the White House for coverage, prompting a lawsuit and a boycott from the full press pool. In response to one particular question, Haberman stressed that even those around Trump with strong political instincts no longer have much influence over his decision-making.

"I don't think anybody can influence Trump particularly strongly," Haberman explained. "One of the reasons that the attention on Natalie Harp is significant is not, you know, because of all the jokes that are made or 'human printer,' etcetera, etcetera. It's because she is emblematic of the kind of presidency that he wants, which is that he wants to do what he wants to do. And people who try to curtail him on the margins, even — which really is what this presidency has been. It's not like term one, where there were tons of people who made their objections known."

Haberman also noted that as Trump's polling and approval numbers enter freefall, he faces a severe "fact-set issue," as few or no people around him are willing to present "negative information."

"I mean, one of the key things that [co-author Jonathan Swan] and I reported in Regime Change was this lead-up to the Iran war and how JD Vance was the only one in these meetings, large meetings... who was arguing with the president about this in pretty direct terms, and it cost him with Trump. Trump was annoyed by it. Maybe people were saying things to him in one-off meetings, but very few people really, really speak up about quote-unquote negative information in front of this president, and less so now than ever."

In response, Taylor noted that even the pushback he witnessed in term one was minimal, and now even that is out the window.

"I think Maggie is right to focus on the people around the president, and I don't say that to self-aggrandize about people in the first term," Taylor said. "Weren't no heroes in the first Trump administration, right? The only people that were left were witnesses and survivors. And all any of us did was the absolute bare minimum you, as a taxpayer, expect us to do. If the president wants to do something illegal or unconstitutional, you say, 'no.' That's it. Trump replaced that set of people who met a bare minimum standard. Again, there was nothing heroic. No one with capes saying, 'Mr. President, you gotta be a better man." It's just, 'don't do illegal things.' Those people are largely gone now."

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Trump wiretapping enemies is 'breathtaking abuse of power': whistleblower

President Donald Trump’s attempt to surveil the phone of former FBI Director James Comey has prompted much discussion as to how far the former is willing to go to punish his enemies. According to a whistleblower from his first term, however, Trump has turned the “ intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying.”

This is the assertion of Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, during which he famously penned an anonymous article revealing the existence of a resistance group within the White House. As Taylor explains, last week, it was revealed that while attempting to secure charges against Comey for posting an Instagram photo of shells spelling the numbers “86 45” — which Trump claims were a call for assassination — the president, via the DOJ, ordered the Secret Service to begin tracking and surveilling Comey’s phone, which agents recognized as problematic.

As Taylor elaborates, “The Secret Service’s own supervisor put his objection in writing. Pinging the phone ‘could be done,’ he warned, ‘but it would be a bad idea.’ Warrantless emergency tracking requires an imminent threat to life, and ‘we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger.’ It was, in his words, ‘legally questionable.’ His boss agreed, according to the emails, ‘but said we might do it anyway.’ And they did.” Agents tracked Comey’s movements as he and his wife drove to visit their son’s grave, with Trump allegedly following the progress from Air Force One.

“So, to be clear,” emphasizes Taylor, “we found out that the president of the United States was aboard his airplane, personally tracking the surveillance of a private citizen who had posted a photo of four digits. Obvious free speech. Breathtaking abuse of power to punish it.” What’s more, not only did the investigation turn up nothing, but the government continued to pursue Comey, with the FBI obtaining warrants for his Apple and Google accounts.

“I believe the Comey prosecution will be remembered as one of the most significant First Amendment cases in American history,” asserts Taylor. “An American president is trying to imprison a critic for posting a photograph. And to build the absurd case, the government surveilled that critic without a judge’s approval, in a manner its own agents admitted in writing was illegal. The filings answer some questions about what was done to Comey, but they open a far larger one that may not be answered for years: how many other people is this administration illegally watching and preparing to illegally punish?”

“I don’t write this as a bystander of course,” notes Taylor. “Trump has publicly accused people like me, John Brennan, James Clapper, Adam Schif, and even Barack Obama and Joe Biden, of treason. I have to assume some of us are already under surveillance for the audacity of criticizing the sitting president, while he has agents hunt for something — anything — to charge us with as punishment ... Ironically, one of those criticisms is that I’ve long warned a second Trump term would turn the intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying. Again, the wannabe despot in the Oval Office has proven my point.”

As Taylor concludes, “We don’t know how many Americans are being warrantlessly monitored right now, or individually targeted despite their constitutional rights. That is the problem. Comey’s surveillance surfaced only because his prosecution forced these documents into open court. Everything about how this administration treats the people it considers enemies tells me his case is the rule, not the exception, and that there may be far more people they’ve decided to watch than to tip their hand by bringing weak and foolish cases.”

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