kyle hunt

The Republican Party's lawsuit against the state of Nevada over the law allowing ballots be counted up to four days after the Election Day has been dismissed.

In several states, ballots that are postmarked on Election Day are still counted, even if they are received by election officials a few days after the election. Nevada's law allows up to four days to continue receiving ballots. Ballots with missing or unreadable postmarks may also be counted as long as they arrive within the three days that follow.

The RNC and Nevada Republican Party sued Nevada in 2024 to block the ballot counting, claiming that the law passed in 2021 unlawfully extends Election Day. They pointed to federal laws that set a uniform national date for federal elections. They also claimed that counting late-arriving ballots could dilute Republican votes and provide Democrats an unfair advantage. Nevada officials and voting-rights advocates countered that the relevant act is casting or mailing the ballot by Election Day, not the postal service’s delivery date, and that the law helps ensure legally cast votes are counted.

In the lower-court ruling, U.S. District Judge Miranda Du dismissed the appeal, saying that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. The plaintiffs then appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where the case remained pending until Friday's decision.

According to decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals similarly decided on procedural grounds, not on the law itself, Democracy Docket posted.

The three-judge panel explained that the plaintiffs were not actually harmed by the lower court’s ruling. And if they were not harmed by it, they had no legal right (no standing) to pursue the appeal. The court therefore dismissed the appeal.

This isn't the only case the GOP has filed related to mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

The most important case came from Mississippi, where the RNC, Mississippi Republican Party and individual voters challenged a law allowing absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive up to five business days later.

A federal district court initially rejected the challenge, but the Fifth Circuit struck down the law. In June 2026, however, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee in a 5–4 agreement

"The federal Election-Day statutes do not prevent Mississippi from counting absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days thereafter; nothing in the federal Election-Day statutes requires ballots to be received by Election Day," explained SCOTUSblog.

This week, T. Elliot Gaiser — assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel — issued a memo on changes at the Foreign Service Grievance Board (FSGB). And according to Politico legal reporter Josh Gerstein, the memo attacks a system that has been in place for 46 years.

In a Friday post on X, formerly Twitter, Gerstein explains, "JUST IN: Trump administration declares structure of Foreign Service in place since 1980 is unconstitutional intrusion on presidential power. DOJ's busy Office of Legal Counsel says Secretary of State has to have final say on discipline."

The memo, titled "Memorandum Opinion For The Legal Adviser Department Of State," Gaiser writes, "The Foreign Service Grievance Board ('FSGB' or 'Board') hears grievances filed by members of the Foreign Service. 22 U.S.C. § 4135. Although the Secretary of State is responsible for appointing Board members, the statute prevents him from removing them except for cause and gives the Board final decisionmaking authority within the Executive Branch. This means that, for example, if a high-ranking diplomatic official in the Foreign Service files a grievance after being separated from the Foreign Service or otherwise disciplined by the Secretary, the Board can reinstate the official over the Secretary's objection."

Gaiser, in the memo, goes on to argue that "affording the Board final decisionmaking authority in this way violates the Appointments Clause of Article II" of the U.S. Constitution.

"In United States v. Arthrex, Inc.," Gaiser says in the memo, "the Supreme Court held that 'the exercise of executive power by inferior officers must at some level be subject to the direction and supervision of' a politically accountable officer. 141 S. Ct. 1970, 1988 (2021). But that requirement has not been met here. The Board is comprised of inferior officers removable only for cause, yet the statute empowers it to make decisions that are not reviewable by any politically accountable officer, rendering the statute unconstitutional."

According to the American Foreign Service Association, the Foreign Service Grievance Board "was created by Congress under the 1980 Foreign Service Act to provide due process to Foreign Service members."

In the memo, Gaiser argues that the U.S. Constitution grants presidents broad executive powers — including wide-ranging powers with foreign relations.

"By declining to enforce those portions of the statute," Gaiser writes, "final decisionmaking authority will be appropriately returned to the relevant Executive Branch official — either the Secretary of State or the President himself…. Article II of the Constitution vests in the President the 'executive Power,' which carries with it a 'vast share of responsibility for the conduct of our foreign relations.'"

President Donald Trump's loyalist and election denier, Tina Peters, is on a roadshow. Peters managed to score a commutation from a Democratic governor after her conviction for state crimes around the 2020 election. She was slated to be in jail for nine years. She only served 20 months.

The new election conspiracy roadshow drew the attention of CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, who spoke with host Dana Bash on Friday. Bash questioned whether Peters has able to do much since she's "preaching to the converted." Cohen explained it's all about access.

Peters has met with the White House, the Commerce and the Justice Departments.

"The question of influence is something we're going to find out as we get closer and closer to the midterms and see if the president enacts some of these very extreme and aggressive ideas and proposals that Tina Peters is pitching," Cohen warned. "You just saw on your screen photos of her meetings this week in Washington, D.C.. She sat down with Harmeet Dhillon, who is the chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division."

Dhillon has been pushing her own election changes while at the DOJ.

Peters also met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, which prompted questions on Lutnick's role in elections.

"The Commerce Department is home to the Census Bureau [which] put out a report claiming that there were tons of non-citizens voting in elections," Cohen explained. "It suggests that the office is also trying to play in this space, which is why it's notable that Tina Peters is meeting with him."

He said he spoke with Peters' lawyer Peter Ticktin, "who is also pushing for some very aggressive moves before the election."

According to his comments, Peters "has a plan."

"And I don't know whether, you know, she'll get the support to make sure her plan gets implemented. Her plan differs from mine greatly. It's still going to need an emergency order in order to have it happen," Ticktin said.

The idea of declaring a national emergency so the president can take over the 2026 midterm elections isn't a "hypothetical situation," said Stateline.

Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, said that they're already preparing for Trump's attempts to nationalize the election.

Last week, when asked about nationalizing the election, Trump told a conservative commentator, "Stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”

Trump has yet to hit the "nuclear option," said Cohen. He also noted all of this is coming, again, because Democratic Gov. Jared Polis (Co.) commuted Peters' sentence, releasing her early.

"He said, it's the right thing to do, but he's disappointed in what she's up to in Washington," said the reporter.

The other thing that is making officials "lose their mind," Cohen said, is that Peters could be appointed to a post to consult on election security for the state of California. The post was offered by the Shasta County election official, who is a 2020 election denier.

After the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, Congress carried out a series of reforms that included strengthening federal watchdogs and creating new agencies like the Office of Inspector General (OIG), the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. But according to NOTUS, President Donald Trump is greatly undermining that post-Watergate system during his second presidency.

Reporting for NOTUS, journalists Natalie Alms and Eric Katz explain, "The once-independent system that Congress established after Watergate has radically transformed in Trump's second term. Trump's unprecedented firing of nearly 20 inspectors general has unraveled the firewalls government's ombudsmen have operated under for decades. The new watchdogs are erasing the lines between agency leadership and their own watchdog offices, Office of Inspector General employees told NOTUS, openly suggesting they should work hand-in-glove with the Trump administration to advance its goals…. Trump has installed former political appointees from the same agencies they're now overseeing, a co-author of Project 2025, and a Republican congressman into watchdog roles across the government."

Alms and Katz add, "Those IGs have boosted the president and his appointees in ways that directly contravene the statutory independence of their offices, 11 current and former staffers told NOTUS."

One of the interviewees for their article was a senior OIG official.

Interviewed on condition of anonymity, the official told NOTUS, "All the adults have left the room. All these new IGs are lining up behind political leadership as if they're lapdogs."

The official noted that remaining officials in watchdog agencies are "scared to death to do anything," adding, "So for the most part, they're just sitting on their hands trying to lay low."

Alms and Katz point to recent events with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as an example of how much the federal watchdog system is changing under Trump. VA Inspector General Cheryl L. Mason, according to NOTUS sources, held up a move to new office space so that she could have a private bathroom in her office — which, Alms and Katz note, is the "kind of potentially pricey request that government watchdogs typically investigate."

An employee of the VA IG's office, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told NOTUS, "It's been incredibly challenging to continue doing the work we're doing." And another employee, also quoted anonymously, said, "She wanted to make sure the message of everything we did was part of every agreement, promise or whatever she had with the secretary. If you believe in independent oversight, that's not what we were doing."

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor recalled a recent conversation on his Substack with a reporter in which Taylor was called out for "getting paid big bucks to stand up to Trump."

Taylor said that for a long time, something like this would have hit a nerve for him because Trump frequently used this idea to attack his critics.

According to Taylor, "The word Trump uses, and the word his whole movement adopted with the reflexivity of pull-string dolls, is 'grifter.'"

The reality is something very different, he explained, joking about his big "wealth-building secrets."

The first step, he said, was getting fired, and the second was filling out welfare benefits.

"All the best con men are on unemployment while they make their big bet," Taylor wrote.

"Step three, and this is where the scheme really accelerates: give away the majority of proceeds from your book, hundreds of thousands of dollars, at the very moment you’re struggling to figure out how to pay your own bills," Taylor said.

Taylor also refused a financial advance for his book, A Warning, the New York Times reported.

His next step, he said, was to blow whatever money he had on security guards and lawyers to help protect his family.

"Every penny you drop on concealed weapons and lawyers will eventually make you richer. Trust me," Taylor said, tongue-in-cheek.

Next, he suggested a big money maker was to "get placed under federal investigation by a vengeful president, then sit at the kitchen table with your wife and price out what it would mean to sell your house to cover what’s coming. Also, consider getting even more lawyers."

The final step, he said, is to fight back "and then hold your wife as she cries after the startup you built together, and the friendships that have mattered most to you, crumble before your eyes."

Taylor has now formed a different good government group, DEFIANCE.org, which aims to help people mobilize around presidential overreach.

Hd noted that despite his appearances on television, he's not making money off of the thousands of views that his interviews get.

While he's being sarcastic about his "wealth," he promised he's "doing just fine," but said that if his goal was to make money, taking "the road not taken" would not have been the way to do it.

"Before Trump returned to office, I was on the path to building a multimillion-dollar business. Keeping my mouth shut was the lucrative option. It always was. The real profits in American life these days are earned by sitting comfortably on the sidelines. Yet it comes at a terrible price, which — at this point in my life, with what’s happening in our country — I decided was not a price worth paying," Taylor explained.

One of the realizations he had came after meeting up with a close friend at a conference, when the person explained they'd have to distance themselves from him amid the new Trump administration.

"Was I just trying to get attention?" the friend asked.

"Then, he explained in hand-wringing detail that he would need to step back from our friendship, lest he and his own business interests get caught in the crossfire. Ah, I thought, now I understand what’s happening here. He laid out the logic of disassociation," wrote Taylor, saying that his friend claimed he had to put on his oxygen mask first.

He closed by confessing that it took him a long time to let go of his anger about being called a "grifter" while his family was struggling. After the encounter with his friend, Taylor said he felt "pity."

Kansas State Rep. Pat Proctor, a Republican running for Kansas Secretary of State, lamented just how annoyed he is with female voters.

In a video revealed by his opponent, Jennifer Day, Proctor complained about the 2022 defeat of a ballot measure restricting reproductive freedom in the state.

"There's like, all these, like, women, uh, like 20 to 30-year-old women, who, you know, that you never saw at the polls before, and it's like a long line, the long line, and they're all there to vote," Proctor said.

"And it's just the — they're stealing it fair and square," Proctor said about the female voters, acknowledging that they were all legal voters. "And they all came back out, cause I can see 'em. You know, you had 700 unaffiliated female voters, 20-30, that all came out just to circle, in one circle because it was the only question on the ballot."

Procter made the statement while drawing a "circle" with his hand.

"And they all came back out for the general to vote again," said Proctor about the young female voters.

As of the last count on the Secretary of State's website, there are 575,983 unaffiliated voters in Kansas. Republican voter registration has slightly decreased in the state since January 2025, dropping by about 10,000 voters. A Kansas Reflector report noted that the vote over the ballot measure was "historic."

"Overall, Kansas women made up almost 56 percent of voters in the August 2022 election. And the younger the voters, the more women dominated. Voters between 18 and 24 years old were 61 percent female," the report said.

Retired researcher Earl F. Glynn pointed to a significant discrepancy in the gender of voters in Kansas using U.S. census data and reports after the 2022 election.

"A recent Kansas voter file with 1,975,884 voters shows 1,027,582 females, 937,011 males and 11,291 voters who did not select a gender," Glynn wrote. That math shows that there were 90,000 more female voters in Kansas than male voters.

Kansas' ballot measure is another among red states dealing with issues around reproductive freedom. In the 2024 election, seven states passed ballot measures to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, the State Court Report said after the 2024 election. Missouri affirmed access in that state in early 2026.

With Todd Blanche having made the transition from acting U.S. attorney general to permanent U.S. attorney general following a 50-49 confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate, President Donald Trump continues to push the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for federal prosecutions of his foes. And according to Salon's Amanda Marcotte, Trump is ramping up this pressure despite setbacks in the lower federal courts.

"As the courts keeps getting in the way of Trump's desire to persecute people he doesn't like," Marcotte notes in Salon, "the pressure to find a way to cheat the laws guarding human rights is only intensifying."

According to legal analyst Liz Dye, who hosts the "Law and Chaos" podcast, a lack of evidence won't discourage Trump from pushing for a federal prosecution if he really has it in for the target.

Dye told Salon, "U.S. attorneys are being pressured to bring politically motivated cases based on shoddy or even fabricated evidence, with the predictable result that the cases implode on impact with the court system, sometimes spectacularly."

Marcotte points to the David Hearn case as a glaring example of Trump pushing for a federal prosecution despite a lack of evidence.

"The most recent high-profile example is the attempt by U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to prosecute David Hearn, a former Olympian who was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial," Marcotte observes. "As it turned out, Hearn was being used as a scapegoat to hide Trump's embarrassment over ruining the pool by hiring poorly qualified cronies to renovate it. Pirro eventually had to admit that the case was without merit and dropped it, even though doing so meant a well-publicized dressing-down from Trump at the White House."

MAGA firebrand and former Fox News host Pirro is known for being a hardcore Trump loyalist. Yet after the federal prosecutor determined that there was no evidence against Hearn and dropped the case, Trump angrily berated her and made it clear that he isn't giving on a possible Hearn prosecution.

"The failed attempt to prosecute Hearn was just the latest in a series of high-profile prosecutions of people Trump hates for criticizing him or attempting to hold him accountable, including against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James," Marcotte observes. "In a recent column for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie observed that 'the principal aim of President Trump's second term is revenge.' Worse, most everyone Trump fixates on is innocent of wrongdoing. Their only 'transgression' has been upholding the law, criticizing the president or, in many cases, simply being of a race or class of people he doesn't like. But Trump, Bouie argued memorably, also wants revenge on the American people 'for rejecting him in 2020 and dealing a grievous blow to his ego.'"

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman was the one who blew the whistle on President Donald Trump's relationship with his aide, Natalie Harp, who was among those included in her book about the White House staff.

Haberman said that, according to those she's spoken to in Trump's world, Harp "doesn't do much outside of work. She works constantly for him."

She explained that it's a "huge amount of value" to Trump, who often relies on aides to make him feel better.

"I described her the other day as, as you know, a binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket," said Haberman. "There are men who have played that role for him too. One of them would be Boris Epstein, about whom, you know, his legal adviser, you know, of whom the president describes him as his psychiatrist."

Haberman quoted Trump saying, "Sometimes you just want somebody to tell you everything is going to be okay. That is a lot of what the president values."

CNN host Wolf Blitzer mentioned national security concerns about Harp and the clearance issues. It was reported by MS NOW's Jake Traylor and Jacqueline Alemany, on Wednesday, that it took Harp over a year to handle her clearance paperwork. The reasons for it were unknown, but the president personally intervened on Harp's behalf.

"So, our understanding is that she does have a security clearance. We haven't independently corroborated that she was delayed on her SF-86 forms to get a longer-term one," said Haberman. "She came in ... with a temporary clearance, the way that most other people working in the White House did."

She noted that most people know that Trump speaks via a cell phone that "everybody has the number," including world leaders.

"That includes a bunch of people. And, you know, we don't quite know exactly how secure that phone is. I think the bigger issue that people have had about concerns is just her level of, of, you know, intense devotion to him. And that was what became a question for the Secret Service."

She went on to mention that the White House appears to be realizing that they made things worse by "elevat[ing] attention around Natalie Harp by bushing back on Jon Ossoff and going further than what Ossoff had said about their relationship themselves."

Ossoff mentioned that all Trump wanted to do was "build his ballroom and fly around with Natalie." GOP apologists and MAGA allies quickly began talking about an affair and claiming Ossoff was "insinuating" something.

"But there's also, you know, the way a president's world functions and, you know, this who is around him, who helps provide him with information that is going to be of interest and importance in any administration," Haberman said. "She's a government employee. It should not be a surprise."

CNN White House reporter Alayna Treene echoed the comments, saying that some in the White House now admit "that some of those more aggressive posts defending Harp actually had the adverse effect of drawing more attention to this relationship and dragging this story out."