Political News

On February 27, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) stood before the Cuyahoga County Court to request an emergency civil protection order (CPO) requiring that his ex-wife Emily Moreno stay away from him.

Miller’s rationale, he said, was that Moreno was harassing him with serious accusations that were untrue. Under penalty of perjury, he said he had evidence to prove it. 

“I filed today because my ex-wife is making allegations against me,” Miller told the magistrate judge, Jessica Bartolozzi. “She is making allegations against me…that never happened. And I have video and text message evidence showing the contrary of that.” 

Miller eventually dismissed the petition for a CPO voluntarily after the order had been in effect for five months; his lawyer testified in late July that Miller no longer had any “concern for his safety and well-being at this time.” In recent filings, however, Moreno’s counsel suggests Miller fabricated his initial reason for concern.

Miller had been granted the emergency CPO in February partly in response to his claims that he had evidence disproving Moreno’s accusation that he had injured her during a custody exchange of their daughter on February 1.

Moreno’s allegation that Miller shoved her against a wall that day had surfaced during an interview with detectives who were investigating possible child abuse related to their two-year-old daughter’s broken collarbone. As Mother Jones reported last month, Moreno told the detectives she couldn’t rule out Miller had caused the toddler’s injury because her ex-husband had also allegedly been abusive towards her. (The child abuse allegation was, in the end, “unsubstantiated,” which means there was not sufficient evidence to prove abuse or neglect.)

Miller has vehemently denied ever physically hurting the child or Moreno—including during the February custody exchange in question. “I have evidence supporting that fact,” Miller said when requesting the CPO, explaining that his girlfriend was an eye witness to the exchange and that video footage proved the girlfriend was present. 

But a few weeks after the temporary protection order was granted, Miller and his lawyers recanted some of the highly specific evidence Miller repeatedly attested to possessing. One of his lawyers, Pamela J. MacAdams, emailed Moreno’s lawyers about the situation in mid-March.

“After reviewing the ring doorbell tapes from February 1, 2026, we learned that [Miller’s girlfriend] was in fact not likely present at Max’s home during the time of the child exchange,” said the email, which was referenced in the domestic court filings. “We simply ethically feel the need to disclose to you this edit to our assertions about the evidence of that day.”

According to Rule 3.3 of the Ohio Professional Rules of Conduct, lawyers in the state are ethically and legally required to speak up if they come to understand that material evidence was not accurately described to a court.

“If a lawyer, the lawyer’s client, or a witness called by the lawyer has offered material evidence and the lawyer comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable measures to remedy the situation, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal,” states the rule, entitled “Candor to the Tribunal.”

In an August 6 motion, Moreno argues that Miller’s lawyers failed to take the required remedial steps. While they did email Moreno’s lawyer, Miller’s attorneys did not inform magistrate Bartolozzi that their client made “false statements.”

“Petitioner’s attorneys had an affirmative obligation to alert this Court. The obligation for ‘candor towards the tribunal’ is not satisfied by writing a letter to opposing counsel. Simply put, opposing counsel is not the same as the court,” the motion, filed by Moreno’s lawyers, contend. Neither Miller’s lawyers nor spokespeople responded to Mother Jones’ request for comment.

Filings suggest Miller or his lawyers had informed police and the Department of Family Services that they had “mistake[n]” what happened during the February 1 custody exchange. But by not informing the body that issued the emergency CPO, Moreno’s counsel argues that Miller’s CPO was based on a fictional account.

“Without [the girlfriend’s] corroboration, Petitioner would have no proof this incident did or did not occur. As such, her ability to verify Petitioner’s claims regarding the incident were necessary, and Magistrate Bartolozzi’s issuance of an ex parte CPO would have been founded on the basis of Petitioner’s allegations of her presence and video proof. That CPO lasted five months,” the motion says.

In a series of questions and answers between Miller and one of his attorneys, this is how Miller initially described his supposed eye-witness evidence from the February 1 custody exchange in which Moreno has said she was assaulted.

Andrew Brown (Miller’s lawyer): Did you thereafter collect evidence to establish that that is untrue? 

Miller: Yes. 

Brown: Is one piece of evidence that you collected a witness statement from an individual who was present there? 

Miller: That is correct.

Brown: Okay. And what is that statement, and who made that statement, and what is the general statement? 

Miller: My girlfriend, her name is [redacted], very nice lady. She works night shift. So her shift starts at 7 pm, and she leaves usually around 6:30. Every time that Emily comes for pick up time, [girlfriend] hides…

Brown: Did [girlfriend] say she was present during the custody exchange?

Miller: Yes, she was.

Brown: Did [girlfriend] say she didn’t hear any kind of distress, commotion, pushing, shoving, thumping, anything of that nature?

Miller: That is correct, and she was looking through the window to make sure, and she always does this, she always looks after me during pick up time because she knows that it’s a very tense time for us, and so she was always keeping an eye on things that are happening at pick up time because she knows that it’s a very tense time for us, and so she was always keeping an eye on things that are happening at pick up time.

Brown: Do you have video surveillance at your home?

Miller: I do.

Brown:: Do you have video Ring doorbell surveillance?

Miller: I do.

Brown: Do you have video surveillance overlooking your driveway? 

Miller: I do. 

Brown: Does the video surveillance from your home establish that your girlfriend was present immediately preceding the custody exchange?

Miller: Yes. 

Miller has faced calls from at least six Republican Senators—including ex-father-in-law Bernie Moreno, Jon Husted, Roger Marshall, and Katie Britt—to drop his bid for reelection. However, the window for Miller to withdraw and to be replaced on the ballot passed earlier this week.

While Miller dismissed his motion for a protection order in late July, his custody battle with Emily Moreno is ongoing. The next court appearance is currently slated for two days after Election Day.

The Trump administration has lost roughly one quarter of the country’s MQ-9 Reaper drones as part of the president’s ongoing war against Iran. 

Three U.S. officials told The Washington Post Thursday that the U.S. military had lost at least 45 Reaper drones. Each low-flying surveillance and attack drone costs between $30 million and $50 million to produce, depending on what type of sensor each machine carries, placing the potential total cost of the missing or destroyed Reapers at up to $1.3 billion.  

A fourth U.S. official told the Post that not all of the Reapers were shot down—some of them crashed after the operators’ connection to the drone failed. 

At the beginning of the war, there were approximately 185 Reapers in the U.S. military fleet, including 165 in the Air Force and 20 in the Marine Corps. Marines spokesperson Lt. Col. Joshua Benson said that none of the Marines’ Reaper drones had been lost. 

In May, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Tabor told the Senate that the number of remaining drones had fallen to roughly 135, noting he was “concerned” about the losses. 

Reaper drones join the growing list of weapons that the U.S. is shedding faster than it can replace. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published in May estimated it will take until at least 2030 to restore the U.S. missile stockpile to pre-war levels, leaving a multi-year “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. Since that study was published, the United States has only continued to execute military strikes, and Trump’s war against Iran has racked up a total estimated bill of more than $100 billion.

It’s been more than five months since Trump launched his military onslaught against Iran, and multiple reports have raised concerns that the United States is running out of weapons. Trump administration officials have denied the reports, even after they reportedly sent the president into a rage. 

Despite insisting that the U.S. weapons stockpile is far from depleted, the Trump administration has launched a desperate campaign to boost weapons manufacturing. 

Last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg gave industry leaders three weeks to submit their plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the department was actively focused on boosting munitions acquisitions to provide “the weapons our warfighters need at the pace the threat demands,” but he claimed the effort predated Trump’s seemingly endless war. 

President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived and poorly planned war in Iran has stranded more than 5,000 troops on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East for more than 250 days, with the servicemembers onboard experiencing such a deterioration in both their mental and physical health that it’s caused multiple crew members to attempt to jump overboard, CNN reported on Thursday.

Source

On Thursday, the surveillance technology company Flock announced that it will limit access to its network of over 120,000 automatic license plate readers following disturbing reports dating back to at least 2021 of police officers abusing the technology for criminal activities like stalking.

In his blog announcement, Flock CEO Garrett Langley did not mention the widespread public backlash against the technology, which, in significant part, led more than 20 local governments to begin rolling back their use in July. He only stated that the policy updates work to address “three areas that are critical to the company: strengthening privacy, accountability, and security.”

Among the updates: Flock is now making mandatory a previously optional feature that flags “abnormal activity” for review, shortening the default recommended data storage period for Flock surveillance products from 30 to seven days, and establishing optional limits on data sharing between police departments.

I've learned a lot in nine years of building @Flock_Safety. Some of it from our customers, and some of it from the communities they serve.

Today we’re announcing the changes that came from listening. A new standard for privacy, security, and accountability in public safety…

— Garrett Langley (@glangley) August 13, 2026

The ACLU said in a Thursday statement that most of Flock’s policy changes are “merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures” it highlighted last month. While Flock claims its new policies will empower local police to dictate what other users can and cannot search their data for, the nonprofit said the company is assuming that its system already prevents improper search queries.

Clearly, this isn’t the case. In a statement, Tom Bowman, the policy counsel for security and surveillance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said that the policy changes are still “asking thousands of police departments to police themselves, despite evidence from across the U.S. that this lack of guardrails is unsafe.”

In other words, Flock’s answer to a crisis of trust is to ask for more of it.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana appeared on CNBC, where he was asked the uncomfortable question of whether he regretted his deciding vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of Health and Human Services. This is in the wake of yet another broken promise from the brainworm-having, bear carcass prankster—this time undermining childhood vaccination guidelines. Cassidy…

Source

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump too tired to answer for his mistakes…

Source

On August 2, Ohio Republican Representative Max Miller accidentally shared images of his two-year old daughter’s genitalia while attempting to discredit other accusations against him—like holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head, scalding her with boiling water, and breaking said two-year-old daughter’s collarbone. 

Now, his ex-wife Emily Moreno—daughter of GOP Senator Bernie Moreno—is suing him for exposing their daughter to online pedophiles earlier this month.

“Defendant Congressman Max Miller, and Miller’s lawyer, Defendant Aaron Minc of Defendant Minc LLC, recklessly published and disclosed to the world a nude image of the child depicting her genitalia,” Moreno’s lawyer, Subodh Chandra, wrote. “Faced with a mostly self-inflicted dumpster fire of public attention to his reputation for abusive behavior, Miller so desperately wanted to salvage his political job, that he recklessly and intentionally provided [his attorney Aaron Minc] a trove of documents and photos, indifferent about what they contained or how they were used.”

Miller’s own lawyer was accused of initially lying about “the seriousness of their offense,” before he admitted to releasing the pictures himself.

“Unfortunately, I missed the last three pages of a 40+ page document with sensitive content. It was completely unintentional and a mistake.... To be clear, this was completely my fault. I am solely responsible for what happened. I was the only person responsible for assembling, creating, reviewing, adding, deleting, redacting, or making any changes to the information and files that were in this folder,” Minc wrote days after the incident.

“Any parent—and any lawyer—knows the grave danger of posting nude photos of a toddler on the public web for pedophiles and bad actors to download,” Moreno’s lawyer contined. “They victimized an innocent child to score political points, and we intend to hold them fully accountable under federal and state law.”

This is just one of many, many fires for Miller.  His father-in-law Senator Bernie Moreno has been virtually the only Republican to call on his resignation, saying he needed “serious psychological help.” 

“He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote on X. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them.” Miller also received a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend and former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. 

Miller has done his daughter—whose collarbone he’s already been accused of breaking—an incredible disservice, regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit. Even still, the entirety of GOP leadership from Trump to House Speaker Mike Johnson has stood steadfastly behind Miller as a House Ethics Committee investigation commences. 

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham’s remarks opposing transgender athletes in women’s sports injected political debate into a league with no openly trans women players. By Brooke Migdon for The 19th Irene Vázquez found the WNBA at just the right time. It was the summer of 2020, and emergency pandemic guidelines had kept them physically separated from their friends and support…

Source

Members of Congress are outsourcing their work to artificial intelligence without much, if any, oversight or limits.

Staffers and legislators are using AI chatbots to write speeches and news releases, manage mail from constituents, draft questions for congressional hearings, and even draft amendments, The Washington Post reports. The Senate and House have cleared staffers to use ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini, with the House also approving Claude. Last year, the House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses, encouraging staffers to use them.

Senators and representatives regularly use the services themselves. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville asks ChatGPT questions about issues such as Medicare and Medicaid while driving across his home state of Alabama.

“It’s kind of like you can sit there and talk to an expert,” Tuberville told the Post. “You don’t know whether or not they’re 100 percent correct. But they put you on the right path.”

Republican Representative Mike Flood asked a chatbot where private equity was buying single-family homes while working on a bipartisan housing bill last year. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who supports stricter regulations on tech companies, has used ChatGPT to look up demographic information.

Congressional staffers aren’t clear about if there are limits on using the bots. One staffer uses Copilot to draft bill amendments, while another fed all of his phone contacts and text messages going back years into Claude and told it to build a database of reporters, including what he pitched them, what they accepted, and what went badly. Claude also runs the communications budget of that congressional office, overseeing taxpayer-funded mailers and all ads sent to constituents.

That staffer isn’t sure what congressional rules allow for AI use.

“You’re still not supposed to put constituent data into AI,” he told the Post. “There are weird things around where the rules are. I don’t know all of them.”

In reality, Congress’s own rules are that AI can’t be used to make deepfakes, make personnel decisions, handle sensitive information such as constituent information, or finalize legislation. AI can be used to help draft a bill, but humans have the final review of it. And chatbots can be used to draft a response to a constituent, but aren’t allowed to be told who the constituent is.

Most of the staffers who spoke to the Post said they didn’t know these rules, and enforcing them is left to staffers self-policing or reporting their colleagues. This has already caused problems, such as when Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna proposed an amendment to a defense bill earlier this summer.

One of her staffers included a summary of the proposed change with the amendment, and the first line began with “increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM????Claude responded:”, which was clearly lifted from a chatbot. Until rules and enforcement are tightened, incidents like this, and worse, will continue, and the public might not ever know.

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed the Trump administration’s Title VI lawsuit against Harvard University.

Donald Trump accused Harvard in March of violating civil rights laws by allowing a “hostile educational environment” for Jewish and Israeli students over the course of “several years.” Harvard denied the allegations and moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

In a new filing, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns found that most of the incidents the Trump administration had cited all took place between 2023 and 2024, and the remaining three took place in March 2025—a full year before the complaint was filed.

“Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” Stearns wrote.

The lawsuit was “devoid of any factual allegations plausibly establishing that any events that might be construed as evidence of noncompliance occurred after June 30, 2025,” he added.

The original lawsuit alleged that students were stopped from entering campus buildings by “antisemitic demonstrators” in 2023 and 2024, and that some Jewish students felt pressured into wearing baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes.

The federal government claimed this was evidence that Harvard had violated civil rights laws, and demanded the return of “billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.” But clearly, the administration has failed to prove in court that the university has done anything wrong.

This is the latest blow to the president in his ongoing battle with the Ivy League school. Since the start of his second term, Trump has denounced Harvard as an example of an institution infecting American youth with liberal ideas and has attempted to freeze its federal funding.

In June 2025, Trump officials tried to prohibit Harvard from admitting international students before a judge stopped the plan. In September 2025, Harvard won a lawsuit against the administration after the latter froze billions in federal funds from the school. In that case, a federal judge said the administration had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

This lawsuit was the second time the Trump administration has sued Harvard this year. In February, the Justice Department sued the school for allegedly not handing over its admissions records.

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Inside Washington

The challenge Peggy Flanagan will face in Minnesota

If Democrats want any shot at taking back the Senate, they need to win the seat in Minnesota being vacated by retiring Democrat Tina Smith. Normally, this wouldn’t be a tough task: The party hasn’t had to worry about a Minnesota Senate seat in nearly 20 years. But a unique set of political crises in the state and a pro-choice Republican candidate could change that.

The progressive Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan won the Democratic primary on Tuesday night, edging out centrist Representative Angie Craig. Flanagan, endorsed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, will now face Republican Michele Tafoya, a former sports broadcaster who beat out a crowded field. In her victory speech, Flanagan started tying Tafoya to President Donald Trump’s unpopular agenda, which will likely be one of her main messages during the race. “Donald Trump has cost our state far too much already. And we are not about to give Donald Trump another loyal soldier like Michele Tafoya to take his orders and do his bidding,” Flanagan said. The DFL issued a statement emphasizing a high-profile Tafoya gaffe from March, when the Republican said that Americans need to “be patriots” about gas price spikes due to the Iran war—and that if they find their budgets stretched, they should “take one less trip to Starbucks.”

But despite that inauspicious start, Tafoya this week showed why she is likely the best shot Minnesota Republicans have had to take a Senate seat in decades. As outlets called the race in her favor, Tafoya sketched out a moderate campaign focused on the fraud scandal that has plagued Governor Tim Walz’s administration: “This isn’t about red versus blue. It’s common sense versus crazy. We will not reelect politicians who let criminals steal billions and treat accountability as optional. We deserve better, and it’s time we demand better,” Tafoya said in a statement after her win.

“Republicans are very happy to run against [Flanagan] because they think she owns the fraud issue,” said Steven Schier, a professor of political science at Carleton College. Fraud in state social safety net programs has been a major issue in Minnesota since 2020, and Trump’s administration has elevated reports of fraud to denigrate Somali-Americans and paint the state’s Democratic leadership as inept and corrupt. The main instance of fraud involved a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which stole $250 million worth of federal nutrition funds during the pandemic. There are a number of other social safety net fraud cases working their way through the courts. While the leader at the center of the Feeding Our Future case, Aimee Bock, is white, the Trump administration has highlighted the Somali-American backgrounds of others charged, often calling the Minnesota fraud allegations “Somali fraud” and using the story to boost anti-immigrant and anti-Somali sentiment.

By emphasizing Flanagan’s role as Walz’s lieutenant governor while these scandals transpired, Tafoya could appeal to frustrated suburban voters and independents. “There are two groups in the state that determine the direction of state elections: the group of political independents and the suburbs,” Schier said. “We know from anecdotal evidence that suburbanites are very upset with their money disappearing through fraud.”

Tafoya is also well positioned to win over suburban and independent voters because of her views on abortion. Tafoya has described herself as “pro-choice” multiple times, though she sought to align herself more with pro-life conservatives during the primary election. This pro-choice statement could end up being extremely helpful among suburban women voters.

“College educated suburban women are perhaps arguably the most important voting bloc there is in Minnesota,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University. He pointed to a town called Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis in Hennepin County. Around 20 years ago, Edina was solidly red, but has since become blue. “Tafoya needs to win in places like Edina,” Schultz said. The centrist women in those kinds of suburbs are deeply concerned by “family security issues,” he explained: school safety and quality, cost of living, and healthcare. “If [Tafoya] can talk partly about that and come across as at least a moderately pro-choice candidate,” he added, “that helps her a lot.”

The suburban ring counties around Hennepin and Ramsey will be crucial to watch, said Schier. Those counties—Washington, Dakota, Scott, Carver, Wright, Sherburn, and Anoka—have tended to be solidly Democratic, but could flip to Tafoya.

The last Republican to win a Senate seat in Minnesota was Norm Coleman, who served from 2003 to 2009 and was narrowly defeated by Al Franken in 2008. Coleman’s path to victory was unique. He served as mayor of St. Paul for eight years, which helped him pick up urban voters that would ordinarily lean Democratic. Experts also pointed to Arne Carlson as a useful example of a statewide Republican victory in Minnesota. Carlson served as governor from 1991 to 1999 and was both pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights. In 1994, the Republican Party denied him an endorsement over his pro-choice views, but he still won the primary and general elections in landslides.

While Tafoya seeks out suburban women, Flanagan will need to distance herself from the fraud scandal. One way she will do that will be shifting attention from state governance to federal issues, like Trump’s unpopularity and the ICE incursion into Minnesota earlier this year, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

She’ll also lean on what state Democratic leaders and experts say was a successful primary. Schultz pointed to her success outside of the Twin Cities, where Flanagan outperformed Craig in areas where Democratic voters tend closer to the center. “She emerges out of this a stronger candidate than I think most people were thinking,” Schultz said. Flanagan also has a turnout advantage: The Democratic primary turnout was double that of the Republican turnout on Tuesday.

Polling so far puts Flanagan ahead. She was up seven points against Tafoya in a late May Impact Research poll. A June survey of 800 likely voters had a generic Democratic candidate up eight points against a generic Republican, with nine percent undecided. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “Likely Democratic.” Despite that, the race is still competitive, and could strain national Democratic resources in a cycle where the Senate map is tough for Democrats. “Even if Tafoya can’t win, the fact that the Democrats now have to defend a seat and worry about it—one that they normally don’t have to worry about—is a problem for them,” Shultz said.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Democrat Nate Willems, running for Iowa attorney general, is putting a populist spin on the traditional tough-on-crime talk for A.G. candidates. If elected, he announced this week, he’ll create a new enforcement unit to recoup cash from wage theft, which he said in an interview to the Iowa Capital Dispatch amounts to “ten times the amount of all other types of theft in the state of Iowa combined.” The unit will offer workers a “direct line” for reporting violations, and have a special focus on “chronic offenders.”

Buried beneath Wisconsin primary and consumer price index headlines on Wednesday, The New York Times published a disturbing report about Ecuadorean fishermen being attacked and killed in drone strikes, with their lawyer saying the drones were “deployed from a vessel manned by ‘gringos’ with American-flag patches.” Despite the Trump administration boasting of similar strikes on boats in the past, both the Pentagon and U.S. Coast Guard have disclaimed these attacks. The Times also points to flight data showing “that a maritime patrol plane—based out of a military base in El Salvador—flew in the direction of all three boats in the days before they were attacked. The pilots onboard spoke English with American accents, according to air traffic control communication recordings.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In a brief for the Roosevelt Institute, Michael Madowitz outlines policies that could “reduce price volatility and maintain global stability” in the face of supply chain shocks like the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. “Advanced economies need not import inflation when crises occur due to geopolitical conflict,” he writes. “We are once again seeing a real-time example of the case for strategic reserves, buffer stocks, and spare production capacity for even abundant commodities.”

The Center for American Progress publishes a new report by Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky on Trump’s efforts to meddle in upcoming elections. They detail 15 specific tactics, including “installing election deniers in key government positions,” “gutting key agencies and essential election security programs,” “sharply curtailing voting by mail,” preparing to “purge” voters by “weaponizing federal databases and demanding personal voter information,” and more.

The Center for Biological Diversity celebrated California’s announcement of a rapid phaseout of the pesticide paraquat earlier this week. Vermont became the first state to ban paraquat in May. “California and other states are taking aggressive steps to protect people from this dangerous poison, but the EPA continues to spin a web of red tape to obscure paraquat’s well-documented harms,” said Nathan Donley, the organization’s environmental health science director. You can read TNR’s coverage of paraquat research, as well as state efforts to shield pesticide firms from cancer lawsuits, here and here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Does anyone really think ICE can be trusted with those gloves?

Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted unpack the hype around the agency’s new “humane” shock gloves, which Edie notes aren’t supposed to be used on “pregnant women, children, the elderly, or people with severe disabilities—in other words, people that ICE has demonstrated no qualms about detaining.”

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With David Crowley now officially nominated to seek the Wisconsin governor’s mansion: How many Black governors have there been in U.S. history, and can you name three? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

My mother died 28 years ago today,

the first day of summer

the last day of my mother.

I loved being 28.

That was 56 years ago,

not as long ago

as the Inca civilization

or the death of Chaucer,

but now let us look at the future.

If I end up living

as long as my mother did,

the year will be 2037

a year in science fiction.

But why is the pasta water

taking so long to boil?

The White House is trying to mislead Americans about President Donald Trump’s impact on crime rates—but the numbers aren’t adding up. 

Last month, the White House touted a mid-year report from the Council on Criminal Justice as evidence of Trump’s public safety policies working to reduce crime. But a closer look at the report found that it doesn’t actually support the administration’s claims, NOTUS reported Thursday. 

In a press release published on July 29, the White House claimed that the four cities that saw the steepest drop in homicides in the first six months of the year were Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis, and New Orleans—four cities where Trump deployed National Guard troops and federal agency officials “after Democrat leaders failed to act.”

But those cities didn’t see the steepest drops in homicides—and some of them weren’t even included in the original CCJ report. 

In reality, the cities that saw the biggest drops were Lincoln, Nebraska; Rochester, New York; and Little Rock, Arkansas. Washington saw the sixth steepest decline, and Los Angeles saw the seventeenth. Meanwhile, Memphis and New Orleans weren’t even mentioned in the CCJ report. 

The White House cited a separate article to support its claim about Memphis and New Orleans, but the author of that piece told NOTUS that the White House’s statement was “incorrect.”

Following a request for comment from NOTUS, the White House published yet another press release Tuesday featuring completely different statistics. This time, the Trump administration claimed that Washington and Memphis had seen the ninth and tenth largest drops in homicide, according to Axios’s analysis of a survey from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

Neither report suggested that the downward trend in national homicide rates—which began in 2022—has anything to do with Trump’s policies. 

The Trump administration has continually fudged the numbers on the president’s public safety record in order to manufacture consent for a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that continue to tear apart families and trample on human rights. But the real crime numbers don’t support his federal takeover of American cities. For example, homicide rates in Minneapolis, which was flooded by ICE agents this past winter as a part of Operation Metro Surge, were higher in the first half of 2026 than they were in 2019, according to the CCJ report.  

Experts have suggested that several factors could be responsible for the change, but many pointed to significant investments in community violence intervention following the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the current administration has cut more than half of federal funding for gun violence prevention from the Department of Justice. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, under Trump appointee Mehmet Oz, changed their guidance on voting in nursing homes last month. Now, a group of senators is saying that these changes are designed to disenfranchise America’s two million nursing home residents.

“On July 20, 2026, CMS issued a memo that appears to be an attempt to intimidate nursing home staff from assisting residents in the voting process,” a group of senators led by Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) and Alex Padilla (D-NJ) wrote August 12, in a letter addressed to Oz and shared exclusively with Mother Jones. The new memo “replaces language from CMS’s 2020 and 2024 guidance aimed at ensuring that facilities helped residents to vote with language threatening nursing home staff with prosecution for voter fraud.” The new guidance removes suggestions of specific ways nursing home staff can help residents vote—providing transportation to polling places, for example—and instead threatens staff with fraud investigations if they “engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.”

The new CMS memo is the latest in a series of Trump administration actions designed “to restrict vote by mail and undermine the right to vote based on unfounded allegations of voter fraud tied to the President’s denial of prior valid election results,” the Senators wrote.

According to CMS officials, there is a legitimate voter fraud threat in nursing homes. “Unfortunately, in recent years, we have become aware of several allegations of instances in which resident rights were unlawfully violated,” the July CMS memo says. But the instances they mention did not lead to any actual fraudulent voting. The memo cites two specific examples of supposed voter fraud in nursing homes in Texas and Wisconsin. But in the Texas case, no improper votes were ever cast, though a nursing home clerk was charged with criminal voter fraud for making technical errors in the voter registration system. And in the Wisconsin case, a sheriff’s claim of coerced voting at a nursing home was later thrown out.

Nursing home residents face unique barriers to voting. Many lack their own transportation, contend with polling places that are not ADA compliant, or may require assistance to fill out their ballots.

The new guidance might encourage staff to avoid helping residents vote. Many nursing home staff in the United States are immigrants who have already been targeted by Trump’s rollback of programs like TPS. “The removal of guidance on vote by mail procedures, combined with specific threats to investigate nursing home staff for assisting residents who are exercising their right to vote, may deter nursing homes from assisting residents with voting by mail,” the senators wrote. CMS spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Wednesday that she’s stepping away from her role of lying to the press on camera about President Donald Trump’s corrupt, amoral, evil, dangerous, and idiotic actions and policies to spend more time with her children. And while you may be cheering that you’ll no longer have to watch her infuriating, childish, and frankly useless daily…

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The Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on airplanes that were supposed to be used for deportation flights, but instead have been sitting mostly unused at an airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

The New York Times reports that the 10 used jets, which were purchased through a no-bid contract with a northern Virginia business with ties to former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have barely been used. Seven of the planes, older Boeing 737s, aren’t being used because DHS doesn’t have the staff to operate them, the Times reports, citing an internal government document.

Three of the plans are luxury business jets, and DHS has sought to lease or loan two of them to other agencies, including one of them to the FBI for use by Director Kash Patel, the agency said in a letter to Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The firm that got the contract for the planes is Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose chairman donated to a political action committee headed by Noem. But DHS may not have needed the planes in the first place, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a history of using planes chartered from private companies for deportation flights, as well as military and Coast Guard jets.

Former acting Director of ICE John Sandweg, who served under the Obama administration, told the Times that “if you asked me to write a list of the things ICE needed to increase the number of deportations, buying its own fleet of airplanes would absolutely not make the top ten.”

When the Times contacted DHS for comment, a spokesperson blamed Noem, whom President Donald Trump fired in March.

“The contract for Daedalus was made and approved by department leadership before Secretary Mullin was sworn in,” DHS said in a statement, adding that the department “reserves the right to adjust course in an environment with evolving requirements and demands.”

A spokesperson for Noem disagreed, telling the Times that the jet purchase was finalized under her successor Markwayne Mullin. The contract size reportedly went up by $303 million on the day Mullin was sworn in.

Regardless of who is responsible, the jets are wasting taxpayer dollars sitting on a tarmac. Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Patty Murray, who sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee, say that DHS officials told them that most of the planes would not be used for deportations after all.

“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars,” Murray and Murphy wrote in a letter to the department.

Paramount has discussed establishing an independent editorial board for CNN to ease well-established fears that the network’s sale wil reduce it to a mouthpiece for David and Larry Ellison—and by extension, President Trump.

Paramount already owns CBS News, a relationship that has resulted in the ascension of The Free Press’s Bari Weiss and the crippling of 60 Minutes. Now, the $81 billion deal to buy CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery—which would give them a near monopoly on mainstream media—has been paused after 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit to be heard in March of next year.

Larry Ellison reportedly met directly with Trump last November, and earlier this year was hit with allegations of “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange: more favorable coverage of the Trump administration and its allies in exchange for favorable treatment by Trump administration antitrust and media regulators.” Trump has been critical of CNN for the greater part of a decade.

Everything the Ellisons have done so far at CBS News, from uplifting Bari Weiss to pushing the network in a more pro-Israel direction—has been to gain Trump’s blessing for this massive deal. It’s no wonder people are concerned—and unconvinced—about some independent editorial board actually doing anything to stop that from continuing. And while some referenced conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch creating a similar committee when he purchased Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones in 2007, others have noted that that too was simply all for show.

Last year, I highlighted the work of Paulina Borsook, whose writing in the 1990s and 2000s presciently exposed the anti-government extremist tendencies of Silicon Valley elites. My BlueSky thread went viral and helped lead to a re-publishing deal for Borsook’s masterpiece, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech.

On Monday, Mother Jones published a profile of Borsook by writer Anna Merlan. From “A Tech Prophet Finally Gets Her Second Coming”:

The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life. A tech prophet finally gets her second comingIn 2000, Paulina Borsook published a book foretelling the anti-government sentiments of the tech world. Now that it’s too late, people are ready to listen.

I wrote a foreword for the new version of Cyberselfish and will publish it here in the newsletter next month.

We’ll also be doing an online book club to help launch the new paperback, which publishes on September 15. You can buy the ebook or pre-order the paperback here.

Use this Bookshop link to support independent bookstores and this newsletter. Please read the book so we can have a great discussion with Paulina Borsook.

My interview with Inc.

Speaking of books, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy continues to attract strong press attention. We’re six days away from the book’s release!

Sam Blum of Inc. Magazine interviewed me for a piece headlined “This Journalist Says Tech Billionaires Are Trying to Take Over U.S. Democracy. Here’s What He Wants You to Know”:

A few years ago, Gil Durán felt he was working alone. Few people, he explains, would listen to his concerns about a rising tide of authoritarian sympathies shared by some of the tech industry’s most powerful figures. 

Now, in his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley and the War on Democracy, Durán makes an argument that is hard for many to ignore. As he frames it, the book is both an exposé and a warning about Silicon Valley’s rightwing political drift and the consequences of corporate money in politics. Durán also argues what he believes the U.S. stands to lose if the movement isn’t stopped.

Click here to read the full interview.

We’re almost to publication day! Please pre-order The Nerd Reich book today wherever you buy your books.

You can use this Bookshop link to support independent bookstores (and this newsletter). Or click here for the official Nerd Reich book page for other pre-order options.

President Donald Trump reportedly wouldn’t stop harassing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt during her brief maternity leave.

CNN’s White House correspondent Alayna Treene reported Wednesday that Trump had repeatedly called Leavitt while she was on maternity leave to have her second child. The president was apparently desperate to know when she would leave her children and return to her podium, Treene said, citing anonymous sources.

Treene also said that Leavitt’s decision took the administration by surprise, and Trump even asked her to stay.

Another source close to Leavitt told the Daily Mail that she had been strongly considering whether to step down during her maternity leave—while she was fielding frequent calls from the president.

Leavitt left for maternity leave on April 27, three days later than she initially planned to leave. The press secretary gave birth to her daughter on May 1, and returned to work just nine weeks later on July 1. Federal employees are typically entitled to 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

Two sources told the Mail that Leavitt’s decision, announced Wednesday, had been months in the making. “She was just trying to figure out how to politely step down with [Trump’s] blessing,” one of the sources said.

Another source told the Mail that Leavitt realized she needed to leave after returning from maternity leave. “First week back she realized she wasn’t feeling it anymore,” the source said.

Yet another source told Mail that Leavitt had been experiencing severe “burnout” from her job.

“It was a very stressful job to do with her children. She never got any sleep, and she didn’t want her performance to slip either, so she decided to stay as long as she could and do the job well,” the source said. “The president did everything he could to keep her.”

Leavitt said Wednesday that she was leaving to spend more time with her family. “The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter, I have felt in my heart that I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary,” she wrote on X.

Trump initially announced Leavitt’s departure Wednesday, saying she was leaving in order to “spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!”

But it doesn’t seem likely that the president has “respect” for Leavitt’s decision—after all, he couldn’t even give her three months off with her newborn baby.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Paramount Skydance head David Ellison demanding that he speak to them and answer questions about his plans to merge his media company with Warner Bros. Discovery. Ellison, a Republican donor and ally of President Donald Trump, has moved news content at CBS News to the right and there are fears that the planned $111 billion merger…

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