A Natalie Harp Conspiracy Theory (Not Really)

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

It’s very easy to be a conspiracy-monger. Let’s give it a shot.

This week, there was a hullabaloo about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s 35-year-old aide who’s been derisively referred to within the White House as the “Human Printer.” She’s always by Trump’s side, typing his social media posts and printing out and feeding him positive and misleading information about his presidency. (“Look, this poll shows that 110 percent of all Republican voters think you’re better looking than Jesus Christ!”) She’s also a conduit for aides and foreign leaders who want to slip Trump a message.

There’s been much speculation and tittering about her devotion and physical closeness to Trump. She was part of the small elite band that was hustled into that now-infamous catering compartment in Turkey when Trump covertly fled Air Force One to use another aircraft due to a security threat. Her notes to Trump read like love letters. (“You are all that matters to me.”)

This new shot of attention for Harp was triggered when Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, said at a campaign rally, “[Trump] golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Outraged MAGA-ites and Trump defenders pounced (see Dumbass Comment of the Week below) and slammed Ossoff for supposedly implying Harp and Trump were trysting and denounced him for denigrating a hard-working woman.

Harp’s 24/7 presence in Trump’s life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Ossoff unfairly insinuated anything and demeaned Harp. His remark was at least partially prompted by the reports that Harp was one of the few aides who accompanied Trump when he skedaddled from Air Force One and left behind the seemingly expendable Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Whether he intended to or not, Ossoff spurred a national conversation about Harp—and about the appropriateness of discussing her bizarre relationship with Trump. Her 24/7 presence in his life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

On Wednesday, MSNOW reported that for more than a year, while working for Trump in the White House during his second term, Harp declined several times to seek a security clearance. Obtaining clearance is a routine move for an aide, especially a staffer in such proximity to the president. After all, she can hear and see the top-secret information flowing to and from Trump. It’s a tremendous security lapse to allow a person without clearance around-the-clock access to the president. Yet Trump permitted this. Eventually, Harp did receive a clearance. But how stringent was the review? And why did she not do so at the start?

That’s a bit suspicious, right? What would Alex Jones have said if an aide to President Barack Obama or President Joe Biden had done the same? Now let’s add to the picture where Harp worked prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022: the One America News Network.

OAN is a far-right cable news outfit that’s for Trump fans and MAGA-heads who think Fox News has gone soft. And it’s been overtly pro-Russia. When it was launched in 2013 by Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who got rich in the circuit board business, he instructed OAN staff to promote Trump, push conservative issues, and downplay Russian aggression. Fun fact: Herring married a Russian woman years earlier. And OAN aired reports from RT, a Kremlin-funded media outlet and propaganda shop. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that OAN producers “said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia.” This was after Russia had launched its first invasion of Ukrainian territory and illegally annexed Crimea—and after Vladimir Putin had attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win.

Where did Harp work prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022? The One America News Network, which, during the 2020 campaign, played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation.

Later, during the 2020 presidential campaign, OAN played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation. One of its anchors, Chanel Rion, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to smear Joe Biden, claiming without evidence that Biden had engaged in brazen corruption in Ukraine. The pair both promoted baseless allegations about Biden made by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who was later sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department for being a Russian agent. Derkach served as a major source for a series of Rion reports bashing Biden.

After the 2020 election, the US intelligence community stated in a public report that Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—­to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump.” The media organizations referenced here included OAN. The report also noted that Derkach and the Russian operation assisted the production of an anti-Biden documentary, apparently a film that aired on OAN in early 2020. (Following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Derkach fled to Russia. In 2024, he was appointed to a seat in the Russian parliament’s upper chamber.)

After the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, OAN aired a report from the front lines filed by Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop and fugitive who found asylum in Russia and became involved in disinformation operations Moscow mounted against the United States. He was identified on OAN as a foreign correspondent for the network, and the long piece he produced claimed that Ukrainian forces—whom he called “Nazi terrorists”—had massacred civilians and that the war had been caused by “kleptocrats in Washington” who were desperate to keep “Ukraine out of the hands of Russia” because they used Ukraine to “launder their money” and needed to hide their corruption. Dougan accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of skimming billions of US aid money and causing “thousands of innocent people to die.” OAN was broadcasting straight-­out, pro-­Putin, made-in-Russia propaganda.

As regular readers might guess, I cover OAN, Derkach, and Dougan in more detail in my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say.

Now what might a creative, conspiracy-minded person do with all these dots? An attractive aide has an oddly close connection to the president and is situated to know everything and can influence his thinking. She helps write his tweets. She can control what information he receives. She once worked for an organization that has aired Russian disinformation, that has been identified by US intelligence as an outlet for Kremlin propaganda, and that has been ordered by its owner to go easy on Russia. And she was reluctant to submit to a security clearance investigation.

Hmm.

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say. But I have no doubt if there had been a similar set of facts for Obama or Biden, OAN, Fox News, Kash Patel, Glenn Beck, Roger Stone, and just about the entire MAGAsphere (and maybe Joe Rogan) would have been off to the races with such a narrative.

But the Harp tale is indeed a serious episode that reminds us of how Trump and his gang don’t give a damn about security. The fact that a staffer with such access to Trump could blow off a security clearance for so long is troubling. As is the fact that Jared Kushner, who is not a government employee and who has business interests around the world, is handling highly sensitive matters in three sets of negotiations: the Ukraine war, the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and the Iran war. (He’s also doing a piss-poor job in each of them.) No one was punished for Signalgate. Trump readily accepted a 747-8 from Qatar that posed significant security problems. Mar-a-Lago is a counterintelligence nightmare. Trump’s crypto business and other deals allow foreigners—perhaps even overseas officials—to buy influence with him. Let’s not forget he swiped top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021 and stored some in a bathroom.

Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly because he and MAGA world went apeshit over Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails when she was secretary of state. There was never evidence that her use of a private server for her official emails—a violation of the rules—led to any security breaches. But during both Trump administrations, there have been multiple instances of Trump and his lieutenants violating basic security protocols. Harp dodging a security clearance investigation is the latest example. The Donald-Natalie story might seem like gratuitous gossip. Yet it shows once more that Trump and his gang have no respect for rules and believe they can get away with anything. That attitude is a national security threat.

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In the Wake of a Toxic Disaster, Roseland Parents Still Struggle to Keep Their Children Safe

This story was originally published by Capital B and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As a young boy in the 1960s, almost every weekend Elbert McGee walked a half-mile with his father through the wooded streets of Roseland, Louisiana, to the Tangipahoa River. There, he learned to swim and fish for bass, crappie, and the occasional catfish.

​“We had a good, good life as children,” McGee said, unloading fishing gear from his truck. “We grew up healthy and in community.”

Today, McGee still lives in the home where he was raised. But he no longer makes the 10-minute walk to the river to fish. Instead, he drives three hours to Grand Isle.

That change only came after August 22, 2025, when Smitty’s Supply, an oil facility in the majority-Black town, exploded. The disaster released an estimated 12 million gallons of oily liquid and chemical waste into the river, and painted hundreds of homes, churches, schools, and playgrounds with black oily streaks.

Within weeks, McGee’s then-15-year-old son, Markel, began having nosebleeds severe enough to make him miss school. A friend who is battling cancer developed a respiratory illness. Neither family has received a definitive answer as to whether those conditions are linked to the blast.

For McGee, who has a combined eight children and grandchildren, and other Roseland parents, the loss of the river has been surpassed by a much more pressing question: What does it mean to be a parent when you cannot stop harm from reaching your children?

Across Roseland and communities like it, protecting a child from refineries, railyards, and contaminated water becomes a never-ending, intimate form of vigilance—one Black parents shoulder disproportionately. Research shows Black children experience higher exposure to environmental toxins like lead, air pollution, and pesticides than children of any other race in the US, turning everyday parenting into an act of defense against threats they never chose and often cannot see.

“This is my home,” McGee said. “I have no other realistic option to leave.”

McGee, 63, has begun to sit with the devastating thought that he may have failed to protect his children by raising them here.“They’re not gonna be healthy here, especially doing anything in the dirt or the river,” he said.

“We can’t control the government or these companies,” he added. “We can pray on it. But you want the best for your children, and it hurts not to be able to give it to them.”

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality did not respond to Capital B’s requests for comment. In a statement, Smitty’s Supply said: “Smitty’s has completed all of the remediation requirements under the existing CERCLA Consent Order with EPA and has submitted its final report to EPA for its concurrence.”

Elbert McGee grew up fishing and farming in his community before the explosion.
Adam Mahoney/Capital B

McGee’s fears are rooted in more than parental instinct. After toxic events, children can absorb a larger dose of contamination than adults because they breathe, eat, and drink more relative to their body size, and because they often spend more time outdoors and closer to contaminated dust and soil. Their developing lungs, brains, and immune systems can be especially vulnerable.

Markel, a football player, was back in the dirt, running and breathing hard, just days after the explosion. McGee wonders if he should’ve pulled him from the sport, but it is one of the teenager’s main joys. And at the time, McGee said, he had been told Roseland was safe.

McGee now joins the Black mothers trained to keep the windows shut on a day the air smells metallic in Philadelphia, even as the house grows hot without air conditioning. The fathers, like John Ishmael Taylor in Flint, notice rashes developing on their children and begin buying bottled water they cannot comfortably afford. And the parents in Houston forced to decide whether their child’s cough is another cold or the result of pollution from the trucks idling outside.

When Markel first developed nosebleeds after the explosion, McGee immediately took him to the doctor, only to be dismissed. “They didn’t even examine him,” McGee said, “they said it was normal, but this had never happened before Smitty’s [exploded].”

All the while, across local farms and along the riverbanks, dozens of animals have died.

“I just want to make it to 70,” McGee said.Adam Mahoney/Capital B

One year since the disaster, both the federal and state governments have publicly maintained that the toxic cocktail of chemicals that spread over Roseland posed “no imminent threat to public health.” But the government’s assessment did not answer the questions parents said governed their daily decisions. They are still unsure if the soil on their property is safe or if children can play outside. And increasingly: What symptoms should prompt medical care?

For parents, the lack of clear answers has meant becoming informal toxicologists and medical advocates while still getting children to school, holding down jobs, and paying rent or mortgages.

“I just want to make it to 70 [years old],” McGee said. “I don’t think I can make it here this long and I’m doing all of this while trying to take care of the children in my house.”

He estimates he has spent more than $20,000 on his property since the disaster. He has replaced his roof and exterior siding and continues to excavate soil around his home.

In Roseland, where the average person makes just over $17,000 annually, many households have largely been left to fend for themselves since the explosion. Capital B has spoken with dozens of residents who said they have received no compensation or support as they have tried to clean their properties, rid their yards of contamination, and, in some cases, replace the exteriors of their homes.

Since the August explosion, the town has also experienced a chemical spill from a processing facility related to Smitty’s that infiltrated the drinking water supply.

Earlier this year, Pam Bean, who has two granddaughters who attend Roseland Elementary, said the lack of support has been “insulting.”

“You always hear about politicians talking about rural America for votes. This is rural America, and look at how they really treat us,” she said.

The absence of help is not only a burden adults carry.

Young people who grow up learning not to trust their drinking water or not to play outside when the refinery is flaring are learning that home is a place of potential danger. They notice whether a spill is cleaned quickly, officials answer questions, or a school is treated as worth protecting. When those signals are absent, children can learn that the institutions meant to safeguard them will not, research shows.

Pam Bean posed for a photo with her two grandchildren in April.Adam Mahoney/Capital B

The consequences can compound when exposure contributes to asthma attacks, sleep disruption, lead-related developmental risks, or repeated school absences. Parents may keep them inside, miss work to take them to appointments, or pull them from class when symptoms emerge.

At a protest in April, Candice Hart held her daughter’s hand as she described what the contamination has meant for her family. Her daughter has had respiratory problems since the explosion, Hart said, and she has emails and letters showing that she and other parents had raised alarms for months, despite school officials’ claims otherwise.

“No parent should have to choose between their child’s education and their child’s health,” she said.

Markel, now a junior in high school, wants to leave Roseland, and perhaps Louisiana, after graduation. The explosion has changed his relationship to the place where his father learned to fish and swim.

His desire to leave is not simply teenage restlessness, McGee admitted. It is one consequence of growing up in a place that has taught him home can be hazardous.

Standing outside of his tarped home about half a mile from Smitty’s, McGee said the lack of an urgent response is inseparable from who lives in Roseland.

He grew up with Ed Smith, the white owner of Smitty’s Supply, and graduated high school with him. “But [today,] he’d walk right past me like he never knew me,” McGee said.

Smith has not made a public appearance about the disaster in the year since the explosion. Smith and his family live in a town 25 miles away from Roseland.

“I think Smitty’s hasn’t done nothing for this community because of who lives here, knowing him,” McGee said, referring to the town’s racial and economic makeup.

In Louisiana, Black communities home to industrial plants are exposed to seven to 21 times more toxic pollution than similar communities with more white residents. And historically, Black communities have received less recovery aid than white areas with comparable damage during environmental disasters.

But in Louisiana, the Black families living with the costs of industrial pollution are often also tied to the industries that create it. Industrial work remains one of the few accessible paths to a stable, middle-class income.

McGee lives inside that contradiction. Like 30 percent of Louisiana’s workers, he has an industrial job, driving more than an hour to shifts at a chemical facility in the region commonly known as Cancer Alley, a disproportionately Black area with some of the nation’s highest rates of cancer.

He knows the risks of the work, he said, but sees few alternatives that would allow him to provide for his family.

Dominic Kruger, a father in Cancer Alley, took his first job at a petrochemical plant shortly before his 18th birthday. It was the only way to survive in his home state, he said, “unless you want to work at McDonald’s.”

For McGee, it felt much the same. “I just want to feed and clothe my children,” he said. “I know I’m killing myself for a job, breathing in benzene and chemicals every day, but I didn’t want my children exposed, too.”

His home doesn’t feel like a place he can offer his children and grandchildren anymore. In his backyard, where a patch of dead grass has sat since the oily rain, McGee’s father grew “everything” and had hens.

“It is hard to give up generations, but we may have no choice.”

“I know I’m killing myself for a job,” McGee says,”but I didn’t want my children exposed, too.”Adam Mahoney/Capital B

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40 Acres and a Lie Part 3

The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people—and it has continued over decades.

Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation.

“They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land [to] take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain…There’s all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”

This week on Reveal, we dive into the examination of American history happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials ask: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

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PBS airs our glyphosate reporting

“They’re taking away the choice of being surrounded by a toxic chemical,” says Tahoe resident and three-time Olympian Hannah Teter about the US Forest Service’s spraying of herbicide around her home town.

The Supreme Court decided last month that the maker of Roundup, the world’s most widely used weed killer, can’t be held responsible for failing to warn users that one of its key ingredients – a chemical known as glyphosate – may pose risks to human health. Glyphosate has been a mainstay of agriculture in this country for decades, and thousands of lawsuits allege that exposure to the chemical caused cancer. PBS NewsHour featured our reporting based on an analysis of millions of pesticide reports in California which reveals another, lesser known way glyphosate is being used right now: to spray this country’s national forests.

Our analysis of California pesticide records shows that the amount of glyphosate sprayed in state forests has quadrupled over the past decade. From Yosemite to Lassen Volcanic National Park in the very north of the state, residents are up in arms about the fact that the efforts to help them recover from wildfires may expose them to a harmful chemical.

PBS NewsHour featured our reporting on their nightly newscast. You can watch the story here:

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Partisan’s Exit Suggests DOJ Is Getting Better at Politicized Prosecutions

Ed Martin, a trench-coat donning former “Stop the Steal” advocate whose work at various senior Justice Department jobs was charactered by brash, bumbling efforts to use the department to punish critics of President Donald Trump, is leaving DOJ, Trump announced Friday.

“Ed is now leaving to go outside to fight Legal Battles for the upcoming Midterm Election, and the Presidential Election of 2028,” Trump posted.

Martin, early in the Trump’s term, was the most vocal proponent of Trump’s claim that he could order federal prosecutors to pursue his critics. But Martin’s exit is not victory for the rule of law. It is a sign that newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had been a critic of Martin’s attention-seeking antics, is ushering in an era in which Trump’s wish to weaponize DOJ against his foes is more competently pursued.

Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Martin is a political journeyman who lost a series of races in Missouri and ran far-right advocacy organizations. He wasn’t hugely successful: in 2017, Martin was hawking a coloring book based on Trump tweets. But Martin, who gave himself the moniker “Eagle Ed,” gained national attention in 2020 as an advocate of Trump’s false claims about that year’s election, and later as a lawyer for indicted January 6 rioters. Martin’s statements in that period include claiming that antifa was behind the attack, calling it a “hoax,” dubbing Capitol rioters “patriots,” and arguing those prosecuted for the riot deserved “reparations.”

Trump’s selection of Martin as interim US attorney for Washington, DC, last year, along with the pardon of 1,600 Capitol attackers, was a middle finger to DOJ and the federal prosecutors in Washington who brought almost of all the January 6 cases.

As the acting US attorney, Martin fired and demoted many of those prosecutors. He also began issuing a torrent of typo-strewn tweets and letters in which he threatened to investigate or prosecute Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, anti-Trump protestors, Georgetown University, and many others, all for what appeared to be protected speech at odds with Trump’s pronouncements.

“Noone [sic] is above the law,” Martin wrote in one letter to Elon Musk threatening to prosecute people who publicly identified DOGE employees.

Martin’s days as US Attorney ended amid fixed opposition to his confirmation by Senate Democrats and by Sen. Thom Tillis, who opposed Martin due to his connection to the January 6 attack. Martin hurt his own chances when, as Mother Jones reported, he lied about his ties to a January 6 defendant infamous for dressing as Hitler.

With his confirmation as a US attorney blocked, Trump named Martin head of the so-called weaponization task force set up to hound critics, local prosecutors and other connected to investigations and multiple indictments Trump faced during his first term and the Biden presidency. Trump also made Martin his chief pardon attorney, a job from which Martin memorably hatched a plan for Trump to issue pardons for so-called fake electors, though those people, prosecuted in state courts, could not benefit from presidential pardons. Trump did it anyway.

In a press conference held last year, Martin said that the task force would work to publicize its work. Even if people they targeted could not be charged, he said, “we will name them…and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” That was a pledge to violate DOJ tradition and written rules that the department pursue justice by prosecuting crimes in court rather than through public relations offensives.

But Martin made good on it. He appeared outside the Brooklyn home of New York Attorney General Letitia James in August 2025, wearing a trench coat, and posed for pictures taken by the New York Post—part of a bid to draw attention to claims that James committed fraud in private real estate dealings, a largely undisguised effort to retaliate against James for the successful civil case her office brought against Trump for fraud.

But it wasn’t all bluster. Martin had a role in investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, the Letitia James indictment, and that of former FBI Director James Comey, though the cases against Comey and James were thrown out. (DOJ later charged Comey again for allegedly threatening Trump by posting a picture of seashells arranged to say “86 47.”)

But Martin’s role at DOJ was steadily curtailed by Blanche, who reportedly believed Martin was overly focused on publicity with minimal achievement. Martin was ousted from the weaponization task force in February. Trump’s April firing of Pam Bondi as Attorney General and elevation of Blanche to acting AG was bad news for Eagle Ed. Martin’s exit comes a few weeks after Blanche’s confirmation.

Blanche appears to have sought Trump’s support for the nomination as Attorney General by advancing cases like the Comey seashell indictment and by pushing Trump’s plan for a $1.8 billion fund to pay January 6 defendants and others who claim they were politically prosecuted.

Blanche said he dropped the plan for the fund, though not a connected agreement that purports to spare Trump and his family members from IRS audits, amid pushback from Senate Republicans.

But any hope that Blanche’s confirmation would lead to his backing off from efforts to make DOJ a tool of Trump’s personal agenda quickly took a hit. First, Blanche spoke at a campaign rally for a Trump-endorsed candidate, in alleged violation of a law barring federal employees from partisan political campaigning while on the job.

Then, in a recent television appearance, Blanche declined to say that the Justice Department is independent of presidential directives. “I’m not going to pledge that,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press, adding that he would allow Trump to weigh in on individual prosecution decisions. “The elected president of the United States says something to me,” Blanche said. “And I’m supposed to say to you, ‘I would say no.’ I mean, that’s not the way it works.”

Blanche’s problem with Martin was not his effort to launch political prosecutions, but Martin’s poor execution of them, it seems. Martin is not leaving DOJ due to his intentions. The problem, apparently, is incompetence. With more effective advocates of Trump’s weaponization wishes consolidating power, fans of the rule of law may already miss Martin’s ineptitude.

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Flock Execs Are Taking Credit For Catching Bad Cops Now

Flock Safety is having a hard month. The surveillance technology company, which has sold more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras to some 6,000 police departments across the US, is up to its neck in cancelled contracts—at least 34 since the start of 2026—and public backlash.

Dozens of police officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for allegedly abusing the technology, which allows police to track vehicles’ movements, to stalk people. Flock’s safety reforms in response to the stalking issue, which mostly consist of voluntary security practices police departments can adopt if they choose, left advocates unimpressed.

“Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7.”

In total, at least 56 municipalities have canceled contracts, deactivated their cameras, or rejected potential Flock contracts since the beginning of this year, according to the advocacy group DeFlock. Many of those towns are simply contracting with competitors like Axon or Motorola instead—so they’re still working with surveillance-tech companies, but encroaching on Flock’s market share as they do so.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to invent creative ways to break a Flock camera: one House candidate in Tennessee allegedly took an extremely direct approach and shot some Flock cameras with a gun, while comparatively pacifist Flock-haters online post satirical videos teaching viewers how to saw through a Flock camera’s pole or spray-paint over its lens.

In response, Flock is trying a new public-relations tactic: Some of its leadership team is publicly arguing that stories keep coming out about Flock abuse not because Flock is especially liable to be abused, but because Flock is better at catching abusers.

You're going to see more stories about Flock catching bad cops misuse the database. We're the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale. If the others had this level of auditing, you'd see a lot more stories about cops abusing DMV data, etc. https://t.co/O2bHuXLjJ1

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

Rahul Sidhu, the company’s chief strategy officer, called Flock “the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale” in a series of posts in which he also wrote that taking away a police officer’s Flock database access would be tantamount to taking away their gun.

Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person. Cops break the law when they run plates for buddies or criminal histories on their daughter's boyfriends. Do we take all that away from them?

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

“Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person,” Sidhu posted. “Do we take all that away from them?”

“One of the many problems with Flock as a company is that they they treat legitimate privacy concerns as if they are just PR issues,” said ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow, “and so once again they are seeing this uprising against Flock throughout the country as a public relations problem.”

Flock, Marlow said, created the problem. In dozens of cases dating back to at least 2021, police officers have reportedly used Flock cameras to stalk their partners, their exes, and even women traveling across state lines to get abortions. And now, “[Flock] thinks if it just includes itself as a watchdog of the problem it’s creating, it somehow deserves a pat on the back.”

Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. The firm is apparently no longer sending out the auto-reply with which it responded to journalists earlier this month: “Thanks for reaching out to Flock. Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

“I think more accurately they’re probably smoking grass if they think they can do an entire PR campaign and then disappear so they don’t have to defend it,” Marlow said.

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Florida’s GOP Has a Very Short Playbook: Call Everyone a Socialist

In a bright red power suit, Ashley Moody, the former Florida attorney general who nabbed the state’s GOP Senate nomination in Tuesday’s primary, strolled onto the stage of Florida Republicans’ “Victory Rally” on Thursday and did not waste time attacking her opponent, state Rep. Angie Nixon.

“If I told you last year that Florida would have a nominee to the United States Senate that was a self-declared socialist, would you believe me?” Moody asked the crowd of more than 150 people who gathered at a Tampa event venue to hear from candidates on the Republican ticket. “This is not a joke. This is not a fictional TV series. This is reality.”

“Let me make this very clear,” Moody continued. “Angie Nixon wants the United States of America to look like Cuba.”

Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker from Jacksonville who helped lead the charge against Florida’s Republican-led redistricting earlier this year, defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, who raised millions of dollars against Nixon’s $975,000, in a stunning upset Tuesday. A union organizer, Nixon is running a campaign centered on affordability, Medicare for all, free childcare, paid family and sick leave, and a national rent freeze. She’s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, though the organization did not endorse her.

The rally marked the GOP’s launching point for the 74 days until the general election in November. It also provided a glimpse of how Republicans will stoke fears of rising socialism against their opponents, especially those who embrace a version of the term, like Nixon.

In a state like Florida, where many Cubans and Venezuelans who fled communist regimes now live, the socialist label can be particularly toxic—and if Thursday’s rally is any indication, the GOP won’t hold back on attempting to leverage that kind of rhetoric this election season.

“The Democratic Socialists of America today is the Democratic Party, and that’s why we need to work triple time to ensure that the party of boys playing in girls’ sports, open borders, and unaffordability never, ever gets a foothold in the state of Florida,” RepublicanBlaise Ingoglia, the state’s chief financial officer—an elected position— who is running to keep his job this November, told the cheering crowd, which included women donning bedazzled red hats and a baby dressed in a US-flag-printed footie pajama.

The evening ended with a speech from Byron Donalds, the House Representative who won the Republican nomination for Florida’s gubernatorial race this week. Donalds, who was endorsed by President Trump, began his remarks by mentioning that he had spoken to the president**—**who “was obviously in high spirits”—that morning.

After explaining the highlights of his platform, including the need to DOGE every government agency in Florida, Donalds pivoted to David Jolly, his Democratic rival—a centrist and former congressional Republican—calling him a “Trojan horse” for the Democratic Socialists of America. (Jolly is not affiliated with DSA or endorsed by them.) The audience erupted in cheers, raising signs with Donalds’ campaign slogan: “Defending the Florida Dream.”

“If you’re going to bend the knee to the Democratic socialists, you’re abandoning common sense,” Donalds continued. “You’re abandoning families. You’re abandoning sound economics. You’re abandoning parental rights. And in Florida, we are never going to abandon the hardworking people. We are going to fight for them every single day.”

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MAHA and the Midterms

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food-label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters—who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House.

But there are signs the MAHA-MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense stand-off over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections. We start with a piece on the Iowa gubernatorial candidate harnessing MAHA’s power in farm country; stay tuned for more stories in coming weeks.

Zach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?

He’s running for Iowa governor on promises to bust up Big Ag. But some farmers are questioning his authenticity.

Top image: Illustration by Mark Harris; Anna Moneymaker/Getty; Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty; Getty (9)

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To Miami’s Chagrin, Warming Seas Are Driving a Bumper Crop of Sargassum

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Dealing with seaweed is the bulk of Chris Bumpus’s job during the summer. As chief of conservation for Miami-Dade county’s parks, recreation and open spaces department, Bumpus is in charge of cleaning sargassum off 17 miles of county beaches. But some days, the odds are stacked against him and his team.

More and more sargassum, a kind of floating brown algae, has been washing up on the beaches of south Florida, west Africa, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Most mornings this time of year, a member of Bumpus’s seaweed crew walks on to South Beach around 7am to take pictures of piles of the stemmy, spicy-mustard-colored seaweed before a dozen tractors and specialized beachcombing vehicles are put to work trying to integrate the sargassum into the sand or rake it out to be hauled away. “Back in July, the beach looked clean for about an hour,” Bumpus said. That month alone, 9,000 tons of seaweed were removed from Miami-Dade county beaches, more than ever removed in a single month before.

“Hopefully, by October it will die down,” he said. “July is always the worst. It’s been a heavy season.”

Before the clenup begins, a crew has already marked any new sea turtle nests so they aren’t harmed by the sargassum removal. The county holds a permit with the Florida department of environmental protection for its employment of heavy equipment to corral the seaweed. The permit prohibits that equipment during turtle nesting hours, from 30 minutes before sunset until sunrise. So far this nesting season, about 700 sea turtles have built nests on county beaches.

Miami-Dade county spends $3 million per year on sargassum removal, more than any other county in Florida, Bumpus said. The Florida Keys, however, can see heavier accumulations of sargassum because of the inlet-like shape of their beaches, he said. For centuries, sargassum has grown in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the north Atlantic encircled by ocean currents that keep the seaweed concentrated there. But in 2011, scientists saw the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt form for the first time, stretching from west Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists say several factors contribute to the blooms, including nitrogen and phosphorus from rivers—such as the Amazon, Congo, and Mississippi—warmer water temperatures, and ocean circulation.

Since 2011, the amount of sargassum has doubled every five years, as a result, larger and denser mats of sargassum have been washing up in Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean. This summer, satellite imagery showed the second highest amount of sargassum in the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt at a whopping 33.5 million tons, slightly behind 2025 when the seaweed biomass reached 38 million tons.

The climate crisis has also played a role in the proliferation of sargassum, said Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University Harbor Branch, who has been studying sargassum since 1982. “As we see more ocean warming, we get more evaporation and that drives these extreme rain events that essentially flush more nutrients from land into the ocean,” he said. “So that’s an indirect effect that can increase nutrient supply to sargassum.”

Miami-Dade county first began efforts to address its seaweed problem in 2019. The county’s annual seaweed removal budget is funded by tourist development taxes paid by visitors who stay at hotels and short-term rentals. In July, Miami-Dade county commissioners voted to petition the state to allow the county more flexibility to use beach raking equipment in more areas.

“I think this year has been kind of a gamechanger in that we’ve seen major inundations here in south Florida, more than we’ve ever really seen in past years, and comparable to what’s been happening in the Caribbean, Mexico and the Dominican Republic,” LaPointe said.

In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a $115 million national plan to combat sargassum, including employing ships that scoop the seaweed out of the water. But federal and state agencies in the US prohibit sargassum removal in open-water because of concerns for the sea life that lives in the floating seaweed mats. But LaPointe said that could eventually change, as research in his lab is showing that sargassum loses much of its marine life as it deteriorates and approaches the beach.

Sargassum serves as a critical habitat in the open ocean, but that changes as it gets close to and comes ashore. “What we’re seeing is that as this excessive amount of sargassum comes ashore it’s affecting coral reefs and seagrass beds and creating dead zones, which strips the oxygen out of the water,” LaPointe said. “That’s why we’re getting these odors of hydrogen sulfide, which presents a human health risk.”

More aggressive seaweed removal efforts might be necessary, but these measures won’t address the underlying causes of increasingly massive blooms in the ocean, LaPointe said. “People are realizing this isn’t going away. It’s getting worse. It’s the new normal. It’s not only treating the symptoms but doing more research on the land-based nutrient sources that we can do something about,” he said.

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Why Cancer, Not Affordability, May Be the Biggest Issue in Iowa’s Midterms

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In Iowa, one of the key battleground states in November’s midterm elections, just about every political candidate agrees on one thing: Something must be done about the state’s rising rates of cancer.

The midwestern state has the second-highest rate of cancer nationwide and, together with Utah and West Virginia, is one of only three states where the incidence of the disease is rising, according to cancer rate monitoring from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Promises to address the issue are now top of mind for candidates ahead of the 3 November elections, in which Iowa may play an important role in deciding control of Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump’s term.

“The road I live on, I think there’s only one family that has not dealt with some kind of cancer,.”

Republicans hoping to preserve their party’s dominance of the state and Democrats who believe conditions are right for them to win key races have pledged to make fighting the disease a priority. Where they differ is in their views over the degree to which the state’s powerhouse farm economy has contributed to making Iowans sick, and what to do about it.

“I think state leadership and industrial agriculture are very hesitant to have those conversations, but I think the Iowa public is calling and demanding action and conversation and answers in a way that both parties are needing to respond, and [that’s] why it has become the campaign issue of this upcoming election,” said Sarah Green, executive director of the Iowa Environmental Council, a non-partisan group whose research into the disease’s prevalence has helped fuel public awareness of the crisis.

Iowa’s cancer rates followed national trends until 2012, when they began climbing upwards for reasons that Green said remain unclear. Cancer includes a broad group of diseases, and many aspects of life, from stress to food to environment, can modify someone’s risk. What’s plain is the importance to voters – one survey has cancer ranked as the top issue facing the state, eclipsing even the cost of living.

In the race for the state’s open US Senate seat, Democrat Josh Turek whose spina bifida he attributes to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, has brought up his sister’s struggle with breast cancer, while his opponent, the Republican congresswoman Ashley Hinson, has emphasized her attempts to reform health policy in Washington.

Candidates of both parties vying for the state’s four Republican-held House districts have battled over who would be better suited to channel federal resources to the state’s needs. In the race to replace the incumbent governor, Kim Reynolds, Zach Lahn won an upset victory in the Republican primary with the support of a PAC connected to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, and both he and his Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, have unveiled lengthy plans to curb rates of the disease.

“The road I live on, I think there’s only one family that has not dealt with some kind of cancer,” said Seth Watkins, a longtime farmer in southwest Iowa who sees the emphasis on fighting the disease—and potentially changing the state’s approach to agriculture—as long overdue.

“We have a farm policy that has resulted in less soil, less biodiversity in wild species, more cancer, fewer farmers and fewer opportunities. I mean, at some point, wouldn’t people just look at that data and say, you know, maybe we should do something different?”

Iowa is the top producer of corn and pork in the US and one of the largest growers of soy, and agriculture generates a third of the state’s economic output and a fifth of its jobs.

But that immense productivity comes at a cost: Iowa’s farmers use more fertilizer than those of any other state, and it also leads in the number of concentrated animal feeding operations, which are part of the meat processing supply chain and generate runoff.

Green pointed out that Iowa also had relatively few regulations intended to keep pesticides and farm runoff, which can be heavy with cancer-linked nitrates, away from people and out of water supplies.

“Too many politicians from Washington, DC, to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money.”

In2022, Iowa’s overall rate of cancer was approximately 506 cases per 100,000 people, higher than the national average of 442 per 100,000 people, according to National Institutes of Health data. It also has elevated rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and acute myeloid leukemia, two cancers that some studies have found may be linked to glyphosate, the herbicide marketed as Roundup that is the most used in the state.

Agriculture’s impact on Iowans has recently become pronounced, even for people that have nothing to do with farming.

Some Iowa waterways are among the most polluted by nitrates in the US, and last year the water utility serving Des Moines, the state’s capital and largest city, announced its first-ever lawn watering ban because levels of the compounds in the rivers from which it draws its water supply had hit near-record levels. The utility ordered water rationed again this summer.

When the Iowa Environmental Council last year dispatched researchers across the midwestern state to learn more about how cancer was affecting its residents, Green said talking about the link with agriculture was often regarded as a “taboo.”

“Iowans knew there were issues, but felt like they were not supported by their state and by elected officials in, one, hearing their stories, and then two, addressing and recognizing real challenges that Iowans are experiencing a health crisis,” said Green, whose group convened the 16 listening sessions together with the Iowa Farmers Union and Drake University’s Harkin Institute, a public policy thinktank.

There are other factors connected to cancer diagnoses in Iowa—its residents face a higher risk of exposure to naturally occurring radon, and this year the state legislature approved a law mandating that mitigation systems be installed in new homes. Under Reynolds, the state has also sought to curb alcohol and tobacco use, and in June the GOP-dominated legislature approved a $320 million investment in water quality. But Green said that measure offered relatively little new funding and “doesn’t address pollution at the source.”

The gubernatorial candidates Lahn and Sand came out against a June Supreme Court ruling making it more difficult for people who believe they contracted cancer from exposure to Roundup to sue its manufacturer.

The RepublicanLahn’s campaign platform has largely focused on incentivizing farmers to change their ways to prevent water pollution, while accusing major chemical manufacturers of misleading Iowans about their products’ safety.

“We all know something is terribly wrong, but too many politicians from Washington, DC, to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money. This will not go on when I’m governor,” Lahn said after winning the nomination in June.

His Democratic opponent, Sand, has called cancer “the top issue on everyone’s mind no matter what part of the state I’m in, and rightfully so,” and proposed measures to better manage farmers’ use of manure, test for radon and help farms enroll in conservation programs.

“I feel like we’re mining instead of practicing agriculture. “

Neither has as aggressive a platform as Chris Jones, the Democratic candidate for state agriculture secretary. A former University of Iowa researcher, he wrote a popular blog that explored the state’s water quality issues, but stopped writing it after, he told the Iowa Capital Dispatch, two Republican state senators threatened the university’s funding over his writings. One of the lawmakers denied the allegations, and Jones later left the school.

Jones is proposing a wholesale transformation of the state’s approach to farming to reduce its impact on water quality. His platform includes zoning changes to address the environmental effects of Cafos and a “strategic retreat” from growing corn for ethanol, a top cash crop for the state’s farmers.

“We know radon is a driver of lung cancer here. Well, guess what? We have policies to help reduce exposure to radon,” Jone said. “The same could be said for nitrate and drinking water. Let’s develop policies that reduce that risk.”

The incumbent agriculture secretary, Mike Naig, a Republican and former lobbyist for Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup that’s now part of Bayer, did not respond to an interview request sent to his campaign.

Some farmers aren’t waiting for the election results to change their agricultural practices.

Last March, three farmers in north-central Iowa announced themselves as “the Lobe Rangers,” unveiling a website complete with a logo of a masked man standing amid the corn in which they made their case for how it is possible to farm profitably without harming themselves or the environment.

“This has been boiling underneath the surface for me for 15 years, and the reason I think we launched is that we just kind of had enough. We saw the inaction of the political class and the ag lobbying leadership class of putting up the same nonsense,” said Zack Smith, a corn and soybean farmer who is one of the rangers.

The group—which took its name from a particularly fertile part of the state called the Des Moines lobe—follows the state’s nutrient-reduction strategy, a blueprint to keep nitrates out of the state’s waterways and the far-off Gulf of Mexico that’s only voluntary, but which the rangers insist works.

Watkins, who works land his great-grandfather first cultivated in 1848, has in recent years downsized what was once a 4,000-acre farm, helping younger farmers grow diversified crops on smaller plots of land.

The change in tack follows more than three decades of Watkins farming at scale and growing more disillusioned by an industry that depends heavily on federal subsidies while exacting a worsening toll on the environment. “I feel like we’re mining instead of practicing agriculture. And, you know, show me an area, whether it’s the oil industry or mining or any of that, where when the resources are gone, the people are better off,” Watkins said.

Watching the state’s political class focus on cancer, and by extension, water quality, had been a curious experience, since it had been a concern of theirs for more than a decade, said Smith.

While the group—which has not endorsed any candidates—doubt any single election can reverse Iowa’s frightening health trajectory, it can at least make a step in the right direction. “It’s definitely not gonna be solved by what’s gonna happen in the election in 2026,” said Smith. “We’ll maybe start making some steps in the right direction, but this is going to be something that is going to take a lot of change at a lot of different levels.”

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Trump’s Minions Say He’s Mulling New Tax Breaks—They’re Mainly for the Rich

Donald Trump apparently wants to cut taxes for the rich yet again. Is this some kind of twisted midterms strategy? Hard to say. But as Timothy Noah points out in The New Republic, the current and former National Economic Council directors Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow were on Fox News last week talking about two tax proposals the president is mulling, and both are pretty misguided.

The first one, which they would likely try and sell as a middle-class tax cut, is to expand the current (fairly generous) capital gains exclusion on profits from home sales. Under current law, when a couple sells their residence for more than they paid, the first $500,000 in gains is nontaxable. Kudlow seemed to be advocating for a $2 million exclusion.

Now, some kind of means-tested relief for people who have owned their primary residence for decades may be reasonable, but a $2 million exclusion, let’s be honest, doesn’t exactly scream middle class. Especially when you consider that the rule also applies to second homes. That means the Van Doughs, after unloading their $10 million Aspen ski chalet for $12 million, won’t pay a dime on the proceeds.

We’re already paying handsomely for the smaller exclusion. I reported in June that this $500,000 tax break, combined with the mortgage interest deduction for first and second homes, will cost the government $574 billion from 2025-2029. That’s according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). And since we talk about budgets in 10-year terms, we can say it will add at least $1.15 trillion to the national debt—which, in case you haven’t heard, just passed $40 trillion.

Quadrupling this real-estate tax break is not gonna help with that.

A more appropriate response to out-of-control deficits would be to repeal the ill-conceived tax giveaways in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, legislation that the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center calculated will cost the federal government $4.5 trillion in lost revenues over a decade. DOGE’s mindless cuts to the federal workforce, executed with Trump blessing and encouragement, will cost America a fortune as well.

And now Trump wants to double down on all the losses he’s created with his profligate policies, pet construction projects, and inept military adventures?

The second proposal, indexing capital gains to inflation, is even stupider. I wrote about this idea last summer, after none other than Reagan-era anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist told the Washington Post that he’d urged Trump to make it happen with an executive order.

Here’s the thing: Taxes on capital gains are already wildly discounted relative to taxes on labor, discounts that, based on the JCT’s numbers, will cost the government at least $2.5 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years. The current top rate for capital gains is 23.8 percent, which includes a 3.8 percent surcharge enacted to help cover the cost of the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, as I wrote previously:

A couple reporting $1,000,000 in salary income pays an effective rate of about 30 percent. That’s a huge difference, and part of why families whose money comes primarily from asset growth have amassed wealth so much faster than working families have. It’s no lefty exaggeration to say America’s economic system is rigged against workers and in favor of investors. It’s right there in the tax code.

Also…

Indexing capital gains to inflation, according to 2018 estimates from the Tax Policy Center and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would add yet another $100 billion to $200 billion to the [deficit]—with the richest 1 percent reaping 86 percent of the benefits.

_TNR’_s Noah, citing more recent estimates from the Yale Budget Lab, writes that “indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.”

All of which is to say that these hare-brained proposals, apart from being likely unconstitutional due to their sidestepping of Congress on tax issues, would exacerbate Dickensian wealth disparities and make our bloated federal deficit even worse, just as borrowing costs have reached a two-decade high.

Those midterms cannot come soon enough.

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Republicans Are Realizing That No One Wants Data Centers

The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo Tuesday suggesting that, if incumbent Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted loses his upcoming election against former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the Republican Party’s position on data centers is to blame.

The memo, as Axios reported, says that “the data center brand is the anchor” of Brown’s campaign. “He has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record,” the NRSC wrote, arguing that if “voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.” They go on to suggest that Republican candidates support some restrictions on data center development, such as only allowing their construction in communities that approve it by popular vote—while still opposing a total pause on data center construction, which they say would cause the US to “lose the AI race to China.”

While the NRSC urges caution, Donald Trump is still positioning himself as an unequivocal ally to data center developers. Speaking at a White House cryptocurrency event Wednesday, he insisted that “we’re building the biggest plants anywhere in the world.”

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state and I had a chance to get an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it,” Trump said. “The jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous. And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

Data centers generate far fewer jobs than other industries, such as manufacturing and warehousing; while they do generate tax revenue, they also tend to be built with generous tax abatements.

“If I were a governor or mayor, I would want that plant in my community,” Trump repeated. But, he added, “maybe [the industry] can use a little public relations help.”

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Trump Enraged South Korea to Please the North. It Didn’t Work.

North Korea launched several ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan on Thursday, according to South Korea’s military—just a day after the North dismissed Donald Trump’s seeming attempt at appeasement by cutting back on joint military training with South Korea.

“The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won’t change even though their duration and size were reduced,” Kim Yo Jong, a top figure in North Korea’s ruling party and supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, said on Wednesday, pointing to other military drills the US and South Korea carried out earlier this year and to South Korea accelerating its development of nuclear-powered submarines.

Before the drills began this week, North Korea said it would retaliate with “a new level of a deterrent.” North Korea had already fired at least two ballistic missiles into the sea earlier this month before the barrage on Thursday.

While Kim Yo Jong said relations between her brother and Trump are “still excellent”, she said she was “completely unaware” of any communications between the pair following Trump’s decision to scale back the joint drills this month by about half—a claim the US president made earlier this week.

The back-and-forth between Kim Jong Un and Trump goes back to Trump’s first term, where peace negotiations between the pair collapsed in 2019 amid disputes over how much sanctions relief North Korea would receive for partial denuclearization. Kim has since sought to further militarize and cooperate with Russia, but he said last September that he would be open to resuming talks if the US dropped its “obsession” with eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

But Trump’s decision to cut military training with South Korea looks to have had only negative consequences, angering that country to the point of President Lee Jae Myung calling to retake full control of its military operations from the US—despite Trump both claiming that the move would keep countries like South Korea and Japan safe and pushing other countries in Asia to ramp up their own defense spending and look for new allies.

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Roger Stone Is Lobbying for a Vape Firm Accused of Illegally Marketing to Kids

Ecto World, a Buffalo, New York–based company that distributes vape products and faces legal troubles, believed it needed an influential friend in Washington, DC.

Over the past three years, officials in New York state and New York City have accused the firm of illegal business practices. In March, police in New York state seized more than 28,000 pounds of illicit vape products linked to the firm, which operates under the name Demand Vape, and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that an investigation had found that the company had been “illegally shipping massive quantities of vape products” across the state and that “criminal charges against Ecto World and its owner will be pursued” by local district attorneys. A year earlier, New York State Attorney General Letitia James sued Ecto World and other vape companies for illegally distributing, marketing, and selling addictive candy- and fruit-flavored disposable nicotine products, many produced in China, targeting sales to children and “fueling the youth vaping epidemic.”

New York City filed a similar lawsuit in 2023, claiming that Ecto World; an affiliate named Magellan Technology; Matthew Glauser, president of Ecto and Magellan; and two other Magellan executives violated “nearly every federal, New York State and New York City law applicable to the marketing, distribution, and sale of flavored e-cigarettes, the sales of which are prohibited under laws enacted by all three jurisdictions.”

“Roger has good relationships with people in the administration,” Glauser said, noting that Stone was “making sure they hear…our message.”

But as it has come under fire in New York, Ecto World has found a champion in the nation’s capital, one it has paid well for: Roger Stone, the longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, conspiracy theorist, and political provocateur who was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Trump–Russia investigation, sentenced to 40 months in prison, and subsequently pardoned by Trump. Earlier this year, it retained Stone as a lobbyist and, as of the end of June, had compensated him at least $300,000 for his efforts, according to lobbying disclosure reports filed with Congress. The reports note that Stone would focus on the “Executive Office of the President” regarding the “regulation of e-cigarettes and related products.”

In an interview with Mother Jones, Glauser said, “Contrary to popular belief, we’re actually a responsible company,” and insisted that its goal is to “fix the broken regulatory system” governing e-cigarettes and vaping products. “The reason we brought Roger Stone on is to accomplish that,” added Glauser, a board member of the Vapor Technology Association, a trade group that has been criticized in right-wing media for not doing enough to stop the flow of illicit vaping products from China into the United States.

Trump’s return to the White House has been a tremendous boon to Stone, who not long ago was claiming he had been nearly bankrupted by legal fees and who, with his wife, was accused by the IRS of not paying nearly $2 million in taxes in a case he settled by agreeing to cover that amount plus interest and penalties.

Since Trump’s restoration, Stone’s lobbying firm, Drake Ventures, has signed up a variety of clients, including two Native American tribes, a rare-earth mineral company, a biotech firm developing vaccines, and Roger Ver, a cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who was indicted on federal fraud and tax charges. Ver paid Stone $600,000 for his services. (In October, months after Stone was hired by Ver, the Justice Department settled the case; Ver paid nearly $50 million in back taxes, penalties, and interest, and the Trump administration dropped the charges against him.) Stone has pulled in over $4 million in fees for his lobbying efforts, according to congressional records.

Working with the DCI Group, a Washington, DC–based lobbying powerhouse, Stone has also been hired to peddle his influence by foreign states, including the governments of the Bahamas and Nigeria, as well as the military junta of Myanmar, which has been paying him $50,000 a month, according to Justice Department filings. Since mounting a violent coup in 2021 that overthrew a democratically elected government, the junta has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

During Trump’s second stint as president, vaping regulation has been a contentious issue—and a cause ripe for lobbyists. Vaping and tobacco companies have pushed for easing restrictions on e-cigarettes and vaping products. In his first administration, Trump imposed limits on flavored e-cigarettes that are widely seen as designed to target children. But in his 2024 campaign, he vowed to “save” vaping and has become an ally of the industry.

Nevertheless, in September, federal agents conducted nationwide raids to seize Chinese-made vape products—illicit Chinese imports comprise much of the vaping market in the United States—and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this marked the beginning of a broader crackdown. “The Chinese are getting richer while our children get sicker, and we’re putting an end to that,” he proclaimed at a press conference.

In March, 71 GOP House members called on the Trump administration “to take decisive action to curb the influx of illegal, youth-oriented e-cigarettes that openly flout U.S. and Chinese law.” One of those congressmen, Rep. Brad Knott (R-NC), claimed the Vapor Technology Association has been “wrapped up” in a “scheme” mounted by China to flood the US market with vape products.

This year, though, Trump took action to help the domestic vaping industry and tobacco firms. He pressured Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary to approve flavored vapes.

Makary opposed doing so, fearing such products increase vaping among minors. But in May, the agency gave an okay to several flavors. A week later, Makary resigned. (Soon after the FDA decision, the New York Times reported that on April 30, tobacco company Reynolds American donated $5 million to a super PAC supporting Trump, and two days later, executives for Reynolds and another tobacco company had a lunch meeting with Trump and griped about the FDA. During the meal, Trump called Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and complained about the FDA’s regulation of e-cigarettes.)

Stone began lobbying for Ecto World at the start of this year. Was he involved in the decision to approve some flavored products? Glauser declined to say whom Stone was talking to or provide details on his lobbying for the vaping firm. “Roger has good relationships with people in the administration,” Glauser said, noting that Stone was “making sure they hear…our message.” A business associate of Stone, who asked not to be identified, said that Stone had advised Glauser to move away from “bubblegum” flavors and that Glauser was annoyed by that suggestion.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Stone was a prominent lobbyist in Washington, DC, working for the Republican-dominated firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. (The Manafort was Paul Manafort, who in 2016 chaired Trump’s campaign and was subsequently convicted of a bundle of financial crimes and other offenses, sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, and eventually pardoned by Trump.) In 1992, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, as well as several other DC influence-selling outfits, earned the nickname “the torturers’ lobby” for representing authoritarian regimes, dictators, and militant groups accused of human rights abuses. “After his sex scandal”—the National Enquirer in 1996 reported that Stone and his wife had placed ads in swingers magazines seeking sexual partners—“he couldn’t get corporate work,” the Stone business associate said. “Now his sex scandal seems tame, and he’s back to the stuff he did in the Black, Manafort, Stone days.”

Stone did not reply to a request for comment about his lobbying for Ecto World and a list of questions sent to him and to Grant Smith, an attorney listed on Stone’s lobby disclosure report as the contact for Stone’s firm. When a Mother Jones reporter called Smith’s phone number, identified himself, and asked to speak to Smith, the man who answered said, “He’s not available” and hung up. When Smith was later reached, he said: “I’m not talking. I have nothing to say.”

The legal actions filed against Ecto World and its associated companies, as well as other official investigations, have raised questions about the firm’s conduct and ethics.

When the 14 tons of products linked to Ecto World were seized by police in March, Hochul said the seizure was a “major” blow against “illegal operations that put our communities at risk.” In announcing her lawsuit against Ecto World and other vape companies, James blasted these firms for exploiting children: “They’re making nicotine seem cool, getting kids hooked, and creating a massive public health crisis in the process.” (Glauser said in a statement at the time that this lawsuit was “wasting New York taxpayers’ money and federal court time.”)

That lawsuit noted that Magellan Technology, the Ecto affiliate, “contracts with Chinese companies to manufacture certain e-cigarette brands in China, import them into the U.S., and then transfers the products” to Demand Vape, “who then sells and ships the products to other distributors.” Demand Vape, the filing charges, sold banned flavored e-cigarettes to New York distributors and retailers and “profited immensely from their illegal sales,” bringing in $389 million in revenue from its sales in New York from 2018 to 2024.

The suit alleged that Demand Vape “routinely accepted import shipments falsely labeled as ‘battery chargers,’ even though they were aware that the contents were flavored e-cigarettes” and had “long been aware that their commercial conduct is illegal.” It contended that Demand Vape has “targeted adolescents” for its flavored vape products.

The New York City lawsuit against Ecto World, Magellan Technology, Glauser, and others, which was filed in federal court, claimed, “So flagrant is Defendants’ law-breaking that Magellan-Demand Vape’s owner publicly admits…‘[to] ensur[ing] that retailers across New York can offer’ flavored e-cigarettes—despite the plain prohibition against sales enacted under federal, State and New York City law.”

“I don’t comment on active litigation, but we will have our day in court and we will be fine,” Glauser told Mother Jones. He did not respond to a list of detailed questions subsequently sent to him about Ecto World’s activities, the lawsuits it faces, and Stone’s lobbying on its behalf.

Ecto World and its affiliates have been subject to other government investigations. Earlier this year, the US International Trade Commission launched an investigation into Ecto World, Magellan Technology, and 14 other vape companies based in the United States or China for unfair trading practices. Ecto World and Magellan subsequently sought an order from a federal appeals court to terminate or stay the investigation; in June, their petition was rejected.

In December 2024, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, then the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, sent a letter to Glauser, noting, “The United States is currently experiencing an unacceptably high level of youth e-cigarette use, fueled in significant part by illegal tobacco products illicitly imported from the People’s Republic of China (PRC).” He pointed out that “it appears that your company openly distributes flavored disposable vapes made in the PRC which are marketed and sold in the U.S. without FDA authorization. These devices put millions of young Americans at risk for developing a lifelong nicotine addiction. During adolescence, exposure to nicotine through products like e-cigarettes can also harm brain development, particularly the parts of the brain related to attention, learning, mood, and impulse control. Sales of these unauthorized tobacco products are not only clearly prohibited, but also immensely harmful.”

Krishnamoorthi requested that Ecto World provide information on its business operations and its dealings with China. Glauser never responded, according to Krishnamoorthi’s office.

In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation into Magellan Technology for “suspected conspiracy to defraud the United States Government of revenue,” according to internal DHS documents obtained by Mother Jones. These investigative reports noted the agency “received information that Magellan Technology is undervaluing vape pens imported from China to evade 2.6% duty and 25% tariff.” Homeland Security Investigations conducted surveillance of the company’s office and a search of the office and a warehouse used by the firm.

The investigation, according to a DHS memo, “determined that Magellan Technology Inc. failed to pay millions of dollars in import duties.” The case concluded with Magellan cutting a check for $23 million in unpaid duties and penalties.

The lobbying disclosure form that Stone had to file regarding his representation of Ecto World included a question that asks, “Have any of the lobbyists listed on this report been convicted in a Federal or State Court of an offense involving bribery, extortion, embezzlement, an illegal kickback, tax evasion, fraud, a conflict of interest, making a false statement, perjury, or money laundering?”

Stone checked the yes box and added: “Obstruction of Proceeding, False Statements, Witness Tampering. Mr. Stone received a Presidential Pardon for all of these offenses in 2020.”

Asked whether Stone’s convictions for these crimes caused him any concern, Glauser said, “I don’t judge people by their past.”

Check out David Corn’s forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, at HowRussiaWon.com.

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Trump Ordered to Release Billions in Resilience Grants for Disadvantaged Communities

This story was originally published by Capital B and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Dominika Parry never stopped fighting for Jackson, Mississippi, residents even after the Trump administration terminated a multibillion-dollar program last year meant to help the Black city still reeling from a water crisis.

For years, if water did flow out of Black households’ faucets in Jackson at all, it was often brown. It left elders and babies with rashes and caused a slew of health problems across the city.

Parry and other community leaders and organizations got some semblance of hope in 2023 with a federal grant. Yet, two years later—before any funds could be distributed—President Donald Trump entered office and terminated a $2.8 billion program meant to help mitigate the harm from climate change and environmental issues in Black, low-income, and disadvantaged communities.

More than a year later, federal courts stepped in and rebuked the administration’s effort to dismantle climate funding. The case centers on the administration’s effort to roll back climate investments authorized by Congress under the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s cornerstone economic policy.

The administration, which shed a quarter of its EPA workers, now says the agency lacks the money and staff to implement the grant program.

Last month, a South Carolina federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to resume distributing funds designed to address environmental and health challenges in underserved communities.

The July ruling came just before the DC Circuit Court blocked the EPA from rescinding nearly $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awards. That program is different from the environmental justice grants promised to Jackson and other overburdened communities.

That means that over $22 billion meant for climate and environmental projects in disadvantaged communities may soon be distributed.

Parry did not respond to requests for comment after the ruling, but Matt Sedlar, climate analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the outcomes of these lawsuits are “sending a message to the administration that the separation of powers exists and that it must follow the law.”

In 2023, a $20 million federal grant offered a life-saving chance for the Jackson’s poorest. The money was for a resilience hub that would offer year-round access to housing where the lights would stay on with clean drinking water in the time of disaster by funding a micro electric grid. It would also include backup generators, an independent water well, showers, and overnight shelter for up to 150 people at a time facing water issues in their home.

The goal was building “a place where people can come, stay overnight, have access to energy, be in healthy conditions,” Parry said last year. Parry founded the recipient group 2C Mississippi, a Ridgeland-based nonprofit focused on climate resilience in Mississippi.

Since February 2025, the billions made available through the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program have languished as the Trump administration has moved to gut a historic number of environmental rules and protections. The Associated Press estimates that the EPA programs and rules cut were projected to prevent roughly 30,000 deaths per year, particularly in Black and disadvantaged communities.

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was designed as a $27 billion national clean-energy financing program. Its goal was also to make clean-energy investments like home-energy upgrades, solar installations, and electric vehicles more accessible in low-income and disadvantaged communities that have historically been shut out of affordable green financing.

The Trump administration has already moved to appeal the judge’s ruling regarding the environmental and climate justice grant program, claiming that the EPA now lacks the money and staff to implement the program. (The Trump administration has fired 25 percent of EPA workers since 2024, bringing the agency to its lowest staff total ever.)

Already, some of the programs that received the initial approval for funding in 2024 have ceased to exist, including a solar installation program for formerly incarcerated people in Houston.

Last year, Leon Dillard, a formerly incarcerated man who was a part of the program before it was cut, said the climate-friendly work gave him a “sense of purpose.”

“I really just needed to be a part of [the program], be a part of something,” he said. “You have to make a choice to take a chance, or your life will never change. But you need other people with you on that journey.”

It is likely that the administration will attempt to appeal the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund ruling as well.

After prison, Leon Dillard participated in a solar installation program for formerly incarcerated people in Houston. The program no longer exists. Adam Mahoney/Capital B

Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program projects include:

• More than $14 million to install wastewater systems in Alabama’s Blackbelt communities where failing septic systems and untreated sewage have long sickened Black residents.
• A $500,000 micro electric grid project in Gentilly, a historically Black New Orleans neighborhood that has faced chronic flooding, heat, and power-outage risk, particularly during hurricane season.
• A $20 million grant for four connected disaster hubs in Florida’s historically Black areas of Lee County. The hubs would include cooling centers and, during disasters, sites for electricity, communications, water and food distribution, and emergency health support. The project also included money for stormwater treatment, new shade trees, and workforce training.
• $500,000 for solar-workforce training for formerly incarcerated Texans, illegal-dumping cleanup, and environmental education in a Black community in Houston overburdened by pollution.
• $20 million to weatherize, electrify, repair, and improve air quality in 500 homes in East Alabama and West Georgia. The plan also included 10 solar-and-battery resilience hubs for residents during outages and extreme weather.

Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund projects include:

• Mississippi Solar for All**:** Hope Enterprise Corporation received $62 million to expand residential solar access for low-income and disadvantaged Mississippians.
• Arkansas Solar for All: Hope Enterprise Corporation received $94 million for a companion program bringing solar benefits to low-income households across Arkansas.
• Georgia BRIGHT Communities Coalition: Capital Good Fund received $156 million to expand access to clean energy and related jobs in Georgia.
• EnergizeNC: The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality received $156 million for its statewide low-income solar initiative.
• Industrial Heartland Solar Coalition: Growth Opportunity Partners received $156 million for a multistate solar effort serving Midwestern industrial communities.

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What Does Trump’s Open Respect For North Korean Nukes Tell Iran?

President Trump hinted on Wednesdaythat his friendly relationship with North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un may owe a lot to the country’s strong nuclear capabilities.

“He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. Should have never allowed it to happen,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “But he’s got them. I get along with him very well…As long as we have a smart president, he’s gonna be fine.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Trump said that having “a good relationship” with Kim makes nearby countries like South Korea and Japan safer—which may sound reasonable in itself. But by “good relationship,” Trump seemed to mean building a collaborative connection solely with Kim: “I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea when I’m friendly with him.”

Trump: "I do have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un … I didn't like the fact that we're doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea when I'm friendly with him."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-19T19:39:50.979Z

Trump’s remarks came three days after he announced that he ordered the Pentagon to cut back on joint military training with South Korea, citing President Lee Jae Myung’s refusal to join his war against Iran.

On Monday, Trump further justified the cuts to joint military efforts—which led Lee to call for South Korea to retake full control of its military operations from the US—by saying that the drills “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, a country that “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his presidency. Trump also said he plans to meet with Kim later this year.

Q: Are you exchanging written letters with Kim Jong Un?

TRUMP: I can't tell you that. But I get along with him great. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. He's gonna be fine. pic.twitter.com/AfhVw6Hrwl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2026

Trump’s explanation sends a blunt message to Iran: If the country alreadyhad nuclear weapons, it may have had a paradoxically friendlier relationship with Trump—and been able to avoid an ongoing war that has killed thousands of civilians, which the Trump administration has justfied on the basis of halting Iran’s nuclear development. As Iranian historian Behrooz Ghamari told me earlier this year, Iran’s nuclear program is tied to its pursuit of greater sovereignty, following several decades of intervention in its economy and politics by countries like the US and Britain.

To any country watching Trump’s words, it now looks like one of the only paths to prevent conflict with the current administration is to militarize or even go nuclear—a warning South Korea may also be taking to heart.

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Administration Moves to Open National Forests to Roadbuilding, Drilling, and Logging

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday it plans to rescind the “roadless rule” that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years, potentially opening up almost 45 million acres of national forests to road construction, drilling, and logging.

Conservationists had feared the announcement was coming since last summer after Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, targeted a rule brought in by Bill Clinton’s administration, describing it as “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development.

On Tuesday the US Forest Service, an agency inside the Department of Agriculture, formally announced it had filed the proposal to rescind in its entirety the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Environmental groups immediately criticized the plan for rollbacks of protections to forests from Alaska to Oregon to North Carolina.

“[The rule] is the only thing preventing much of our wildest remaining national forests from industrial development. These forests offer critical habitat for wildlife, provide clean, fresh air and water for millions and contain vast swathes of the last remaining old-growth forests in the country,” said Alex Craven, forest campaign manager for the Sierra Club.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) appealed for submissions for the public comment period to “defend our forests from the administration’s chopping block.”

“These landscapes also support thousands of jobs and generate billions in economic activity each year.”

“Their scheme would open up tens of millions of acres of our national forests to destructive logging, drilling and road building—including iconic public lands from California’s Tahoe national forest to Alaska’s Tongass national forest to the Appalachian Trail,” the NRDC said.

The Trump administration said the move would remove obstacles to managing forests and fighting wildfires. “For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Rollins said. “Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands.”

“Active forest management is not an option. It’s essential,” said Tom Schultz, the forest service chief. “More than 40 percent of inventoried roadless areas, primarily in the west, have high or very high wildfire hazard potential. And only 5 percent of those areas have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014.”

But Craven of the Sierra Club said: “The administration’s attempt to blame the roadless rule for worsening wildfire risk ignores both the facts and the rule itself. Roads generally lead to more ignitions and result in more wildfires—not fewer.

“And,” Craven added, “the roadless rule has always allowed for targeted actions to reduce hazardous fuels. What it does not allow is using wildfire as an excuse to open some of America’s most intact public forests to industrial exploitation and new road construction.”

Clinton had championed the roadless rule late in his second term as president after concerns grew around unsustainable logging of national forests. The biggest roadless area is the Tongass national forest in Alaska, which stores huge amounts of carbon and is home to brown and black bears, wolves, and bald eagles.

“America’s last great backcountry forests are not bargaining chips,” Emma Powell, government affairs manager at Alaska Wilderness League, said on Tuesday about the plan. “The Tongass and Chugach national forests are global treasures.”

“From fisheries to tourism and outdoor recreation,” Powell said, “these landscapes also support thousands of jobs and generate billions in economic activity each year.”

Concerns of environmentalists were especially focussed on logging. “It’s clear the processes required by the National Environmental Policy Act are being treated as merely boxes to check on the path to enacting an entirely political agenda to clear-cut the last remaining intact old-growth forests in America,” added Maggie Rabb, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

The public has until September 21 to comment on the plan.

“Trump is pushing for the largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history and against what Americans want,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Once you start bulldozing roads for commercial logging and industrial development, there’s no getting them back.”

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Angie Nixon Goes on Trial in September. She Just Won Florida’s Senate Primary.

Florida State Representative Angie Nixon just defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary—even though Vindman raised roughly sixteen times as much money as Nixon.

Nixon, 42, helped lead the fight against Republican-led redistricting in Florida that disproportionately supports GOP voters, who are mostly white. According to the Miami Herald, 86 percent of Florida’s congressional districts will favor the GOP, even though only 41 percent of voters are registered Republicans. The three-time state lawmaker from Jacksonville protested the bill during an April legislative session and videos of her wielding a pink bullhorn and declaring “this is a violation of the constitution” went viral. Nixon also staged a sit-in at the governor’s office in May, where she was arrested and faces a jury trial on charges of trespassing and resisting an officer without violence in September.

Despite Democratic opposition, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved the new map in May. In June, the state’s Supreme Court allowed the new map to stay in effect for the upcoming 2026 US House elections.

Nixon ran on an affordability platform, pushing Medicare for All, free childcare and family leave, and a national rent freeze and moratorium on evictions. She touted endorsements from Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Maxwell Frost and—featured prominently on her website—the children’s content creator and activist Miss Rachel.

“These things are not radical, they’re not extreme,” Nixon said during her primary victory speech on Tuesday night. “This is just basic human decency; it’s caring for our neighbors.”

Vindman, whose national public profile mostly centers on his role as a witness and director of European affairs for the National Security Council in the first Trump impeachment over the 2019 Ukraine scandal (and on his twin brother Eugene, who is a Virginia congressman), has never held elected office in Florida. Nonetheless, Vindman raised over $16 million for his campaign, according to FEC data, and polls pointed to his likely victory. He seemed sure he would win—so much so that he reportedly had a fundraiser in Nantucket scheduled for this coming week. He lost by 12 percentage points.

Nixon now faces an uphill battle in November. She’ll be facing off against DeSantis-appointed Republican incumbent Ashley Moody, who replaced Marco Rubio when he became Secretary of State. Moody is also a staunch proponent of President Trump’s voter-suppression efforts, including co-sponsoring the SAVE America Act. Florida hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2012, when former Senator Bill Nelson won his third term.

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Sen. Adam Schiff on Israel, Impeachment, and Post-Trump America

Sen. Adam Schiff is often on the receiving end of President Donald Trump’s rage online. It should be no surprise.

Back in 2020, the California Democrat was the lead prosecutor during the first Trump impeachment trial as a member of the House of Representatives. Now a senator, Schiff has been laying out a different strategy for how Democrats might challenge the president if they reclaim Congress. Much of that strategy focuses on how the president has enriched himself in the White House—all at the expense, Schiff argues, of the American people.

“The key to making corruption a powerful issue is by always bringing it back to the impact of that, the cost of his corruption,” Schiff tells host Al Letson. “Because the cost of his corruption is a president not focused on doing what he promised.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Schiff describes what it’s like to be an ever-present target of Trump’s ire, how the Israeli government has pushed longtime supporters like himself to criticize it more openly, and lays out his proposals for rebuilding America’s institutional guardrails in a post-Trump era.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Trump’s White House Business Shindig Will Be a Cesspool of Financial Conflicts

Donald Trump will welcome the leaders of major cryptocurrency and prediction-market companies to the White House on Wednesday to discuss how they should be regulated—a potential make-or-break moment for nascent industries that have struggled to establish themselves as credible and legal.

As it happens, Trump himself is a crypto and prediction-market leader. The president and his adult children are major investors in both industries.

In the past, presidents have divested from their business interests while serving, or have taken pains to distance themselves from any involvement. During his second term, Trump has done essentially the opposite. And his hand in the regulation of two industries he’s directly involved with is merely one headline from this president’s Financial Conflicts News of the Week.

Consider World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm Trump co-owns, in which a senior government official from the United Arab Emirates acquired a $500 million stake just months before the administration, ignoring national security concerns, agreed to provide the UAE with America’s most advanced AI chips.

World Liberty Financial calls itself as a “de-fi” company—as in de-centralized finance, the idea that you can do most banking activities through the crypto blockchain rather than at a real bank. And as it happens, Trump’s company just got the greenlight from one of Trump’s regulators to be a bank.

Under the charter it was granted, World Liberty won’t do much in the way of traditional banking (no deposits or loans) but it will make it much easier, and profitable, for the firm to issue crypto tokens. That’s not a traditional use of a bank charter.

The ambiguity around what these crypto and prediction firms really do, how they should be regulated, and whether they should be treated differently than traditional banks, puts Trump’s business interests at the bleeding edge of the debate over these industries. These issues are essentially the agenda for Wednesday’s White House meeting and a subsequent regulatory meeting on Thursday.

Another example of a Trump business foray that would likely be scrutinized by regulators—if regulators are allowed to scrutinize the new crypto and prediction markets—is his meme coin ($TRUMP), an inherently worthless bit of digital branding that has netted him around $635 million while costing “investors” around $3.8 billion as its value fell to almost zero. It’s the kind of financial shenanigan into which, in a less corrupt administration, government regulators might be inclined to look.

Another major Trump asset is his stake in Truth Social, which has tethered itself to the crypto industry by acquiring lots and lots of Bitcoins—astrategy that has proved unwise, at least in the short term, as Bitcoin prices have declined more than 25 percent this year.

Trump has made no secret of his support for the prediction markets—he has publicly backed them in their fight to avoid state regulators who have tried to rein them in.

The White House did not return a request for comment, but its standard denial of Trump’s financial conflicts usually includes the claim that his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr., are in charge of his finances. If anything, those two are even more involved than their father in the crypto and prediction industries that Trump will determine how to regulate—or not regulate. In addition to helping manage his father’s crypto investments, Eric has his own crypto-mining company—American Bitcoin. Don Jr. is closely linked to the prediction industry: Kalshi gave him a stake that has become enormously valuable, and he sits on an advisory committee for Kalshi’s chief rival, Polymarket.

Wednesday’s meeting is a warm-up for the much more formal and significant meeting on Thursday, when the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, one of two major government agencies that regulate investments, holds the first meeting of a new committee that will determine how the government regulates the markets in question.

Trump is never all that predictable (he did once call crypto “a scam”), but it’s a good bet that the committee—which is stacked with crypto and prediction market reps, including Trump associates, many of whom will be at Wednesday’s event—will get a warm White House welcome.

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Cops Love ICE’s New Shock Gloves. Parents Want Them Out of Schools.

In early August, ICE revealed plans to purchase $20 million worth of electric-shock gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies. The gloves work on direct contact with exposed skin and deliver a painful electric charge. Police departments, jails, and even school resource officers across the country have used the gloves for years—though human rights groups like Amnesty International say they’re “readily misused for torture.” Police officers, speaking on Compliant Technologies’ own YouTube channel, repeatedly stated that the shock gloves work because they are “less conducive to lawsuits” than other forms of physical force, and can cause pain but “leave no burn marks or scars.”

The GLOVE, or Generated Low-Output Voltage Emitter, is already in use in some public schools. Twenty-nine of 34 school police officers in Omaha, Nebraska have trained to use the GLOVE, and twice in the past year, officers have used the devices to shock students.

Omaha requested 40 pairs of the gloves for just under $66,000 in 2025, as Nebraska Public Media reported. (At that same price point, ICE’s $20 million would buy the agency at least 12,000 pairs of shock gloves.) The Omaha city council unanimously approved the purchase. But with the gloves now under increased scrutiny, students and parents are raising concerns. School board members, at a meeting on August 17, said they hadn’t been informed that the shock gloves were being deployed in their schools.

“I personally am sickened to learn our schools have been used as a test bed for a new law enforcement technology,” Omaha School Board member Gini Magnuson said, according to Nebraska Public Media. The GLOVE’s most recent user manual suggests that wearers avoid using it against “small children.”

Despite the manufacturer’s warning against shocking children, Omaha is not the only school district to use shock gloves. Compliant Technologies regularly exhibits its products at School Resource Officer conferences nationwide. In July of this year, they were listed as an exhibitor at both the Texas and Mississippi Associations of School Resource Officers’ annual “school safety” conferences.

“I wish the adults in the room would actually just pay attention to what the students are saying, and hopefully understand that hurting students, and using weapons against them, is not what teaching is about, and it’s not what school is supposed to be about,” Omaha Central High School student Lux Tipton said at this week’s school board meeting.

While students, parents, and politicians speak out against these weapons, White House border czar Tom Homan is defending their use. “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not,” Homan said in an interview last week on Fox & Friends. The Department of Homeland Security may distribute thousands of pairs of the gloves as early as March 2027.

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South Korea Wants Its Military Back

On Tuesday, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung reiterated his calls for the country to retake full control of its military operations from the US following Donald Trump’s order to cut back on annual joint training drills in preparation for North Korean threats two days prior.

“A strong alliance makes the foundation of security stronger, and strengthening our own capabilities increases our value and necessity as an ally,” Lee said, framing the US-South Korea alliance and independent military control as ‌mutually beneficial.

Trump told reporters at the Oval Office on Monday that his decision to scale back military training with South Korea was due in part to Lee’s refusal to support the US war effort in Iran: “We can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us.”

And in thatannouncement reducing the joint training, Trump wrote on Truth Social that his move was also “based on myvery good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” North Korea’s dictator and, oddly referring to himself in the third person, the drills with South Korea “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

Lee said in response on Tuesday that Seoul should immediately plan a transfer of control over the Combined Forces Command, which consists of both South Korean and US forces. According to the Korea Times, regaining wartime operational control, which takes effect during major conflict, is a key goal of Lee’s administration. South Korea ceded full control of its military during the Korean War in the 1950s, but has been trying to regain complete command for over two decades. The same Korea Times report said that South Korea’s joint training drills with the US are “essential for assessing Seoul’s readiness to lead the combined forces” in the near future and are symbolic of the country’s national sovereignty.

Lee also signaled rearmament, which may increase tensions and threaten further military action from North Korea. Hepushed for Seoul to accelerate building nuclear-powered submarines, signaling rearmament. Several NATO members have also ramped up spending on military development following Trump’s multiple threats to withdraw from the alliance.

Trump approved Seoul’s nuclear submarines last year, and Hegseth has praised South Korea for taking on more of its own defense. But burden-sharing was supposed to mean allies paying more for an arrangement Washington still runs. Lee is proposing something else: an ally that no longer needs to ask.

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Trump’s Bombing Threats Have a Golf Course Problem

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump issued a blunt warning to America’s erstwhile ally: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” It was another one of his un-diplomatic jabs at a longtime friend—this time for the possibility that Oman might prove helpful to Iran in ending the war. But if Trump’s aggressive, crude attitude towards an ally isn’t confusing enough, it’s also another example of how Trump’s sprawling efforts at personal enrichment since he returned to office have only made US foreign policy more complicated.

Because, of course, Trump has a lavish golf course and real estate development deal, right in Oman, on the edge—literally, the cliff’s edge—of the Gulf of Oman, which is just a few dozen miles from the embattled Strait of Hormuz. And the incredibly lucrative terms of the deal—as is the case with most economic opportunities in absolute monarchies such as Oman—were granted to Trump and his business partners with the blessing of the Omani government and crown.

Will this business engagement actually deter Trump from bombing the oldest independent state in the Arab world? That’s unclear, if only because it’s so hard to distinguish Trump’s real threats when it comes to bombing from the empty ones. But the irrefutable fact that he has a large money-making opportunity in the same location where he proposes to bomb raises several questions about how he navigates his priorities as commander-in-chief and international developer.

As I’ve written before, Trump has a very good deal in Oman.

A livestream of the site shows a sun-drenched stretch of water, edged by brown desert rock outcroppings, where it’s easy to imagine minimalist boxy units, cantilevered 400 feet above the sea, starting at just $1 million.

Built by Saudi real estate developer Dar Global on land provided by the Omani government outside its capital city of Muscat, all those seaside views and quiet luxury could be a gold mine for the US president. In 2024, he earned $1 million in licensing fees from the deal. The project’s website boasts of its “ideal location.” It offers “easy access” to the Persian Gulf, which sits just a few hundred miles to the northwest via the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, the website notes, is “one of the safest countries in the world.”

But whatever conflicts of interest may be playing out in Oman are nothing new. It’s difficult to list all the places Trump’s personal business interests are intermingled with US national security interests. Even in South Korea—which Trump also lambasted recently—recently disclosed financial statements showed that Trump embarked on a new deal with some Korean developers.

Previous presidents simply have avoided conflicts of interest. But there is a special problem when it comes to Trump’s: Whether it’s in Oman, or Saudi Arabia, or the Korean peninsula, they’re all mostly licensing deals.

That means that Trump technically doesn’t own any property in Oman. The land on which the project will be constructed is owned by an Omani government entity joint partner on the project, and the project itself is owned by Dar Global, the Saudi development firm. But Trump gets paid for applying his name, managing the property, and selling luxury villas. In total, he has earned somewhere around $35 million on his licensing projects in the Middle East, most of which have been in partnership with Dar Global. In Oman alone, he appears to have earned $6.8 million—and that’s before the property has been built. It’s not clear from the livestream or any information on Dar Global’s website how far along the construction has progressed.

But for a president trying to negotiate Middle East peace or head off a nuclear threat, this is a uniquely bad conflict of interest. Not only are his personal money-making efforts located in the middle of conflict zones, but his chief way to make money is selling the image of success, luxury, and peace. And that’s something our enemies definitely know.

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Trump Burns Allies Over Iran. South Korea and Oman Are Next.

President Trump spent the weekend turning on two US security partners. He ordered a cutback in joint military exercises with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator — and threatened to bomb Oman, one of the countries mediating between Washington and Tehran.

On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social that based on his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” and the finances required, he ordered Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” annual joint military exercises with South Korea, designed to prepare against threats from North Korea. At the end of his post: “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”

Seoul is downplaying it. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the exercises began Monday as planned, and President Lee Jae Myung said the two governments had “maintained close coordination” on joint training and would keep doing so.

But the reversal is abrupt. Just three months ago, as the Associated Press noted, Hegseth praised South Korea for raising defense spending and “assuming primary responsibility for the security of the Korean Peninsula” — a shift he called proof of “alliance burden-sharing that all of America’s partners would do well to follow.” It’s the same pattern the administration ran on NATO members who declined to back the war on Iran.

Regarding Oman, Trump told Fox News on Monday that “if Oman gets in the way [of US-Iran negotiations], we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” Oman is reportedly close to an agreement with Iran to restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway that carried 20 percent of the world’s crude oil before the US and Israeli strikes on Iran began in February.

Trey Yingst: "I just got off the phone with President Trump … the president told Fox News that Iran should raise the white flag of surrender … the president said that if Oman gets in the way, 'we'll bomb the s**t out of them""

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-17T13:54:57.609Z

Oman is also a strategic partner of the US in the region and often acts as a diplomatic mediator between the US and Iran. The US holds a security agreement with Oman that allows it to access Omani airfield and port facilities for military purposes.

It looks like yet another time where Trump makes decisions built on personal squabbles rather than its critical security relationships.

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Could the GOP Lose Florida Over Data Centers?

A few years after her husband died, Sandie Slowey moved from Pennsylvania to a mobile home in Hernando, a small town in rural Citrus County, Florida, known for its open green spaces and pristine spring waters. Down the road from her home was a horse ranch, and Slowey enjoyed the serenity of her quiet retirement from her job as a nurse—strolling on lush walking trails and sitting outside in the afternoons to hear the birds sing. On chilly evenings, she sleeps with her windows open.

In February, on Valentine’s Day, a neighbor told Slowey that the Deltona Corporation, a Florida real estate developer, planned to construct an 800-acre data center next to their neighborhood. Then in March, Slowey noticed the horses were gone. When she checked tax records, she discovered that Deltona had bought the property. It also bought another lot next door.

Slowey was outraged. Friends back in Pennsylvania, who now live near data centers, had warned her about the constant noise, and she worried that the incessant humming would pierce through the thin walls of her home. As one among dozens of residents who spoke up against the project, she said as much at a county planning and development commission meeting in March. She joined with other residents and decided to form No Data Center Citrus and organized a community meeting that attracted many residents, some of whom voiced their concerns at commission meetings. Their efforts worked. “We had two overflow rooms full, and they had to stop people at the door because there was no room,” Slowey recalled. County officials ultimately rejected Deltona’s proposal and approved a one-year moratorium on any data center projects.

The fight in Citrus County against data centers has played out in dozens of communities across Florida, and as residents in rural areas—already fed up with the encroachment of new development that has infiltrated much of the state in the last few years as its population has grown—feel threatened by the explosion of data center construction. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz reported in May, there are at least 268 local opposition groups across 37 states. The local resistance against data centers “draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries,” Hurwitz wrote this month.

Voters’rage at these construction projects has extended into Florida’s politics and splintered the Republican base. Many of these Floridians, some of whom are lifelong Republicans, are not voting for US Representative Byron Donalds, the leading GOP candidate running for governor to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis, during this week’s primary election. Donalds has openly supported the technology infrastructure, provided regulations were in place. As Politico reported, he’s also accepted millions in campaign contributions from data center developers. “I’m not anti-data center. I’m pro having a plan,” Donalds said in February, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “Data centers are going to be a function of American life going forward.”

Although polls show he will win the Republican nomination, the data center issue likely will discourage many GOP and independent voters from supporting him, even leading them to cast ballots for his opponents. Slowey, a registered Republican, will vote on Tuesday for Jay Collins, the current lieutenant governor, who has vowed to put Floridians first before data centers, calling for stringent guardrails around the facilities.

I spoke to other residents who say they will vote for Bobby Williams, a grassroots conservative and third-generation Florida native who opposes data centers. It is unlikely he’ll win, according to polls, but the fact that he has amassed support in many communities outside bustling metro areasis one more example of a nationwide trend of how once-loyal voters are fed up with the current GOP establishment that takes money from large corporations at the expense of local concerns.

“Most everybody that you talk to, everybody on Facebook, everybody that we talk to on the street, it’s all about the data centers.”

“Party labels are less important when it comes to our homes and way of life,” Slowey told me. “Everything for this election, for me, is based on the data centers at this point, and I think most everybody that you talk to, everybody on Facebook, everybody that we talk to on the street, it’s all about the data centers.”

If Donalds wins, come November’s general election, Slowey says she will throw her support behind David Jolly, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Jolly, a former Congressman who was once Republican, announced in July that he would enact a statewide moratorium on construction, citing environmental and economic concerns. Slowey suspects others in her community are making the same calculations.

This past week, I spoke with residents in several Florida counties that have dealt with the data center issue—Marion, Citrus, Escambia, Palm Beach, and Sarasota—and asked them how this topic is influencing their votes. Some registered Republicans told me they would not support Byron Donalds and instead vote for Williams or other candidates in the primary. Other voters, like Slowey, told me they will support Jolly in the general election.

Susan McManus, a seasoned political analyst in Florida, called the governor’s race a “bloody primary,” a term used to describe infighting within a political party during an election cycle. Eleven different Republican candidates are competing in the primary for governor.

The challenge for Republicans will be that in these red, rural areas, residents are hostile to data centers and to candidates—like Donalds—who openly support them. But the central question for Democrats will be if voters in these conservative, heavily Christian communities can get past the way that “socialist” has become affixed to Democratic candidates, she said. “Maybe they won’t vote for the Democrat,” McManus said of Republican voters in the general election, “but they’ll stay home, which is equally bad.”

The local government in the city of North Port, in Sarasota County, is grappling with the data center dilemma. Like much of the state, in recent years, the once sleepy town has now boomed into a city of nearly 100,000 with a younger population and lots of development. Robin San Vicente, an environmental and wildlife consultant, moved there in 1999 and has warily watched the growth. So when the city received an application for a data center construction project, San Vicente was among those who spoke out. Wearing a black tank top printed with the words NO DATA CENTERS, she told commissioners at a July 21 meeting, “It is extremely important that we take the time to accurately assess all of the data required to implement proper citywide protocols and guidelines in the name of public health and safety.”

Last month, she created the Facebook group, No Data Centers North Port FL, and in the last five weeks, it has attracted more than 900 members. They post news articles about data center moratoriums or videos of community meetings. Comments range from concerns about the data centers being close to wildlife preserve areas, the excess water usage, the thought of having a nuclear reactor, which many data centers use, in an area prone to hurricanes nearly six months out of the year. As one North Port resident wrote: “DO NOT VOTE for public officials who don’t put the residents of North Port FIRST.”

The North Port city commission is now considering an 18-month moratorium on data center projects. San Vicente, who is an independent voter, says she is considering David Jolly in the general election. “We don’t trust Byron at all. He is supported by Trump, and people are not trusting Trump anymore.” She added that many people had their eyes “opened” and realized that “what party you belong to doesn’t matter with this particular issue.”

In Citrus County, Slowey and the steering committee she’s a part of are now helping the commission draft ordinances to regulate any future data centers, including the regulation of water usage, as well as distance requirements from schools and churches. They hope the measureswill be enacted before the one-year moratorium ends.

Still, the threat of a data center being erected in town lingers. Deltona, the developer, still owns the land close to Slowey’s home.“We won the battle,” she told me, “but we haven’t won the war.”

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The International Underwear Model Who Stormed the Capitol Is Now Running for Congress

When Florida congressional candidate John Strand introduces himself to potential voters, he starts with his criminal record. “I’m John Strand, patriot for Congress, the J6 hostage who went to prison on principle so that you don’t have to,” he said at a January debate hosted by the Women’s Republican Club of Naples Federated.

The former international underwear model spent about a year in federal prison after a DC jury convicted him of five criminal counts, including one felony, related to his participation in the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. In January 2025, Trump pardoned him, along with 1,500 people convicted of J6-related crimes. And now, Strand is using his J6 infamy to try to catapult into Congress in one of the weirdest GOP primaries in the country this year.

Of the 10 candidates currently running to fill a seat vacated by Rep. Byron Donalds, who is running to be the GOP candidate for Florida governor, Strand is actually one of two felons pardoned by Trump in the race. The other, former Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), resigned from Congress in 2019 and pleaded guilty to insider trading and lying to the FBI. He was serving a 20-month prison sentence when Trump pardoned him at the end of his first term.

John Strand speaks during an event hosted by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 13, 2023.Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP

Joining them is former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who lost his 2022 primary after being plagued by scandals ranging from sexual harassment allegations to carrying a gun through TSA—twice—and claiming he’d witnessed some of his House colleagues do a “key bump of cocaine” right in front of him. The frontrunner, Catalina Lauf, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020 and 2022—in Illinois. She lost the 2020 race to former Illinois state senator Jim Oberweis, who is also now running in Florida’s 19th.

To distinguish himself from the pack, Strand has leaned hard on his status as a J6 “hostage” while supplementing his rhetoric with the timeworn GOP campaign tactic of demonizing LGBT people.

“Hostage” is a bit of a stretch. After he was arrested in Beverly Hills a few days after the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Strand opted to go to trial rather than take a plea bargain, as did Simone Gold, the anti-vax doctor he accompanied into the Capitol. Gold was sentenced to only 60 days in prison as a result. Strand got 32 months after a jury found him guilty on all counts. The sentence included extra time for lying on the stand and fundraising off his “49 minutes of infamy” while a court-appointed lawyer represented him.

Strand likes to blame his prison sentence on an “openly biased DC jury,” but the evidence against him was overwhelming. After leaving the Capitol, he literally texted someone, “We stormed the Capitol. It was insane.” Video footage also showed him at the front of the mob, stepping over a fallen US Capitol Police officer on his way into the building with Gold.

As the crowd began to force their way into the Capitol building, Dr. Simone Gold and John Strand were part of the crowd that violently pushed/pulled an officer down the stairs.

I slowed down/highlighted the pair currently being sought by the FBI.
H/T: @Cineaste_C
: NyPost pic.twitter.com/nf7PGOqwJG

— 𝚃𝚘𝚡𝚒𝚌 𝚆𝚘𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚗 𝚆𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚗 (@Autre_Vierge) January 12, 2021

Strand has engaged in some revisionist history to spin this record into a selling point for his congressional candidacy. “I was innocent,” he insists on his campaign website and in ads. “The DOJ vacated every charge.” The judge, however, saw things differently. “This Order does not constitute a finding of innocence,” wrote US District Judge Christopher Cooper in an order dismissing Strand’s case after his pardon. “Nor does it affect the existence of probable cause for Defendant’s arrest and prosecution.”

Hard time clearly isn’t enough substance to drive a congressional campaign, especially in a race featuring more than one former felon. So Strand has adopted another popular MAGA strategy: attacking the LGBTQ community. Strand was homeschooled and raised in a conservative, Christian family. He has seamlessly supplemented his J6 story with Bible references and promises voters a return to “Judeo-Christian values.”

“The enemies of America—both foreign and domestic—are erasing truth, rewriting history, distorting gender, and sexually exploiting our children,” says his campaign website, where he’s portrayed as a “maverick” in a leather jacket like Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

In May last year, Strand joined in a protest in Naples, Florida, to support the city’s decision to ban a drag show from a public park during Pride week. In December, he testified before the Naples City Council to further support city action against Pride events by speaking “some hard truth” about what he learned while working in Hollywood.

“Pride,” he said, putting air quotes around the word, “is a very aggressive, explicitly sexual enterprise with a terribly destructive agenda, confusing, distorting and then destroying the natural and healthy design of human sexuality.” He claimed that the “Pride movement” was “eroding the health and strength of the family unit,” and called it a form of tyranny that features “deviant sexual behaviors.”

WOW: I challenge anyone in the nation to watch this—and ask yourself:

“Are any other candidates for Congress speaking truth like this?”

There is only one way to save our nation:
Confront evil head-on…and overcome it with good.https://t.co/MlXjx59P2i pic.twitter.com/Yxg9rH14sO

— John Strand (@JohnStrandUSA) August 4, 2026

Strand, 43, doesn’t always seem to have found the “Pride movement” so toxic. In his memoir, Patriot Plea: The J6 Journey of a Political Prisoner in the Divided States of America, he briefly recounts his years couch-surfing through West Hollywood as a struggling model. But he omits some critical details.

“I met him in a gay bar,” says Loran Morgan, who has known Strand for more than 15 years, speaking about that time. Morgan says back then, Strand had many gay friends. He even attended Morgan’s 2010 birthday party at The Abbey, the “world famous gay bar,” according to its website, where drag shows are a staple, and went back there with Morgan at least one other time, in 2014. Morgan says in 2011, he even secured Strand a job working in an Equinox booth during the Pride Festival in West Hollywood.

Florida congressional candidate John Strand working at the Equinox booth at the 2011 Los Angeles Pride Festival.Loran Morgan

Strand’s years modeling underwear also landed him in gay media. In 2012, for instance, he graced the cover of Sensitif, a French gay magazine, and inside, he poses virtually nude. He also modeled skimpy underwear for RUFSKIN, a gay California fashion label. (Strand did not respond to several requests for comment.)

No one I spoke with claims that Strand was gay or engaged in gay sexual acts, but they say he definitely associated with LGBT people and seemed supportive of the community. For about a year starting in August 2011, Strand and his now ex-wife lived with Amy Messigian, a Los Angeles lawyer who let them stay rent-free in her house in exchange for caring for her dog while she was at work. “His group of friends was predominantly gay,” she told me. “He would go out with his boys in West Hollywood. His wife would stay home.”

John Strand and Loran Moran at the Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood.Loran Morgan

Messigian had a group of old friends who would regularly meet up socially, and Strand and his wife would often join them. One of those friends, Richard Valois, who works in advertising in Los Angeles, says he and Strand once went out without the group. “He had a place he wanted to go to in West Hollywood because he knew the bartender. It ended up being a gay bar,” Valois told me, noting that he was surprised to end up there because their friend group didn’t go to gay bars. He was even more surprised by Strand’s choice of venue “because he had a wife.”

“He had no problem with gay people back then, so why is he doing that now?”

“I’m not saying he’s gay,” he emphasized. “But when we went there, he knew the bartender. He knew everyone.” He’s mystified by Strand’s current campaign against Pride events and trans rights. “He had no problem with gay people back then, so why is he doing that now?”

In Patriot Plea, Strand says he lost many of his Hollywood friends after he embraced Trump. “I torched my Hollywood career with a Maverick barrel roll into public support for MAGA,” he writes. But his former LA friends say they never knew him to care about politics. “He had this insatiable thirst for fame. All his social media was talking about being famous,” Valois says. “He would post his laps that he did in the pool. That was his whole persona. He was not a political person in any sense of the imagination.”

Strand was famous, they say, for being marginally employed, never paying for drinks, and always looking for a place to crash. (In his memoir, he mentions bouts of homelessness.) Even before his turn towards MAGA, he’d fallen out with many of these friends because they tired of him taking advantage of their goodwill. Messigian asked him to move out after she says he neglected her dog.

Morgan and Messigian both reported Strand to the FBI after seeing photos of him at the Capitol on January 6. They were furious when Trump pardoned him. January 6 was one of the most “horrifying moments in our history that I experienced,” says Messigian. “So any pass that he’s been given is unfortunate and undeserved.”

“I was like, dude, so many of the LGBTQ people had your back and took care of you the whole time you lived here, and now you’re going after them.”

Morgan, who is gay, feels doubly angry about Strand’s latest reinvention as a congressional candidate. “I still can’t believe he is even running for an office. In one video I saw, he was going off on trans rights and gay rights,” he told me. “I was like, dude, so many of the LGBTQ people had your back and took care of you the whole time you lived here, and now you’re going after them.”

It’s not clear whether Strand’s J6 narrative or his attacks on the LGBTQ community are winning him many votes. He has secured a few endorsements from MAGA world, including from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Gen. Michael Flynn, and MyPillow guy Mike Lindell and talk show host Dennis Prager. But his campaign has failed to raise much money—little more than $100,000, with almost $20,000 of that coming from a personal loan from Strand himself. (Not even Simone Gold seems to have contributed, according to FEC records.)

Strand has made much of the fact that Turning Point USA, the conservative youth group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, had endorsed him. But the week before the primary, the group quietly unendorsed him and threw its weight behind one of his challengers, Catalina Lauf, who worked at the Commerce Department in the first Trump administration.

Strand had been fervently trying to win an endorsement from Trump. But the president doesn’t like to endorse losers, and a Victory Insights poll poll released August 7 showed Strand languishing at the bottom of the pack, with barely 3 percent support. On Friday, Trump endorsed Lauf.

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The Right Is Targeting Abdul El-Sayed’s Family Members

Since Abdul El-Sayed’s win earlier this month to become the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s US Senate seat, the right has ramped up its attacks on him, condemning his past comments as evidence of him being a “terrorist” and “radical Islamist” or a “jihadist sympathizer” who is “infiltrating from within”. But it has also targeted El-Sayed’s family—including his wife, Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist, and his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, a writer and assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

The same week as El-Sayed’s victory, President Trump posted a photo of himself and First Lady Melania Trump in formal attire next to a photo of the Senate nominee and his wife, who is wearing a hijab. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s [sic],” the post reads.

More recently, media outlets like Fox News and the New York Posthave dug into Abdelhadi’s past, citing her arrest last fall on a felony charge for allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper during a protest outside Broadview ICE Detention Center in Chicago next to a mugshot, remarks on Israel and Palestine, and criticism of American holidays like July 4th and Thanksgiving.

Socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's half sister is revealed to be a radical University of Chicago professor who was arrested last fall on felony charges for allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper during anti-ICE riots outside a detention facility in suburban… pic.twitter.com/kKU2oeEsmx

— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) August 14, 2026

“Abdul loves his sister and also disagrees with her on a number of political positions and the rhetoric she’s chosen to use,” Sophie Pollock, a spokesperson for the El-Sayed campaign, told Fox News in response to its story on Abdelhadi’s arrest. “But Abdul is the one on the ballot and his record of public service and his platform is what matters to voters here in Michigan.”

El-Sayed had already addressed much of the right’s criticisms—and increasing concern from establishment Democrats—previously, distancing himself from his past support for the “defund the police” movement along with other progressives candidates looking to come across as more presentable in the lead-up to the midterms.

But for the many on the right, backing down from past progressive rhetoric once, or even many times, will never be enough. It is those same folks on the right who dictate what is considered unacceptable and, in response, what many Democrats may worry is too radical or “woke” for potential voters leaning more toward the center.

Conservatives co-opted “woke” and its discourse. Democrats don’t have to fall in line with them.

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Warmonger’s Son Mongers War

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, pushed the United Kingdom into a needless war in Iraq in a wild-goose chase for weapons of mass destruction. Then, he helped British companies make money from that war. Now, his son Nick is carrying on the family legacy.

Nick Blair, a 40-year-old former football agent, is seeking funding for a military technology startup called “Pyra” to the tune of 200 million dollars. It’s not clear what, exactly, Pyra needs all that money to do: its website only says “Deploying Summer 2026…Stand By.” Blair is at the moment the only active officer of the company, according to UK government filings. In an article published this week, an unnamed source told the Financial Times, vaguely, that Pyra “is developing technology that will allow users to integrate different systems into a single source.”

During his time as Prime Minister, Blair’s father helped UK companies cash in on the Iraq war. After he was forced to leave the country’s government amid growing discontent over the war, he built a dizzyingly massive global business empire. And he’s making moves that could allow him to profit from the reconstruction of war-torn places: in January, he was appointed to President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, charged with overseeing international efforts in Gaza.

Blair the younger, meanwhile, is now founding his second military-tech company. His first, Skyral, is a war-games simulator. Its co-CEO, Naomi Hulme, recently described its work as “Fortnite on steroids.” The company won a $2.7 billion dollar contract to train the British military, which is betting big on AI. Pyra, meanwhile, does not yet have a product—but hopes to raise a great deal of funding nonetheless.

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The Trumps’ Crypto Project Just Got One Step Closer to Becoming a Bank

Federal regulators have given President Donald Trump’s family crypto business a conditional approval to operate like a bank. On Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—led by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould—announced that World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture controlled by the Trump family, was on track to receive a banking charter. This will allow World Liberty Financial to issue its stablecoin tokens—called “USD1″—inside the United States without an intermediary.

“The decision stands to give new powers and federal credibility to a venture in which Trump and his family retain a substantial financial interest,” as Politico‘s Michael Stratford and Declan Harty put it. “It’s also among the most direct official actions that the administration has taken involving the president’s private finances.”

Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s special diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff and co-founder of World Liberty Financial, applauded the decision on social media. “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy,” he wrote.

The move certainly seems likely to strengthen the pocketbooks of the president and his family: as my colleague Russ Choma reported, Trump made $65 million in 2025 by selling shares in World Liberty Financial. According to his financial disclosures, Trump also made almost $600 million selling stablecoins and other digital assets through World Liberty Financial that year.

Democratic lawmakers are pointing to the regulatory green light as an example of Trump’s corruption. On Friday, as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced the move, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on social media that “this is the most brazen act of self-dealing our system has ever seen.”

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The Orwellian Company Behind ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves

In 2022, Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, purchased electric shock gloves for his officers after learning about them at a trade show. And his employees, he said, couldn’t get enough of them. “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands,” Glueck joked on a podcast interview a couple of years later. “They’ve grown really attached.”

The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits.

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”

The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They’ve been described by groups like Amnesty International as “readily misused for torture.” And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them.

The device is called a GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. It looks like a regular padded black utility glove, but when the wearer presses a small button on the glove’s wrist, it produces a painful electric shock.

Nelson County, Ky., jailer Justin Hall shows an electric shock glove that is used at his facility, Thursday, Aug. 13, in Bardstown, Ky. Dylan Lovan/AP

“We have a saying: Feeling is believing,” Compliant Technologies CEO Jeff Niklaus said in one 2022 YouTube video. In promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts. Since then, though, it’s downgraded the language to “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation device,” branding the technology on its website as “humane.”

Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long raised concerns about electric shock devices like the GLOVE, as well as other products that Compliant Technologies sells, like electric shock belts and vests, which the company recommends for prisoner transport, courtroom use, and use on “combative individuals” during medical procedures like blood draws.

The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, called the gloves “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture.” Some police departments that use the devices issue guidance saying they shouldn’t be deployed against pregnant women, the elderly, or people in shackles. A 2021 user manual for the GLOVE notes that it can cause an “increase in blood pressure” and “changes in heart rhythm,” and recommends that users avoid shocking “those with obvious health conditions.” The manual also includes a graphic saying “evil is powerless when the good are unafraid,” laid over a Blue Lives Matter flag.

“How in the world is ICE just going to be walking around with these gloves?” Rizvi asked. “It is inherently harmful. It has no legitimate law enforcement purpose.”

“Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” an ICE spokesperson told Mother Jones; Compliant Technologies did not respond to a request for comment. The devices “will be issued to Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) and Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) officers and agents,” according to a notice DHS published August 10. They will be delivered by the end of March 2027.

Compliant Technologies was founded in 2018 by Jeff Niklaus, a former Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Afghanistan and Somalia, who believes that President Donald Trump has been “anointed” by God. He is also a sometime conspiracy theorist: In a podcast interview in 2025, he blamed the fatal crash of a passenger plane and a military helicopter on “the vaccines,” and on the Biden administration’s inclusion of women and LGBTQ people in the military.

In an interview with the International Law Enforcement Educators & Trainers Association last month, Niklaus said he was inspired to start his company after participating in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, on which the book Black Hawk Down is based.

“If you look at the why…I mean, we lost 18 guys in one day,” Niklaus said. (Hundreds of Somali people were killed on that day, alongside 18 Americans.) “So, for me personally, if we can help save or stop the injury of at least 18 people, then I feel like we did something as a company,” he said.

But his technology has also hurt people. A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. A man with heart problems sued over allegations that he was shocked at a Las Vegas trade show, as the Associated Press reported. And in 2023, a man who was incarcerated in Kentucky’s Bullitt County Jail sued an employee of that jail for shocking him repeatedly with the gloves. “The gloves feel just like a taser,” Josh Elswick, who was in handcuffs and shackles when he was shocked, said. Bullitt County Jail representatives told local media they would stop using electric shock gloves shortly thereafter.

But local police across the country are still eagerly buying the gloves—in large part so that they can harm people and avoid being sued for it. It’s been successful “from the patrolmen to the jailers,” Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. “It’s been a great tool as far as mitigating liability,” according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department sung the GLOVE’s praises, too: “I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

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