Ein Datenleck trifft die AfD: Hunderttausende interne E-Mails und sensible Dokumente sind plötzlich öffentlich abrufbar. Während die Partei den Vorfall herunterspielt, hoffen andere auf Enthüllungen, die der Alternative massiv schaden könnten. Pauline von Pezold, Co-Host von „Inside AfD“, ordnet ein, wie gefährlich dieser Akt des „Hacktivismus“ für die Partei wirklich werden kann.

Brennende Barrikaden in Frankreich wecken im Bundesinnenministerium die Sorge vor einem Überschwappen der Gewalt nach Deutschland. Rasmus Buchsteiner hat den Überblick, wie sich die Sicherheitsbehörden auf die bundesweiten Gen-Z-Proteste Ende des Monats vorbereiten und wo die Unterschiede zur französischen Protestkultur liegen.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview erklärt Juso-Chef Philipp Türmer, warum er die Anliegen der Schülerproteste unterstützt, aber vor einer Unterwanderung durch radikale Kräfte warnt.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

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BRUSSELS — The EU is preparing to try and persuade Canada and the U.K. to increase their support for Ukraine as part of efforts to plug the €70 billion funding gap Kyiv faces next year.

The EU-Canada summit on Oct. 29-30 and the EU-U.K. summit on Nov. 20 will give Brussels a chance to make the case at the highest level. With Kyiv’s financing needs rising and U.S. backing uncertain, Brussels is increasingly looking to non-EU allies to contribute more, five EU officials, including two from the European Commission, and two EU diplomats told POLITICO.

The EU and its member countries provide 80 percent of Ukraine’s external aid, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Friday. “We urgently need other partners to step up.”

The EU has committed to a €90 billion loan for 2026 and 2027, intended to cover about two-thirds of Ukraine’s needs. Brussels had expected other partners — including Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Norway — to provide another €45 billion, but much of that money has been slow to arrive as other governments have yet to firm up or disburse the support Brussels expected.

While calls to help Ukraine defend itself are not new, the projected 2027 bill has grown as Russia intensifies its assault, the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran drives up costs and Washington shifts toward positions more favorable to Moscow — leaving Europe and other allies to shoulder more of the cost of keeping Kyiv afloat.

Brussels is heading into negotiations about closer economic and defense ties with London and Ottawa. Diplomats and EU officials said they do not expect a formal bargain, but that support for Kyiv from the EU’s partners is likely to shape the political climate around the talks. Like others in this article, they were granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive diplomacy.

The EU has also raised Ukraine’s 2027 financing needs at meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the G7 and the G20, as well as with Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

“During my meetings in Bangkok, the need to secure financial support for Ukraine in 2027 was a prominent topic,” European Economy Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis told POLITICO, referencing last week’s IMF and World Bank Group meetings. He said he called for “broad burden sharing and stressed the importance of international partners each doing their part as Ukraine continues fighting Russian aggression.”

All the EU officials and diplomats stressed that the push was not a criticism of the U.K. or Canada, both of which are strong supporters of Ukraine. The point, they said, is that Kyiv’s needs have grown.

The U.K. says it has committed a total of £25 billion for Ukraine and Canada has promised the equivalent of €5.4 billion in military assistance and €8.2 billion in direct financial support.

The EU and its member countries say they have contributed over €231 billion since Russia’s full-scale invasion, including military aid, budget support and guarantees, support for Ukrainians hosted in the bloc, and proceeds from immobilized Russian assets — an amount one senior EU diplomat described as already “over and above.”

How to meet Ukraine’s financial needs has become “a central discussion in every single meeting” with partners supporting Kyiv, a Commission official said.

The push to secure Ukraine’s financial needs comes as support for Kyiv will be tested in a series of elections across Europe next year. In France, far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen has vowed to end aid if elected president in 2027, while in Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faces a challenge from Russia-friendly Roberto Vannacci ahead of next year’s election.

The looming votes, combined with the unpredictability of Washington’s backing for Kyiv, mean European countries need to look beyond their own budgets, the senior diplomat said. “We need to think wider and broader.”

The EU is also urging the Ukrainian government to secure more support from non-EU backers. “This is the first next step that they need to secure from their partners,” the Commission official said.

Not ‘pulling a Trump’

EU ambassadors are set to talk about the upcoming Canada and U.K. summits tomorrow, with Ukraine funding expected to form part of the discussions, the two diplomats said.

Brussels, “without pointing the finger,” wants to use the run-up to the meetings to press for broader support, the senior diplomat said. But the EU “won’t be pulling a Trump” and explicitly linking favorable treatment to contributions to Ukraine, they added.

The Commission has not set out what it will ask partners for or how any request might connect to trade and defense talks. The diplomat said the EU still needed to work out “how much will translate in joining those dots.”

Von der Leyen proposed making Canada the EU’s first “associate member” in her State of the Union speech last month. The October summit in Montreal is an opportunity to develop the idea.

Ottawa will participate in the EU’s SAFE program, which finances joint defense procurement, giving Canadian companies preferential access to SAFE-funded contracts. Closer defense cooperation and industrial access could form part of the wider conversation about support for Kyiv, one of the diplomats said.

In a statement to POLITICO, Kathryn Serieux, a spokesperson for Canada’s Privy Council Office, said Ottawa “is and has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine,” with Canada committing nearly C$26 billion in military, financial development and humanitarian assistance.

“Canada continues to stand by Ukraine and remains engaged with international partners on Ukraine’s needs,” Serieux said.

The U.K. summit is expected to advance Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s promised reset with the bloc, including agreements on youth mobility, food and emissions trading. Burnham has said the status quo is “not good enough” and wants Britain to move closer to the EU.

London wants U.K. companies to count as European under the proposed Industrial Accelerator Act, which would give preference to goods made in Europe in public contracts and industrial support. British officials worry U.K. firms could lose out despite close links between British and European supply chains.

Three U.K. officials said Tuesday they had not heard of a request for Britain to provide more support for Ukraine in exchange for letting its companies qualify under the act. A fourth EU official said Ukraine was expected to feature in the summit declaration with the U.K., but that it would reflect both sides’ efforts to help Kyiv, rather than a Brussels demand for more support.

The EU is also pressing Japan to increase its contributions, with one senior EU official saying it was lagging in 2026. A person familiar with the thinking in Tokyo pushed back on the idea that Japan was not pulling its weight, saying Tokyo had already given around $20 billion in support to Kyiv — but there could be room for more if Ukraine requested it.

Tokyo is also seeking assurances that Japanese companies will retain access to the EU market, following concerns the Industrial Accelerator Act’s “Made in Europe” preferences could put its firms at a disadvantage.

The Mission of Japan to the EU didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Australia says it has not yet received a request for more funding for Ukraine for 2027. Canberra is likely lower on the list, if it is on it at all, because its prime minister and foreign minister met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the U.N. General Assembly last month and announced additional funding and a security agreement, an Australian official said.

Dan Bloom contributed reporting from London. Amanda Copp contributed reporting from Canberra. Mike Blanchfield contributed reporting from Ottawa.

In a throwaway comment this week, Donald Trump made clear that he does not regard the war in Ukraine as a conflict with fault on both sides. “Russia frankly has been fine on Ukraine,” the U.S. president said. “They have not been doing that much.”

To residents of Kyiv — who have endured weeks of intensifying bombardment — and Ukraine’s allies across Europe, the remark confirmed a growing impression that the U.S. is taking Russia leader Vladimir Putin’s side in the war.

“American negotiators have been trying to push Ukraine into surrender for already almost two years,” the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas told the European Parliament on Tuesday. The reason Ukraine hasn’t “surrendered on Putin’s terms” so far is because Europe has been providing so much support, she added. 

As they scratch their heads for explanations for Trump’s latest turn against Ukraine, some European officials and diplomats think it comes down to the president’s personal preferences, as much as his country’s political aims.

“I do think it’s a personal thing,” said former British Cabinet minister David Lidington, now distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a leading security think tank in London. “Trump is self-centered — his personal predilections for dictators and autocrats, his desire to give opportunities to U.S. businesses … are very important parts of his motivation.”

In private, EU officials agree. “Trump doesn’t like [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. He just doesn’t like him,” said one government official who has observed both men closely. “That makes it harder to get the U.S. to help on peace. Everything is a rational business deal with Trump, until it’s not.” 

A diplomat from an EU country — granted anonymity, like others in this report, to discuss sensitive matters — said the inconsistent Trump could change his mind again and reverse recent moves against Ukraine. The U.S. president has chopped and changed on many issues, “except one thing,” the diplomat said. “He seems to be supportive of the Russians.”

“He’s been critical of Ukraine, the EU, NATO, but hardly ever said anything critical about Putin. It is striking. We have to deal with an administration that seems to be more pro-Russian than anything else,” the diplomat said.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mounting losses

For Ukraine and its European allies, the idea that nothing can or will change Trump’s feelings about Zelenskyy is a bleak one. After four-and-a-half years of war, Kyiv is running low on funding, air defenses and — amid swelling support for Europe’s populist right — facing a potential loss of political support in the months ahead. 

Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met the Ukrainian president and the leaders of Norway and Finland for talks in Oslo on Tuesday, and will head to St. Petersburg to discuss peace proposals with the Russian leadership on Wednesday as the White House pushes hard for a ceasefire. One option Putin will be offered is a three-way leaders’ summit with Trump and Zelenskyy.

Previous efforts to get the Russian president to attend such a meeting have failed, however, and EU diplomats do not believe Putin is showing any genuine desire for a ceasefire. That is partly what makes Trump’s hostility toward Zelenskyy so problematic.

“There is a clear consensus across Europe that Putin does not want peace,” a second EU diplomat said. “He will need to be forced into peace.”

But instead of making demands of Putin, Trump has ratcheted up his pressure on Zelenskyy, even amid escalating Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities this month. Ukraine’s leader is feeling the strain, as he told his EU counterparts in private meetings in Brussels last week, according to the first diplomat.

In a succession of highly critical comments in recent days, Trump has said Zelenskyy “doesn’t care” and “doesn’t want to end this war;” and should be replaced as leader or as Ukraine’s negotiator. “President Putin would like to see a settlement,” Trump said. “President Zelenskyy could have solved this war, or he could have made a deal, many times.” 

The Oval Office beating

Trump’s animosity may date back to an incident during his first term in 2019, when he urged the Ukrainian leader to help with an investigation into Joe Biden, who eventually defeated Trump in the following presidential election, Lidington said. A succession of hostile encounters in the years since — including in the Oval Office in February 2025 — have reinforced the impression, he said. 

“It was clear that in the infamous meeting in the White House that Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance had planned that public beating-up of Zelenskyy and it struck me then that there was a strong personal element to this,” said Lidington.

“I think there’s another element, which is that if you look at the people Trump tries to court, it tends to be autocratic strongman — and it is ‘man’ — leaders,” Lidington said.

He recalled attending a dinner with world leaders in 2018 to mark the centenary of the end of World War I in Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron and the German chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, were playing joint hosts “at the top table,” but Trump was not interested in making small talk with either of them, Lidington said.

“It was pretty obvious from the body language that Trump was impatient with them and one of the people he really wanted to talk to was [Turkish leader Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and other people who were a bit more in that strongman image that he likes to portray himself,” he observed.

‘Strange stories’

A senior official from a European country familiar with the Ukraine talks said Trump’s motives were partly political, partly about calculating what would be profitable and partly about personalities.

“They are currently in an election cycle and need someone to blame for rising prices,” the official said. “In general, Trump tends to like various types of people and leaders. He actually has a fondness for successful and cheerful people.”

In recent days, Zelenskyy has warned his country is suffering more civilian casualties because the U.S. has cut back on support, including Starlink and Starshield services that help Ukraine defend itself against Russian attacks and plan operations. “We still have no explanation for this, just different strange stories,” Zelenskyy told U.S. congressmen on Monday.  

This month, the advanced warnings of incoming Russian missile attacks from U.S. partners have failed to come through as normal. Ukraine is also running low on Patriot missile interceptors, he said. 

The Pentagon has not issued an official comment on the Ukrainian complaints. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said 328 civilians were killed and more than 2,000 wounded across Ukraine last month, an 85% increase compared to September 2025. The U.N. said that the first two weeks of October were among the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine in years, driven by increased missile and drone strikes.

The first EU diplomat quoted above said many European governments were irritated that Trump had cut them out of his conversations with Putin so far. “There is probably much more dialogue between the Americans and the Russians than we might know,” the diplomat said. 

Tuesday’s meeting with Witkoff in Norway raised the possibility that direct engagement with Putin might be back on the cards, for Zelenskyy at least. 

“Today was a good day for peace,” Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said after attending the talks in Oslo. “On a substantive and technical level we have actually made a lot of progress under the radar in the past week or so and now I feel that the process is back on track,” Stubb said.

The process is now going in the right direction again, he added. “Hopefully, we don’t do any backtracking.”

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday that the Trump administration was giving right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley $10,000 and launching a $25 million bounty program for members of the public to report fraud.

In December 2025, Shirley published a viral video alleging fraud at daycares in Minnesota that were operated by members of the local Somali community. Shirley lingered in parking lots and asked to enter childcare centers, taking refusals as evidence that the centers weren't actually caring for children. The video quickly went viral, triggering a massive governmental response: Federal immigration agents descended on the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

One of the last decade’s most consequential changes to how the Supreme Court operates is the growth of the so-called shadow docket — a process that allows the justices to decide cases unusually quickly, and often without full briefing or oral argument.

Historically, the Court would typically allow contentious legal issues to percolate in the lower courts for months or even years before the justices agreed to decide one of those issues. Then they’d spend months reading briefs, hearing arguments, and debating the case amongst themselves before they finally issued an opinion. This slow process existed because the Supreme Court is the final word on many legal questions — the Court can even override Congress if it claims a law is unconstitutional — and so it should be cautious before it hands down a decision that cannot easily be displaced.

A new case, which recently arrived on the Court’s shadow docket, embodies all the reasons why America’s highest Court should act carefully and slowly. K.M.K. v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association involves a highly contentious issue — the plaintiffs in the case effectively want the Supreme Court to bar transgender women from women’s sports teams at high schools and universities, even in states that support trans inclusion in sports.

It also involves an appalling sexual assault allegation. One of the plaintiffs in the case is a high school women’s team wrestler who is identified only by her initials because she is a minor. She claims that one of her wrestling opponents, who is transgender, “forcefully” penetrated the plaintiff’s vagina with her fingers during a match.

As a memo from the local prosecutor’s office points out, if these allegations are true then K.M.K. is the victim of a very serious crime — rape in the third degree. The prosecutor’s office, however, decided not to prosecute because it concluded that it could not prove that a sex crime was committed beyond a reasonable doubt. Among other things, prosecutors spoke to the referee who officiated the match, and he said that “nothing stood out to him during the match” and that “after watching the video of the match, he could not say that the suspect’s hand placement was ‘anything out of the ordinary.’”

The school district, meanwhile, says that it has reviewed video of the match, interviewed both competitors, and that its investigation into the allegation is “still ongoing.”

K.M.K., in other words, is exactly the sort of case that the justices should step away from, sending it back down to the lower courts to gather more information and to fully think through the difficult legal issues presented by the case. Setting aside the horrifying allegations against her one-time opponent, K.M.K.’s lawyers — most of whom work for a Christian right law firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — make novel legal arguments that ask the Court to make broad pronouncements that go far beyond its previous precedents. 

One of their arguments, if taken seriously by the justices, could potentially make it impossible for any school athletes, whether cis or trans, to participate in competitive sports of any kind.

There is a very real risk, in other words, that the Supreme Court will, if it moves too quickly in this case, harm millions of school athletes throughout the country. The factual question of whether a particular wrestler committed a crime is separate from the legal question of whether federal law strips states of their authority over trans participation in women’s sports. And this legal question deserves more deliberation than the Court can give it if it decides this case on the shadow docket.

So what are the actual legal issues in K.M.K.?

In West Virginia v. B.P.J. (2026), the Supreme Court warned that judges should not be given the power to decide which athletes may compete on a women’s sports team. “The legislatures and the schools are better equipped — and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for his Court, “to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines.”

B.P.J., of course, was a loss for transgender rights. The Court rejected a constitutional challenge to state laws that forbid trans women from playing on school sports teams within that state. But the legal question in B.P.J. was whether laws barring trans women from women’s sports are allowed — a question that the Court’s Republican majority answered in the affirmative. A victory for the plaintiffs in K.M.K., by contrast, would likely establish that no state may permit trans women to compete on women’s sports teams, regardless of what the people of that state want.

This Court is often skeptical of claims by trans rights advocates, and it almost always resolves disputes between cultural liberals and religious conservatives in favor of the religious right. That said, this Court has thus far respected states’ rights on another contentious issue that is a high priority for the religious right: abortion. Although the Court’s Republican majority overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, it has rejected some attempts to restrict abortion in blue states — including by repeatedly ruling against litigants who seek to ban the abortion medication mifepristone.

So it is, at least, possible that this Court will follow a similar path in K.M.K. and conclude that the question of which team trans women should play on should be answered by the states and not the Supreme Court.

Broadly speaking, ADF raises two legal arguments against Washington state’s policy allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams. It claims that Title IX, a federal law that bars “sex” discrimination by most schools, implicitly requires those schools to have sports teams that only cisgender women may play on. It also claims that the Court’s recent decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), which requires public schools to out trans students to their parents even if the students wish to keep their gender identity secret, also requires those schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports.

There’s no reason for the Supreme Court to decide either of these questions now, however. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Lux v. Rodrigues (2010), when a party that lost in the lower courts seeks an injunction from a Supreme Court justice before their case is fully litigated in those lower courts, they must demonstrate that “the legal rights at issue are ‘indisputably clear.’” This rule, like many old rules disfavoring shadow docket decisions, exists to prevent the justices from rushing into a decision that may later prove unwise.

There is no plausible argument that Title IX “indisputably” bars trans women from women’s sports. That’s because, just a few months ago in B.P.J., the Court held that it was not deciding the question of “whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams.” So that’s a recent Supreme Court precedent holding that the answer to this legal question remains open.

Mirabelli, meanwhile, is an unusually thinly reasoned decision. The Court’s Republican majority held that schools must out trans students because of a judicially created doctrine saying that parents have “primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’” But the Court’s analysis of this issue was just a single paragraph long, it relied on the most malleable doctrine in all of US constitutional law, and it had nothing to say about sports. 

Moreover, as the school district points out in its brief, the Court has never held that a parent’s right to direct the upbringing of their child includes a right to dictate which rules will be used by school sports teams. If such a right existed, a parent might insist that a school bar players of a particular race. Or they might demand that their child be allowed to play football without being tackled.

Competitive team sports simply cannot exist if one player’s mother is allowed to demand changes to the rules that neither the league nor the other players support.

In any event, at this stage in the litigation it should be enough for the Court to say that the unique right claimed by K.M.K.’s mother — the right to dictate which rules a multischool competitive sports league will use — is not “indisputably clear” under current law. 

What should happen when the Court eventually decides whether blue states may allow trans women to play on women’s teams?

It is, to borrow from Lux, indisputably clear that the Court should not give the K.M.K. plaintiffs the sweeping policy change that they seek in a shadow docket ruling. But the justices cannot avoid, forever, the question of whether federal law forbids trans women from playing on women’s teams. So how should they resolve this question when it is more properly presented to them?

Let’s dispose of the plaintiffs’ Mirabelli argument first. While the Court has held that parents have some right to direct the education of their children, prior to Mirabelli, this right was construed narrowly. One older case held that states may not forbid parents from sending their children to private schools. Another held that the government may not bar teachers at these schools from teaching the German language.

Prior to the Court’s barely explained decision in Mirabelli, however, the Court had never held that parents may dictate how public schools operate, and the school district’s brief in K.M.K. cites several court decisions warning against giving parents too much authority over public schools. (The Court did hold, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), that parents who object to a school’s curriculum on religious grounds may opt their children out of certain lessons. But the K.M.K. plaintiffs do not raise a religious objection.) As the Supreme Court said in Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), states may “restrict the parent’s control by requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child’s labor and in many other ways.” 

It’s clear from Mirabelli that the Court’s Republicans do not share this caution about judicial control over public schools. But, because Mirabelli was so thinly reasoned, it’s also impossible for outside observers to determine why these justices want an unprecedented amount of control over public schooling, or whether they have good reasons for asserting this new power.

I will simply reiterate the school district’s objection that, once the Supreme Court opens the door to parents dictating which rules will be used in school sporting competitions, the lawsuits will not end with parents seeking to kick trans women out of women’s sports. The next parent may object to their child wrestling Black people. Or they may demand that their child be given protective gear that gives them a competitive advantage. Some parents may also demand rules changes that conflict with changes demanded by other parents. And there is no principled way to distinguish these requests from a request to exclude trans women.

There are myriad problems, meanwhile, with the K.M.K. plaintiffs’ Title IX argument. That statute provides that schools that receive “Federal financial assistance” may not exclude individuals from “any education program” on “the basis of sex.” This statute has long been read to require equal treatment of men’s and women’s sports by schools that receive federal funds.

But, as the school district argues in its brief, Washington schools do not discriminate on the basis of “sex” — which the Court has defined to mean sex assigned at birth in this context. Instead, they classify athletes on the basis of gender identity. There is one team for all people who identify as male, whether trans or cis, and another team for all people who identify as female. Social conservatives may object to this arrangement, but it does not classify students based on their sex assigned at birth at all.

The K.M.K. plaintiffs’ argument is also undermined by federal regulations implementing Title IX. Those regulations provide that schools generally should not separate women and men in sports, but that they “may operate or sponsor separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport.” It is quite a stretch to read regulations saying that schools “may” have sex-segregated teams to say that schools must ensure that their teams are strictly sex segregated.

Finally, recall that Title IX only applies to schools that accept federal funding — schools have the option of rejecting Title IX’s requirements if they also forego federal grants. This matters because, as the Court recently held in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2026), “Congress must clearly and unambiguously alert a grant recipient to any condition on federal funds.”

Thus, if there is any ambiguity about whether Title IX requires schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports, that ambiguity must be resolved against imposing any requirements on public schools. Title IX may only be read to ban trans women from women’s sports if it “clearly and unambiguously” does so.

Again, there’s no reason for the justices to resolve either of these questions because, at this early stage in the litigation, the Supreme Court should simply decline to decide K.M.K. because the plaintiffs’ legal rights are not “indisputably clear.” But this Court is often impatient, especially in cases involving culture war issues. Mirabelli was also a shadow docket case, but that didn’t stop the Court’s Republicans from inventing a new legal rule compelling teachers to out their trans students.

There’s a serious risk, in other words, that this Court will rush to decide K.M.K. before it fully considers the legal arguments on either side, or even learns whether the genuinely shocking allegations raised by the plaintiffs have merit.

PARIS — The first publicly available poll following the violence that rocked France over the weekend showed little change in voter intentions in next spring’s presidential election.

While even some of far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen’s adversaries expected her to get a boost from the rioting and looting that took place on the sidelines of peaceful protests on Saturday, the survey published by Ifop and Fiducial found little change in her support levels.

Nor was there much change in voting intentions toward far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom the government has repeatedly blamed for stoking the violence. Mélenchon and his allies have repeatedly and forcefully denied the accusation.

The poll was conducted online from 8 p.m. Saturday — after rioting and looting had begun — until Monday.

Le Pen remains well ahead of the pack with 34% to 38% of the vote in the various scenarios tested. Given France’s presidential election moves to a two-person runoff if no candidate obtains a majority of votes on the first round, the battle for second place is shaping to be the most crucial story of the election.

That fight looks like it will be a tight one.

Mélenchon’s position remains similar to what it was before Saturday, despite the attempt by the government and his opponents to tie him to the unrest. The Ifop Fiducial survey has him either in sole possession of second place or tied for it in the various scenarios tested, though his lead on his nearest competitors — center-right former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and center-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann — is in some cases within the margin of error.

“The first feedback we’ve had from the ground — including from areas where we’re not held in high regard — is that the tactic of blaming us for everything isn’t working,” said a high-level Mélenchon campaign operative, granted anonymity to discuss internal campaign analysis.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau told broadcaster TF1 on Monday that she “absolutely [could] not confirm” the government’s analysis based on the profiles of those arrested and placed under investigation in the French capital so far.

The government, meanwhile, continues to fend off critics who allege that it has mismanaged the affair, which they are concerned could snowball into a sustained movement like the Yellow Vest demonstrations of 2018.

Calls for more protests this coming Saturday have emerged online, prompting Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to order what he called on Tuesday a “massive” police apparatus to avoid more scenes of vandalism, arson and mayhem. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said elite tactical police and a military unit normally deployed on French soil for counterterrorism operations would be mobilized as well.

After localized curfews were established throughout the country Monday, Lecornu said it would be up to local and regional authorities to renew them Tuesday night.

On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.

Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.

“Shoot all he has to really do is stop by and say ‘yes,’” Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. “That should only take a minute and he’s on his way. We don’t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.”

At the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the “yes” he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek’s way in his native South Carolina, Kao later recounted to the FBI. In exchange, he said, Graham asked Kao to pledge a total of $100,000 to his reelection campaign.

In early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham’s steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.

The scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said — in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state’s top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.

Kao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: “This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.

Kao’s admissions would constitute a vast criminal bribery scheme if they could be proved in court — a challenge, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult to win corruption cases. Kao himself posed another hurdle. He was facing prison for fraud and campaign finance violations and was speaking to the FBI in the hopes of reducing his sentence.

But the FBI agents who took Kao’s confession — two experienced anti-corruption investigators — could see that much of it lined up with a trove of records they had seized from Navatek. They forged ahead. The FBI took the formal step of naming two former Navatek executives who had worked with Kao as subjects of a bribery investigation. The agency did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao. The agents indicated to their superiors that the lawmakers could become subjects in the future, according to records viewed by ProPublica.

The details of this investigation have not previously been reported.

President Donald Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately gutted the specialized FBI and Department of Justice teams dedicated to taking on public corruption — an act of revenge for having previously investigated him. The two experienced agents on the case were swept up in the purge, and the career prosecutor assisting them quit after Trump appointees forbid the DOJ’s anti-corruption section from filing any new cases. Today, there is no one left to look into Kao’s explosive allegations, as the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption. The case is dead.

ProPublica has unearthed the investigation by reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, internal company emails, evidence the FBI used to vet Kao’s claims and dozens of interviews with people who saw how Navatek operated, including an eyewitness to Graham and Kao’s secret steakhouse dinner.

This story is part of a series based on our reporting. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had probed the conduct of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who steered millions in government funding toward Navatek while Kao gave her illegal campaign donations. Collins denied wrongdoing and dismissed Kao as a “convicted liar.”

Kao is indeed the only person involved to serve prison time. He pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign donations and a loan fraud scheme in 2022. In 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months in prison.

Graham died at 71 earlier this year. His sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill his seat, retained most of his senior staff, including those who dealt with Navatek. She even took up some of his committee assignments, including appropriations. Darline Graham is running for a full term in office this November.

Clyburn, 86, is one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. He is widely credited with tipping the scales for Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Wilson remains influential on national defense spending from his senior perch on the Armed Services Committee.

“Whatever a donor may think or say, a donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor’s request,” Jami LaRue, Clyburn’s communications director, wrote in response to detailed questions. “The Congressman has always striven to assist the University of South Carolina and all of the colleges and universities in his district when called upon to further their important missions. The crimes and lies of an imprisoned fraudster will not cause the Congressman to waver in his support for these fine institutions.”

David Snider, Wilson’s communications director, did not address a detailed list of questions sent by ProPublica. “Congressman Wilson does and has always abided by campaign donation regulations set forth by the Federal Election Commission,” Snider said in an email.

In an emailed statement, Taylor Reidy, who was Lindsey Graham’s communications director and now holds the same post for his sister, wrote that “any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior or wrongdoing by the late Senator Lindsey Graham or his staff are simply false.” She said the accusations were the “ravings of a convicted felon” and that her office was never contacted by the FBI about the matter. After Kao’s arrest, they disgorged his donations, she added.

The two executives who were subjects of the FBI investigation, Duke Hartman and Joshua Knight, were never charged. Hartman, the other executive at the dinner meeting with Graham, is now the CEO of a new naval research company called Integer Technologies that he co-founded with Knight after Kao’s arrest. Integer was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing government contractors in the country. It also became the ultimate beneficiary of the Graham dinner meeting, picking up the contract Graham allegedly agreed to facilitate that night.

Hartman and Knight did not respond to detailed requests for comment.

“[It’s] corruption at its best,” Kao wrote to ProPublica from federal detention in South Dakota, before cutting off contact. “But I am the only one rotting in prison.”

Small Company, Big Ambitions

Kao’s dinner with Graham was part of his grandiose plan to make Navatek a major defense contractor.

He had become the CEO at an uncertain moment in the company’s history. Founded in Hawaii in the 1970s, the company originally thrived on a close relationship with the state’s powerful senior senator, Daniel Inouye. When Kao assumed ownership in 2019, it had been several years since Inouye had died, and Navatek was in need of a new patron in Washington.

At times, Kao hardly seemed the person to pull this off. He had started out as the company’s CFO and was openly uninterested in its technology. He told bombastic lies about his personal life. Former employees said he regaled them with tales of selling newspapers for members of the Bloods and Crips street gangs as a youth. In a deposition, Kao later admitted that wasn’t true.

But what he lacked in engineering chops he made up with ambition. Once, Kao held a company town hall using a map of the U.S. dotted with future Navatek offices as his backdrop, a former employee recalled. “He would talk about how we’re a $10 million company, and in the next three years, we’re going to be a billion-dollar company,” said a former engineer. “He was an absolute megalomaniac.”

Kao hatched a plan to expand Navatek’s presence across the country, making new friends in Congress along the way. He courted politicians using something he called “the method,” as ProPublica detailed in September.

Navatek would open an office in the state or district of a powerful member of Congress and partner with a local university to concoct a proposal for federally funded research. Then, aided by a well-connected lobbyist and the sheen of credibility from its association with the university, Navatek would approach the member for federal research funding.

Kao told the FBI he would strike deals in small, face-to-face meetings with the members or their trusted staff. Navatek — through executives, family members and lobbyists — would make generous campaign donations. In exchange, the member would add detailed language to the defense budget to fund the company’s work.

That legislative language would not name the company. But it would describe specific work that Navatek was already planning to do behind the scenes, making it the only logical choice for the eventual government contract. The lawmakers’ staff would also backchannel with the Navy after the bill was passed to make sure contracting offices knew to direct the money to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show — even though the contracts were in theory competitive.

Kao “wanted to build a company as big as he could as fast as he could,” a former executive later testified in court. For a while, he succeeded. Under Kao, Navatek went from having to “rebuild,” as the executive put it, to winning $40.7 million in new government contracts in 2020.

Hartman, the other Navatek executive who went to dinner with Graham, was in charge of maintaining friendly ties in Congress while tracking the millions of dollars the company had requested in research funds. He kept careful tabs on the company’s progress using dozens of color-coded spreadsheets. “If anyone knows the impropriety of the business model, it’s him,” Kao told the FBI, referring to Hartman.

Later, these spreadsheets provided the FBI a detailed picture of which congressional offices worked closest with Navatek. In the tables devoted to South Carolina, Navatek denoted Graham as a “key supporter.”

The company primarily targeted lawmakers from smaller states who sat on appropriations committees, like Collins, Kao explained to the FBI, because they wielded huge power over the budget while having fewer “constituents to ‘feed.’”

The senior senator from South Carolina was another prime target. “You can get access to Lindsey Graham,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, said in an interview.

Kao, Hartman and other Navatek executives approached the offices of Graham, Clyburn and Wilson — all powerful members of the South Carolina delegation — in the beginning of 2019. The company had recruited the University of South Carolina for a joint research project, and together they asked the lawmakers to find $9.5 million to fund the work. If it succeeded, Navatek planned to ask Congress to re-up the funding for two more years as well as green-light two more projects, internal company records show, for a total of up to $90 million in South Carolina alone.

Yet Navatek had “zero people” capable of doing the research it was pitching, said a former executive with direct knowledge of the work.

Its $9.5 million “power and energy” proposal promised cutting-edge research on how to distribute the limited power on board a ship between multiple energy-intense systems, like radars, lasers and rail guns. Graham’s office later boasted that the work would lead to new technology that would “ensure that our fleet is ready for the fights of the future.”

In reality, Navatek’s initial research “looked like a college senior’s graduation project,” the executive said. “Something you go get from RadioShack.” Graham’s office referred questions about the quality of the work to the Navy and the university. The Office of Naval Research, which awarded the contract, did not respond to questions.

But for Congress, that lack of expertise wasn’t a problem. Throughout 2019, the FBI noted, as the ensuing year’s budget came together, both Graham’s and Clyburn’s offices took steps to make sure it included Navatek’s funding.

In May 2019, Willie Lyles III, Clyburn’s legislative director, alerted Navatek that the House Appropriations Committee would endorse new funding for a “modular and scalable integrated power and thermal system capable of powering a directed energy weapon system of 100 or more kilowatts,” according to an email flagged by the FBI. Three days later, that exact language appeared in the House Appropriations Committee report. Lyles did not reply to a request for comment.

In September, the Senate Appropriations Committee — Graham’s committee — released a budget report that set aside $9.5 million in funding for “Talent and Technology for Navy Power and Energy Systems.” Agents noted that Navatek may have ghostwritten the technical description that accompanied this line item because “an almost identical paragraph” appeared in Hartman’s internal spreadsheets two months before the Senate report became public.

After the Senate advanced its version of the budget in the fall, Navatek dropped $4,799 to send bourbon to a handful of lawmakers, including Graham and Collins, the FBI found in company records — a likely violation of Senate gift rules. Both Collins’ and Graham’s offices denied receiving bourbon. Navatek later sent Clyburn a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements for $102.60.

Congress passed the final spending bill containing $9.5 million for Navatek’s pet project on Dec. 19, 2019.

At that point, Kao and other Navatek executives had not made any donations to Clyburn, Wilson or even Graham.

That would change within days of Congress passing the budget, when an executive pledged $750 to Wilson’s campaign at a fundraiser held at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill watering hole for lobbyists and Hill staffers, emails show. In the following weeks, Kao and his lobbyist gave Wilson’s campaign $3,500.

And bigger checks were imminent. Kao kicked off 2020 by making plans to spend $300,000 at a slew of political fundraisers, according to text messages filed in court and a recent deposition. Navatek’s lobbyists at that time were seeking private meetings with Graham, Wilson and Clyburn, where Kao planned to ask for significantly more federal funding. Kao eventually met with all three, and each asked for $100,000, he told the FBI.

During that same period, Kao and Hartman met a top fundraiser for Collins at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. As ProPublica reported, that meeting led Kao to donate $150,000 to the pro-Collins super PAC. Kao told the FBI that the money was a bribe in exchange for the senator’s support for more Navatek funding. The head of the super PAC and Collins have denied Kao’s version of events.

Kao told the FBI it was not unusual for donations to come after the favor: “We became clever in our own right and figured out how to dangle the carrot,” he wrote in a memo seen by ProPublica, “until we saw some assurance that the Ask was in the budget.”

To secure a meeting with Graham, Kao hired Michael Tongour, a veteran South Carolina lobbyist who was old law school friends with the senator and family friends with Clyburn and Wilson. Graham was up for reelection against a well-funded challenger, Jaime Harrison, and had a crowded fundraising schedule, said Tongour, but they eventually found a time.

“The Graham fundraiser says that it [sic] you want to reserve a date for Senator Graham to attend a private dinner, the campaign wants to get $40,000 in contributions,” Tongour wrote to Kao, Hartman and lobbyist Andy Winer, in an undated email seen by ProPublica. Winer, whom Kao described as Navatek’s chief lobbyist, chimed in to say that Graham could stay only 45 minutes, and Kao replied that all they needed to hear was “yes.”

“These discussions are very frank and oddly not at all awkward,” Kao told the FBI. “I suppose once we got that far, everyone knows the deal.”

A Dinner With Graham

Graham showed up late to his March 3, 2020, dinner with Kao, Hartman and Tongour. A fundraiser working for Graham appeared first and accepted an envelope from Kao containing checks made out to Graham’s campaign, Kao said. Kao did not know the fundraiser’s name; in an FBI debrief, he simply referred to the person as the “money man.” After that person departed, Graham entered.

Graham, Kao recalled to the FBI, was “very abrupt” and “straight to the point”: He asked how much Navatek wanted, to which they said $10 million a year for three years. Graham asked Kao to pledge $100,000 in donations in exchange for his support, Kao told the FBI.

Navatek was juggling multiple proposals in South Carolina worth around $10 million, and it’s not clear which one Kao was describing.

Congress had just approved the $9.5 million for the power and energy project, but Navatek still needed the Navy to award the money in the form of a contract. The company was also about to ask Congress to fund the same project for a second year at $10.5 million. On top of that, Navatek was planning to pitch a new research proposal, at $10 million, to study the transport of supplies inland from ships using autonomous vehicles. It was another area where Navatek had “zero past performance,” the former executive said.

The same week of the steakhouse dinner, Graham’s office was working behind the scenes with Navatek and the University of South Carolina to make sure the Navy sent the first $9.5 million to the right company.

A day before the dinner, an official with the Office of Naval Research emailed Graham’s office to ask about the money, which “the Senator may have an interest in.” Craig Abele, Graham’s national security adviser, called her a few days later to confirm that Graham’s office had intended the money to be awarded to the Navatek partnership, emails show. “Spoke to ONR this morning,” Abele wrote March 6. “Should be set.”

The company received the contract, which it split with the university, in July 2020. 

Abele became Graham’s deputy chief of staff and still holds the position for Darline. He did not reply to an email requesting comment. A Graham spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that their office had indeed added the $9.5 million to the budget at the request of the university and Navatek. The spokesperson said the research was supported by the Navy and rejected the notion that Graham was motivated by campaign cash.

Graham’s spokesperson said requiring a fundraising minimum for a dinner was normal practice.

The checks Kao handed over at the dinner added up to about half of the $40,000 he had agreed to raise for the dinner, according to Tongour. The rest came in May, campaign records show.

“My understanding at the time was that the contributions associated with the event were lawful political contributions,” Winer said. “I never advised Kao to make a political contribution in exchange for official action. I never participated in, witnessed or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution.”

After Kao’s 2020 indictment, the University of South Carolina broke off the partnership. “University officials were not aware of any political contributions from Navatek,” Jeff Stensland, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Our sole objective in partnering with them was to expand our research enterprise.”

One week after the dinner, on March 10, a University of South Carolina lobbyist sent written requests to Graham’s office for $20.5 million in appropriations: $10.5 million to continue Navatek’s power and energy research and $10 million for its new autonomous vehicle research.

Tongour confirmed many elements of Kao’s story. In a recent interview with ProPublica and subsequent emails, he remembered Kao giving the envelope full of checks to Graham’s fundraiser and even agreed that Graham kept the meeting short. “I don’t recall that he stayed more than 30 minutes,” Tongour said in an email. “Certainly not for appetizers, entrée, and dessert.”

But he denied Kao’s most significant claim: that Graham and Navatek struck an explicit, potentially illegal deal for contracts.

“I would remember that forever,” Tongour said. Graham supported Navatek’s requests, he said, because they were good for the state. “If I had seen that kind of quid pro quo, I would have quit earlier.” Tongour fired Navatek as a client later that year, immediately after Kao’s arrest.

Navatek considered Graham its chief patron in South Carolina, internal records show, just as it viewed Collins in Maine. But the company also wanted support in the House.

For that, Navatek turned to Clyburn, a member of Democratic party leadership and one of the most powerful figures in Congress. Agents found Navatek emails setting a meeting with Clyburn for early March. The goal, Kao said, was to make sure that the House draft of the budget “mirrored” whatever Graham inserted in the Senate version.

Over a meal, Clyburn asked Kao how much he was donating to Graham and then asked for the same amount, $100,000, Kao told the FBI.

The FBI tallied $20,000 in contributions that Kao and his family members made to Clyburn a few days after their scheduled meeting. A month later, Hartman arranged for a $10,000 gift to Clyburn’s alma mater, South Carolina State University, according to an email seen by ProPublica. Hartman noted it was “Congressman Clyburn’s favorite school.”

The spokesperson for Clyburn confirmed the dinner occurred but did not respond to questions about what was discussed.

Kao and Hartman struck a similar bargain with Wilson, Kao told the FBI, at a private lunch he secured by donating to his campaign. The FBI pulled records of $3,500 in donations Kao and Tongour made in late 2019 and early 2020.

Wilson has an influential role on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes defense spending. Wilson was “very clear and knew what the ask was,” Kao told the FBI. He wanted however much Clyburn was getting in campaign contributions in exchange for his support, Kao said.

Tongour denied this. “There was no ‘pay to play’ with Joe Wilson or his staff either,” he wrote in an email, adding that he donated because Wilson “is a friend and I want to see him re-elected.”

Kao claimed to the FBI that he paid for meals with all three politicians, but campaign finance records appear to show the lawmakers’ campaigns picked up the check.

By August 2020, Hartman had gotten word that Graham’s and Wilson’s committees would each support part of the company’s requests, internal company records show. Clyburn was not on key committees while he was a party leader. In one of his myriad spreadsheets, Hartman projected that the final budget could include up to $15.5 million of the $20.5 million the company had lobbied for.

Kao told agents he was gearing up to make more significant donations to Graham, Clyburn and Wilson by the end of the year. Instead, on Sept. 30, 2020, he was arrested.

Kao reflected on his time at Navatek in a deposition taken last month inside a federal prison. The company’s founder has sued Kao, saying his stewardship defrauded Navatek of millions.

“It’s nothing more than government contracting done through placating senior appropriation members for contracts,” Kao said. “The whole thing is a grand lie.”

An Arrest, a Lifeboat

Kao’s arrest plunged Navatek into disarray. Federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding a federal loan program; not long after, he was also charged with making illegal donations to the Collins campaign and super PAC. Lobbyists, universities and congressional offices abruptly cut off contact. “Don’t call us,” one congressional office told an executive, he later testified.

The Collins campaign said it disgorged Kao’s contribution. Yet the senator, facing a tight reelection bid, has had to field questions following the ProPublica report about her support for Navatek and why the super PAC supporting her accepted the $150,000 donation from the shell company in the first place.

As Navatek sank, Hartman began building himself a lifeboat. In 2021, he and Knight started a new military research company headquartered in South Carolina called Integer Technologies. Integer’s first project was one that Navatek had brokered with Graham.

Hartman didn’t face any criminal charges at the time and left Navatek largely unscathed. He would later settle a civil lawsuit brought by his former employer, which contended he played a role in Kao’s campaign finance and loan fraud schemes, for $425,000. He admitted no wrongdoing.

In September 2024, FBI agents flew to Hawaii for what would be their final interview with Kao. They pressed him for details about what happened in South Carolina, quizzing him on his dinner with Graham and a second in-person meeting he said he had with Clyburn. Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.

As the year came to a close, FBI agent Michelle Ball felt she had enough material to move forward. The FBI had “uncovered a lengthy history” of a government contractor making donations “in exchange for government contracts,” she wrote in a Dec. 9, 2024, memo viewed by ProPublica.

In federal corruption probes, agents often begin by focusing on lower-level targets with a goal of working their way up to more prominent figures. Ball named Hartman; his business partner, Knight; and their company, Integer, as the formal subjects of the probe, as they prepared to potentially issue subpoenas and gather more evidence. They had Graham, Clyburn and Wilson in their sights. Ball devoted entire sections of the memo to detailing the lawmakers’ conduct. And she flagged the case as a sensitive matter that might implicate politicians in the future.

In the summer of 2024, Kate Fifield, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s anti-corruption section, had been assigned to join the case. Fifield was wrapping up a high-profile prosecution of a retired Navy admiral who traded a government contract for a future job. Turning her attention to Kao, she and the FBI agents weighed their options. They considered getting high-level approval to deploy undercover agents. Proving an exchange of cash for favors often requires the kind of inconvertible evidence that undercover recordings can provide.

But before the investigation took flight, the new Trump administration began to demolish the Justice Department. The president’s handpicked leaders ordered prosecutors to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, triggering a wave of resignations in the Public Integrity Section where Fifield worked, and revoked the section’s authority to bring new cases.

Then Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, began to purge the anti-corruption unit in the Washington D.C., field office, where many agents had investigated Trump.

Ball was fired in October 2025. Kevin Gounaud, another agent who had been working with her on the investigation, was pushed out in early 2026. Through their lawyer, the agents declined to comment.

The corruption investigation, just launched, suddenly went dark.

The White House referred ProPublica’s questions to the FBI and DOJ. 

The Department of Justice didn’t respond to detailed questions about the investigation. 

“Under President Trump, the Justice Department is rooting out the weaponization, corruption, and institutional rot that ran rampant under Joe Biden’s two-tiered system of justice,” DOJ spokesperson Audrey Cook said.

Kao’s claims are “half baked” and “misleading,” FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said. “Additionally, as we have said repeatedly, personnel are only removed at this FBI if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”

Meanwhile, Integer has rapidly expanded. Last year, it reported $81 million in contracts and announced that number would climb to $375 million by 2030. The company inked partnership deals with universities in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Mississippi. The University of South Carolina called its partnership with the firm a “model for public-private success.”

The company continues to forge ties with powerful politicians. In late 2024, Hartman posted a photo of himself with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on his LinkedIn. “It was great to visit with the Speaker of the House today,” he wrote. “It’s good to know there are people in positions of power who seem to really care for the people they serve.” Johnson’s office did not reply to an email requesting comment. 

The occasion was a new research partnership in Louisiana. Hartman thanked his lobbyist for making it happen.

The post How Trump’s FBI purge saved Lindsey Graham and James Clyburn from a bribery investigation appeared first on Salon.com.

Justice Samuel Alito’s new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, isn’t going to set the world on fire with its bold new ideas. It’s mostly a collection of Alito’s old speeches. 

But if the book treads familiar ground, the reception to it among writers who share Alito’s broad alignment with the political right is quite surprising. Three recent reviews of Alito’s new book —  all by right-leaning authors — sound a lot like the longtime liberal criticisms of Alito.

All three of these reviews accuse Alito of engaging in results-oriented decision-making — meaning that he often seems to start with the outcome that he prefers, and then comes up with a rationale to justify that outcome. This, they argue, is at odds with Alito’s fairly recent decision to label himself an “originalist,” an approach to judging that’s long been sold as a way to keep judges from mistaking “their own predilections for the law.”

Originalism, for the uninitiated, is the idea that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what its words meant at the time it was ratified. It’s more than just a fashionable idea among many Republican lawyers and judges. Many legal conservatives view originalism as a central part of their professional identity, and powerful conservative organizations like the Federalist Society have long evangelized originalism as the one true way to interpret the Constitution.

Yet, a consistent theme in the critical reviews of So Ordered is that Alito’s actual approach to judging cannot be squared with his decision to label himself an “originalist” in the book’s title. As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a conservative who has written critically about originalism in the past, writes in his review of the book: “Alito’s embrace of the originalist label is also likely to come as a surprise to people on the left and the right.”

Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the second Bush administration, writes in his review of the book that early proponents of originalism, including Scalia, often sold it as a more restrained alternative to “a liberal conception of judging called ‘living constitutionalism.’” Goldsmith says that approach, which was ascendant among liberals several decades ago but has since fallen out of favor, read the Constitution as an adaptable document whose meaning could evolve to deal with “current needs.” 

Conservatives needed an intellectually consistent way to put the brakes on that impulse, and originalism was their answer. By treating the Constitution as an inflexible charter whose meaning was fixed at some distant point in the past, Scalia and his fellow travelers hoped to “limit or reverse the progressive transformation of American society set in motion by Supreme Court decisions that had expanded criminal-defense rights, ended prayer in public school, recognized the rights to contraception and abortion, strengthened voting equality, and supported affirmative action and busing.”

Now that movement conservatives control the Supreme Court, however, it’s less clear whether originalism is still useful to conservatism. As Jason Willick, a conservative Washington Post columnist, writes in his review of Alito’s book, “originalism can get in the way of the right’s ambitions.” Sometimes, an honest application of originalism produces liberal results.

Willick interprets Alito’s book as an attempt to “keep the marriage” between conservatives and originalism together. But if that’s true, it is an open marriage. Alito is happy to make originalist arguments when they suit his preferred outcomes. But his greatest value to conservative Republicans is often that he is willing to write non-originalist opinions that reach the result his team desires, but that a more principled originalist would view as beyond the pale.

On the surface, the fact that conservative intellectuals are starting to notice, and criticize, Alito’s weak commitment to one of the conservative legal movement’s core ideas might indicate that a schism is forming between committed originalists and more flexible partisans like Alito. Perhaps the conservative legal movement is becoming a victim of its own success?

In So Ordered, Alito seems to be suggesting the opposite: He’s offering proof that a judge can still identify as an out and proud originalist, even if they enjoy frequent flings with the right-wing version of “living constitutionalism.” 

More broadly, if Democrats hope that the growing tension between Republican judges’ preferred methodology and their ability to reach reliably conservative results will lead to more liberal outcomes, they should expect to be disappointed. Alito, despite his apostasy, is still one of the most celebrated figures in the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative bar association that has long evangelized originalism as the one true way to interpret the Constitution. 

What is Alito’s actual approach to judging?

So Ordered offers a simple way for judges whose originalist and conservative identities are in tension to resolve that tension: They can continue to self-identify as “originalists,” while still reaching whatever result they want in the most important cases.

Alito hasn’t always described himself as an originalist. In fact, at times he’s openly mocked originalism. In a 2011 argument about how the First Amendment applies to violent video games, Alito responded to an originalist question from Justice Antonin Scalia by quipping, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?” 

In the past, Alito has, at some points, called himself a “practical originalist,” and at other times expressed doubt about that self-description.

In their reviews, both Goldsmith and Willick highlight Alito’s statement that originalism can only survive as “anything other than a minor academic curiosity” if it is “widely viewed as generally producing good results.” But, as Willick notes, this raises an important question: “Viewed as producing good results by whom?”

The answer to this question is that the justice wants to reach results that he personally, as well as other members of the Republican Party’s right flank, view as good. That, as Willick lays out, entails cracking down on broad exercises of executive power during the Obama administration, then letting those reins go slack during Donald Trump’s presidencies. 

The actual approach to judging Alito describes in So Ordered, the libertarian author Damon Root writes, sounds “much more like the results-oriented ‘living constitutionalism’ that originalists are supposed to oppose.”

Goldsmith, Willick and Root are hardly the only right-leaning thinkers to notice Alito’s thin commitment to originalism. There is also Alito’s closest ideological ally on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas.

The occasion for Thomas’s criticism was Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) v. Community Financial Services (2024), a bizarre lawsuit where a lower federal court claimed that an entire federal agency, the CFPB, violated a provision of the Constitution that had literally never been cited by any other court in all of US history to strike down a federal law. 

That provision says that the Treasury may not pay money unless Congress allows that spending through “Appropriations made by law.” As Thomas explained in the Court’s opinion in CFPB, this constitutional provision merely establishes that Congress must identify a “specified source of public money” that an agency may draw upon when it funds that agency. Because the CFPB cleared this low bar, it is constitutional.

Alito’s dissent, meanwhile, did not really make a legal argument against the CFPB. Instead, he spent the bulk of his dissent discussing centuries-old conflicts between England’s Parliament and its king, which eventually inspired the drafters of the Constitution to place appropriations in Congress’s hands. Yet, as Thomas writes, Alito “never connects its summary of history back to the word ‘Appropriations.’” Alito simply listed a bunch of historical facts that are tangentially related to the legal question before his Court, then leapt to the conclusion that the CFPB is unconstitutional.

Alito, in other words, did not actually practice originalism when he wrote this dissent. As Alito concedes in So Ordered, originalism isn’t simply the idea that judges should rely on historical sources when deciding cases. It is, in Alito’s own words, “the theory that constitutional provisions should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.” Originalists, in other words, are supposed to use history to determine what the words of the Constitution mean, not to vomit historical anecdotes onto a page before reaching an irrelevant legal conclusion.

So Alito’s CFPB dissent is not originalist, but it is entirely consistent with the results-oriented approach to judging that even his conservative critics have begun to notice. One of Alito’s major projects as a justice appears to be attempting to dismantle anything accomplished by President Barack Obama. The CFPB was created by the financial reform legislation that Obama signed in 2010. Alito has also tried three times to kill Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.

Yet, as Goldsmith writes in his review of So Ordered, Alito “has supported the Trump administration in every second-term case of importance, including with dissents in every major Trump loss.”

Beyond his unapologetic partisanship, Alito is, as law professor Neil Siegel wrote in a 2017 review of the justice’s career, “the primary judicial voice of the many millions of Americans who appear to be losing the culture wars.”

In So Ordered, for example, Alito repeatedly brings up an argument against same-sex marriage that he first raised in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision. Same-sex marriage should remain illegal, Alito claims, because its legalization “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” Alito feared that, once gay equality became enshrined in the law, Americans who reject that equality “risk being labeled as bigots.”

But this isn’t even a legal argument, much less an originalist one. The First Amendment’s free speech clause protects the right to call someone a bigot, even if Alito believes that the charge is unjustified. And the First Amendment’s guarantee that everyone may freely exercise their religion allows believers in liberal faiths to teach others that God abhors discrimination. The Constitution has never been understood to deny civil rights to a group of people because someone might speak disparagingly about individuals who oppose that right. If it did, constitutional rights could not exist.

All of which is a long way of saying that Alito’s conservative critics are right to label him a results-oriented judge. He has no real commitment to a principled theory of interpretation like originalism. His approach to individual cases often turns on whether the defendant is a Democrat or a Republican. And many of his opinions do not so much make legal arguments as, to borrow the words of Lionel Trilling, rely on “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

Originalists need Alito more than Alito needs originalism

Originalism is a powerful tool in the hands of judges who wish to radically change how the Constitution is understood. In the American legal system, courts typically follow a principle known as stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided” — which holds that judges should almost always follow the legal rules laid down by previous decisions, even if a judge does not like how that earlier case was decided.

Originalism, by contrast, posits that a judicial decision’s legitimacy flows, not from its alignment with prior precedents, but from the judge’s understanding of how the words of the Constitution were originally understood. This allows judges who wish to toss out longstanding legal rules to wrap their opinions in the trappings of America’s founding, and to paint judges who honor stare decisis as betrayers of the Constitution’s true meaning.

Historically, originalism has been used by liberals and conservatives alike to justify dismantling legal rules they despised. Franklin D. Roosevelt-appointed Justice Hugo Black, for example, wielded originalist arguments to attack precedents that undercut the New Deal, or that otherwise interfered with progressive economic legislation.

Similarly, conservatives like Alito use originalist rhetoric to undermine liberal precedents that they abhor. Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which abolished the constitutional right to an abortion, is chock-full of originalist arguments that “until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law.”

But one problem with the Constitution’s early history, at least if you are a results-driven judge, is that it does not map perfectly onto anyone’s modern-day political beliefs. While originalism sometimes gives judges strong arguments that they can use to undermine previous Supreme Court decisions, a results-oriented judge like Alito will inevitably want to reach outcomes that originalist arguments cannot support.

Consider, for example, affirmative action. There is no plausible originalist argument against it. The same Congress that drafted the 14th Amendment, which the Court’s Republican majority used in 2023 to abolish race-conscious admissions programs at most universities, also enacted numerous affirmative action programs — ranging from the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act to a much smaller program providing money “for the relief of freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia.”

But the dearth of originalist arguments against affirmative action has not stopped this Court from implementing its preferred racial policies. As Goldsmith notes, only three members of the current Court — Thomas, plus Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — “regularly try to practice originalism, and they do so very unevenly.” So, when the Republican justices wish to reach a result that cannot be justified by originalist arguments, the opinion is typically authored by one of the Court’s three non-originalist Republicans.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the decision ending affirmative action on college and university campuses, was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts — who declared during his 2005 confirmation hearing that “I do not have an overarching judicial philosophy that I bring to every case.” The Court’s more recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), which applied the Republican justices’ skepticism of race-conscious laws to voting rights, was authored by Alito.

Republicans, in other words, would be in rough shape if they actually filled the Supreme Court with principled originalists. The conservative legal project depends on flexible, results-focused justices like Alito, who will reach ideologically correct conclusions even when originalism calls for a more liberal result, and who will sign their name to opinions that may make their originalist colleagues quietly cringe.

Does that mean that originalist rhetoric will fade in Republican legal circles? It’s certainly possible. In So Ordered, Alito gives a mixed review of the work of Adrian Vermeule, a Catholic conservative law professor at Harvard who argues that legal conservatives should abandon originalism altogether because it constrains their ability to impose their own vision of the “common good.”

Trump, meanwhile, has had a falling out with the Federalist Society. While the Federalist Society successfully pushed Trump to appoint outspoken proponents of originalism to the bench during his first term, many of his second-term nominees’ primary qualification is their personal loyalty to Trump. At least three of his former criminal defense lawyers are now US Court of Appeals judges.

At the same time, some members of the Court’s Democratic minority appear to be taking a page from Justice Black’s playbook. Liberals who disagree with the current Court’s precedents will often find that constitutional history supports their preferred outcomes. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in particular, often wields originalist arguments to disparage her Republican colleagues’ approach to race.

So it’s certainly possible to imagine a future where Republicans abandon originalism in favor of Trump’s personalism or Vermeule’s unapologetically results-driven approach. Democrats, meanwhile, could become outspoken originalists because originalism gives them a vocabulary they can use to argue against applying stare decisis to the Roberts Court’s most right-wing decisions.

But this future is not inevitable. The most important lesson taught by Alito’s new book is that judges do not need to hold any principled legal views in order to identify as an “originalist.” Regardless of how partisan your rulings are, calling yourself an originalist is enough.

L’exécutif a convoqué, ces dernières heures, les plateformes de e-commerce ainsi que Google, Facebook, Instagram et Snapchat pour leur demander de faire preuve de vigilance. D’abord, face aux pilleurs qui chercheraient à revendre des produits volés en ligne. Ensuite, pour demander aux réseaux sociaux de mieux contrôler leurs fonctionnalités, notamment les diffusions en direct. Elles sont accusées par les forces de l’ordre d’avoir servi aux casseurs à s’organiser efficacement. Mais avec quel effet?
Marcelo en discute avec Tiphaine et Klara. Des questions? Des commentaires? Ecrivez-nous sur Whatsapp au +32 49 07 69 41

**Un message de GSK : Prévenir, soigner, innover : GSK appelle à investir dans la santé des Français pour accélérer l’accès aux innovations et atteindre un objectif : zéro perte de chance pour les patients, en renforçant la recherche et les investissements industriels en France.**

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said Tuesday that Brussels would use the next months “to open dialogue” on how to counter U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court — resisting calls from lawmakers to take quicker action.

Nearly 60 MEPs from across the political spectrum urged the Commission to intervene swiftly after the White House announced sweeping sanctions against the Hague-based court earlier this month. They want the Commission to activate a legislative shield known as the blocking statute, which would prevent EU firms from complying with U.S. sanctions.

“We should keep all options on the table. If we use the blocking statute, we have one shot and we should do it well. So, it should be well prepared,” Kallas said, calling on firms not to overcomply with sanctions.

Multiple lawmakers continued to push for a faster response in a plenary session in Strasbourg. But while Kallas acknowledged their calls, she said the EU executive would take time “to analyze the full legal implications, to open dialogue and look for solutions.” The sanctions are expected to be implemented after a 180-day delay starting from Oct. 9.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had already targeted nine judges and the chief prosecutor of the Court, cutting them off from all U.S. service providers, including banking services.

Irish European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne, who represents Dublin’s presidency of the Council of the EU, told lawmakers that the sanctions delay provides “an opportunity for dialogue, which we should take advantage of while remaining ready to take all necessary measures,” as laid out by EU leaders in a statement issued after their gathering last week.

Washington is openly campaigning to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick,” and urging countries to quit the court’s founding charter. Kallas said that “decisions by Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Venezuela to reject or even withdraw from the ICC risk eroding the foundations of global justice.”

“The ICC is under attack at precisely the moment when we need it the most,” Kallas said, citing the Court’s investigations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The EU will continue to engage with partners to strengthen the court, she said, warning countries under pressure from the U.S. to leave the body: “This also has clear consequences for their relationship with the European Union.”

“The European Union has practical means to do more,” Kallas said, adding that she would be in the Hague this week.

LONDON — Kemi Badenoch warned Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham on Tuesday not to repeat the economic mistakes of her former boss Liz Truss in his first budget next Wednesday.

The Tory leader said higher national debt, increased gilt yields and extra government spending are creating a gloomy economic picture — and demanded sharp spending cuts from the ruling Labour government next week.

“The lessons of the mini-budget are: if you don’t balance your budget, if you give away £150 billion in subsidizing people’s energy bills, but you don’t cut spending, then the markets will react,” Badenoch said, citing former Tory leader Truss’ ill-fated mini-budget in 2022, which triggered a sharp sell-off in U.K. government bonds and saw the value of the British pound fall.

Truss — Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, who spent just 49 days in Downing Street — announced Tuesday she is publishing a new book setting out “what really happened” during the mini-budget in 2022, according to a press notice issued by her spokesperson.

“Bank Job: A short book on how the Bank of England broke the bond market and brought down the government” will be published later this month.

The ex-PM has blamed the mini-budget’s consequences on the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog.

Badenoch told a press conference in London she does not believe Labour is paying attention to the consequences of that Conservative budget by failing to reduce spending: “They are the ones who want to repeat the mistakes of four years ago, we are not going to be making that mistake again.”

“We need to live within our means,” she said. “We have to stop borrowing so much, but instead, Labour are taking out more loans to pay the interest on our existing loans.”

Questioned on why the public should trust her judgement on economic competence, Badenoch, who served as Truss’ international trade secretary, told POLITICO: “I am not Liz Truss and I think that the public can tell the difference.”

Badenoch said she only saw the mini-budget when it was presented and collective responsibility “doesn’t mean that you agree with all of the decisions that are made.”

“She needs to take responsibility for it, one way or another,” Badenoch said. “That is her issue.”

LONDON — U.K. fighter jets will be sent to aid Saudi Arabia in defending itself against attacks on critical energy and civilian infrastructure by the Houthis.

The Iranian-backed Islamist militia group, based in civil war-hit Yemen, has been launching ballistic missile strikes on Saudi Arabia for the past few weeks, successfully hitting three airports earlier this month.

The Ministry of Defence announced Tuesday that Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters will be deployed to the Gulf Kingdom — while stressing that they will be only used in a defensive capacity.

U.K. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said the “continuing attacks” on the U.K.’s ally are “absolutely despicable.”

“The targeting of the airport in Riyadh in particular shows the lengths the Houthis are going to escalate the situation in the region,” he added, referencing the attacks earlier this month that killed 14 people and injured hundreds more.

Streeting said that the fighter jets will be used to protect Saudi airspace from drones and missiles. The U.K. will also send an Atlas A400M aircraft, used to transport the equipment, as well as military advisers.

“This builds on the UK equipment and personnel we already have in the country to defend against Houthi air attacks,” Streeting said.

The MoD argued that there is a link between the conflict in the Persian Gulf and the situation domestically in the U.K., pointing to disrupted energy supplies and a subsequent rise in the cost of living.

Since Prime Minister Andy Burnham arrived in Downing Street in July he has offered more support to Saudi Arabia. In September, he agreed to a request for air-to-air refueling of the country’s jets.

Pressed Tuesday on whether the U.K. risked being sucked into the Saudi war with the Houthis, Burnham’s official spokesperson told reporters: “I don’t accept that characterization. Our support for Saudi Arabia is considered proportionate and focused on helping them defend themselves against relentless Houthi attacks.”

They added: “Regional instability can have a serious impact at home in the U.K. We’re clear it’s in the U.K.’s economic and security interests that the Houthis do not succeed, and our approach is about defending our people, our interests, and our allies.”

Albertans overwhelmingly rejected moves toward independence yesterday, voting 3 to 1 in favor of staying part of Canada. With 79% of the ballots counted, 76% of voters in the western province chose to remain with 24% wanting a formal referendum.

"We are a solid country that's united from coast to coast to coast," said Alberta's former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, leading the Forever Canadian campaign against separation, at a campaign event. — Read the rest

The post Alberta votes to stay in Canada appeared first on Boing Boing.

Remember when billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump were supposedly enemies? At the start of Trump’s second term, the world’s richest man, was busy ripping through nearly every level of the U.S. government with the Trump-approved Department of Government Efficiency. But by June 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported the pair had “torched” their relationship, which amounted to a lot of social media slapfights and accusations about who was in the Epstein files. But the truth is, the two men have a storied on-off relationship that seems to fluctuate based on who’s grabbing the check.

Lately, Musk and Trump are back to acting like close pals. It was hard not to cringe watching the president award Musk the National Medal of Science on Oct. 8, the highest honor the U.S. can bestow on a scientist or engineer. I was probably reading too much into it, but I sensed some awareness on Musk’s part that it was an empty gesture, unless inflating stock prices is a scientific achievement. But maybe the pageantry is meant to distract from how many government grants Musk has been awarded. According to multiple reports, Tesla and SpaceX basically would not exist without the government giving Musk’s companies wads of cash.

At any rate, Musk is now stepping in to try to save Trump’s allies in the midterms, dumping hundreds of millions into races, with Axios reporting he is “single-handedly keeping the Republican Party afloat in some of its most vital races.” So far, he’s spent some $366 million in pro-GOP midterm TV spots and other campaign efforts, with $276 million donated since July alone. No other known donor comes close to dishing out more funding. But for Musk that’s a relatively trivial amount, even though his fluctuating trillionaire status is currently hovering below the threshold for designation. 

Some of Musk’s money went to his own super PAC, but a good chunk also to the Senate Leadership Fund and the Lone Star Liberty PAC, both of which are backing Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton’s endangered campaign for the U.S. Senate against state Rep. James Talarico. Right now polling indicates that statewide election results in the Lone Star State are going to be extremely tight, with new data from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project released Wednesday indicating Democrats are statistically tied in key races. It’s not just Talarico, who leads Paxton 50% to 47%, but Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa holds a one-point lead over Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, which is effectively a tie. Trump is reportedly already searching for someone to blame if Democrats pick up their first Senate seat in Texas since 1988.

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Across the country, other races indicate a high likelihood that Democrats will retake the House, while the Senate still looking like a tossup. With these numbers, Musk is likely to dump even more cash into the election before Nov. 3, but it increasingly smells like desperation. As Alex Gibney, director of the new documentary “Musk,” recently told Salon’s Melanie McFarland, Musk is “literally paying for political advantage.”

“He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts,” Gibney said. “But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.”

It remains to be seen if this midterm meddling will pay off for Musk. He got what he wanted out of the 2024 presidential election by propping up Trump’s campaign, but his attempts to financially sway results in other races haven’t worked. In 2025, Musk dumped more than $18 million into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to suborn the state’s redistricting efforts and regulations of car manufacturers and dealers. His influence made it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, but that still didn’t get him the outcome he wanted.

Last Thursday, Musk settled a class action lawsuit alleging that his PAC had engaged in fraud in the 2024 presidential election by falsely telling voters they had a chance to randomly win $1 million when the winners were actually predetermined. He also dodged bribery charges in August for trying the same stunt in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

In the end, the results will all come down to voter appetites, and there are increasing indicators that the majority of Americans are fed up with the ultra-rich meddling in government. A recent Fox News poll indicates that corruption is the top concern among both Democratic and Republican voters, with 60% extremely concerned, a figure that outpaces inflation (58%), gas prices (50%), government leadership (49%) and healthcare (48%). Data from a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found roughly two in three Americans believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, with most of the increase over the past year coming from people who lean Republican.

These numbers may indicate that people are starting to see through Musk’s ruse. He could probably pour even more money into politics, and probably will anyway, but there’s a glimmer of hope that it won’t accomplish much.

The post Musk’s midterm meddling reeks of desperation appeared first on Salon.com.

America’s descent into chaos and depravity was foretold 10 years ago at a press conference. Donald Trump, who had just been nominated for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, issued an invitation for one of America’s foes to hack the emails of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

The call came only days after emails from the Democratic National Committee were released following the hacking of the organization’s computer servers, which was widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Russian agents. As would become the habit over the following decade, many dismissed Trump’s remarks as mere trolling that weren’t intended to be taken seriously. 

This was not the first time he had invoked Russia. Throughout the primary season, Trump had gushed in multiple interviews about Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaled his intentions to draw closer to Putin once in office. Trump even defended the dictator’s extra-judicial killings, blithely explaining, “Our country does plenty of killing.” But the press conference did mark the first time he enlisted Russia as his ally. 

The overtures continued throughout Trump’s first term, most infamously when he sided with Putin during a bilateral meeting over America’s own intelligence agencies, which had found that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. The president suggested an “election integrity” sharing operation between the two countries, a proposal that made it clear Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger. 

Then came Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or of being elected. (His rhetoric often shifted.) He apparently believed that he could get on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and order him to immediately surrender or face his mighty wrath. Needless to say, this did not happen, and since then Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad. 

In recent days, Trump has signed an executive order temporarily lifting the sanctions on Russian oil. While supposedly done to secure diesel fuel for the United States, which has seen prices skyrocket due to the president’s war of choice with Iran, the act is in practice a sign of goodwill toward Putin, America’s enemy, and will help him fund his war against Ukraine, our erstwhile ally. A few days later, Trump waived several additional sanctions that a bipartisan congressional majority had passed just a few weeks ago at the behest of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed himself to have the president under his control. 

Worse yet, in what will go down as one of the most appalling betrayals by a U.S. president in history, Trump and his good friend Elon Musk apparently sabotaged Ukrainian intelligence by slowing the Starlink and Starshield communications systems the country relies on for its defensive and offensive weapons systems. Russia took swift advantage of the favor and unleashed one of the most massive bombardments of the war, killing civilians and hitting Ukraine’s energy sector. Trump also called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and in an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, the Ukrainian president accused Trump of pushing the country to surrender to Russia.

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Trump has a number of apparent rationales for these moves. He wants to be seen before the midterms to be doing something about the price of gas and diesel. But that is a crisis of his own making due to his misbegotten war in Iran, for which he has no way out that will solve the problem. His ongoing war has altered the global energy markets in ways that are not easily fixed, which was the reason no president before him was stupid enough to attack Iran. So now Trump is blaming Ukraine because it is bombing Russian oil refineries and demanding they stop so that Russia can sell its diesel — and finance its war, which led to the sanctions in the first place. Not to be overlooked is that Russia is a staunch ally of Iran and is helping them fight us, which Trump has waved off as having “nothing.” Some might argue that could constitute providing “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy.

Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed in multiple directions. Musk said the government is to blame for the Starlink/Starshield gambit. According to sources in the Pentagon, the order came from the White House. Trump claimed he doesn’t know anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shrugged that “it just sort of happened.” Now, lest the Europeans get it in their heads that they should try to step up their own defenses by restricting Starlink in favor of a European-based system, the U.S. government is reportedly threatening them with “devastating” or “destructive” economic retaliation.

As a cherry on top of the administration’s full-on embrace of Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has floated a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s fate. (On Monday, Trump told reporters he was open to a meeting but denied it would focus on Ukraine, saying he wanted to discuss denuclearization.) If Trump knew any history, he would know that such a meeting would prove to be his Yalta, the trilateral conference between President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that carved up Europe in the wake of World War II. The summit became widely seen by the right as “the sell-out at Yalta” because the Soviets ended up with Eastern Europe, but things have changed within the GOP. 

The summit is clearly intended to elevate Russia back to superpower status, which it is not in any economic or military sense, and to demonstrate a new order in which Trump, Putin and Xi run the world. In reality, Putin and Xi now have the United States dancing to their tune, handing them power and influence to dominate their respective spheres. 

The president’s flagrant betrayal of Ukraine is an outrage that has seemingly awakened some of the slumbering Republicans who know they are facing a drubbing at the polls in the quickly approaching midterm elections. Whether it will arouse the consciences of enough to truly step up and stop this breach of trust is unknown. But the mere fact that Trump has gone this far to salve his ego, defy his critics by embracing Putin even more fervently and drum up a lame excuse for what may be the worst national security decision in American history leaves this country weaker, poorer and more distrusted around the world. It hardly seems possible, but we have reached yet another new low.

The post Putin has Trump right where he wants him appeared first on Salon.com.

When I watched veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl report from the West Bank on a recent Sunday night, my first thought was to wonder how the segment had slipped past the watchful eyes of Bari Weiss. Stahl accompanied a group of Palestinians trying to reach their own land, only to be confronted by Israeli settlers clad in black. The Palestinians had approached the settlers with their hands behind their backs to make plain they posed no threat. One man was headbutted in the face and his nose fractured. An Israeli army captain finally defused the standoff, but the Palestinians never reached their property and the settlers appeared to suffer no consequences. It was a riveting piece of television, framed by the Oct. 27 Israeli elections. 

The report did not slip past Weiss, of course. Within a day, Oliver Darcy of the Status newsletter reported that screenings of the segment had grown extraordinarily contentious, with the CBS News editor-in-chief taking a “very, very hands-on” role and Stahl, who has been at the broadcast since 1991, privately floating the idea of quitting. Darcy’s sources said Weiss’ objections were not confined to a single factual assertion but ranged far more broadly, and that some on the team were unsure the report would even air at all. 

CBS News, for its part, called the Status account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative” and insisted the piece received far fewer edits than most. Perhaps so. But even the network’s version concedes the larger point: A correspondent of Stahl’s stature had to survive an internal fight over an eyewitness account of violence that she and her crew watched unfold.

That contradiction sits at the heart of the Bari Weiss experiment. The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others. As I’ve previously argued, the crisis at CBS News is bigger than one controversial editor. It is about what happens when corporate power no longer values a news organization’s independence as a principle to be defended.

Under the watch of Skydance boss David Ellison and Weiss, whom he handpicked, CBS News’ rightward renovation is running into a problem. The internal revolt at the network has become a daily reality for rank-and-file employees who watched the forced departures of foundational figures like Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The journalists who remain have not all agreed to become instruments of Weiss’ apparent worldview; many are leaking their misgivings to media reporters. Nor do the audience numbers establish that replacing an investigative institution’s identity with a slickly packaged right-wing populist brand constitutes a successful business strategy. Now the network is caught struggling to hold on to the credibility it inherited while forging the political project its leadership appears determined to impose. 

If you want to hear what passes for rigor in Weiss’ newsroom, the tape is available. After Weiss fired London bureau chief Claire Day in April — her offense was apparently coverage of Israel that displeased the new regime — she installed Shayndi Raice as foreign editor. Last week Raice summoned the foreign staff to a virtual meeting and delivered a 15-minute tirade that Status obtained on audio and later released in full. “This is not your publishing platform,” she told the assembled journalists. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place.” Failure to follow that hierarchy, she explained, “is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.” 

When Holly Williams, the veteran correspondent whose report on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks had been edited to remove the Palestinian death toll, respectfully challenged her, Raice informed Williams that she had gotten her own story “wrong.” Williams, Raice said, does not know it as well as she does. As for the figure itself — more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — Raice waved it off as a “magic number.” Including it in the report, she suggested, amounted to “posturing” rather than journalism. 

The same partisan thumb has appeared on the scales in CBS’s domestic political coverage. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Weiss has taken a personal interest in Michigan’s Senate race, and she has pushed CBS journalists to pursue story after story about Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and his supposed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, raising the subject on editorial calls and tasking the network’s investigative unit with combing his background for a link to the organization. 

The raw material for this enterprise is a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing a conversation with their mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. He has explained that his parents divorced when he was young and that he was raised by his father and stepmother, and the leap from a mother’s politics in another country half a century ago to a candidate’s secret loyalties is the kind American journalism once required evidence to make.

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To be fair, El-Sayed is a legitimate story. A Senate candidate’s family history is fair game, and there is nothing inherently scandalous in an editor telling reporters to look into it. The scandal, though, is in the selectivity. The same editor who dispatched investigators after a Democrat on the strength of his mother’s biography also tasked staff with pursuing the theory that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, had secretly checked into a mental health facility during his nine-day absence from the campaign trail, a claim right-wing influencers manufactured out of a bad case of the flu — and one that collapsed on contact with a hospital’s denial and time-stamped security footage. One CBS staffer told Semafor that Weiss’ story ideas “routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets,” and that the resulting reports “usually leave out important context and facts.”

It is worth highlighting what unites the targets: El-Sayed and Talarico are both progressives who have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.

What Weiss is building with her other hand is a stage to platform MAGA. Her signature project is Things That Matter, a town-hall series she devised and launched by interviewing Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, in a December broadcast that drew 1.87 million viewers, which was notably down 11% from what CBS ordinarily draws in that hour. Of the series’ single-guest town halls since, exactly one has featured a Democrat, Maryland Governor Wes Moore. The segment’s latest installment on Saturday handed a Michigan stage to Vice President JD Vance a little over two weeks out from the midterm elections, in a state where the administration needs every vote it can find.

Ironically, the format’s one unscripted moment came from the audience. Joey Amor, whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor ,was one of six American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike on an outpost in Kuwait in March, asked the vice president when this administration would hold its own officials accountable for the failures that left those troops exposed. Vance pleaded unfamiliarity, explaining that “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.” 

The irony was abundant: A town hall designed as a coronation had accidentally produced a news story, and the news was that the vice president of the United States had nothing to say to a man widowed by President Donald Trump’s war of choice.

Now consider what the new CBS has gotten for all this friction. “60 Minutes” recently saw the smallest audience of the season and the smallest for a fourth episode in at least a quarter century. The season premiere in September managed 7.94 million, a 21% drop from 2025 and the weakest opening this century. 

This is a broadcast that grew 9% last season. Nobody was asking Weiss to fix it.

The post Bari Weiss’ pro-MAGA CBS News pivot is falling flat appeared first on Salon.com.

With Election Day 2026 just weeks away and control of Congress hanging in the balance, the results will almost certainly hinge on voter turnout, just as they did in 2024.

Given that genuinely undecided voters are scarce — as little as 5% to 7% of the electorate, according to major polls — both Democrats and Republicans must look to mobilize their rank-and-file supporters. To do so, the Republican Party has bet strongly this year on a strategy of convincing people that voter fraud is rampant.

As a scholar of U.S. politics, I see this as a high-risk strategy for Republican candidates and American democracy. That’s because reduced trust in election integrity can reduce motivation to vote – even if based on flawed information. But it’s not at all clear which Americans are most likely to stay home in November.

Voter fraud vs. reality

Voter fraud is not a real problem in the United States. Study after study, by public officials and think tanks, has shown that voting by noncitizens and other ineligible voters happens only at minuscule, statistically insignificant levels.

Related

Alleged voter fraud in California leads to 28 arrests

Nonetheless, rhetoric from the Trump administration about voter fraud has been pervasive. Consider the recent claim by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls – a number reduced to 185 when state authorities pressed for details, and reduced to zero when the state investigated the names provided.

There is comparable behavior from Congress. My own research on political communication has shown that a substantial number of members of Congress, strongly skewing Republican, make frequent use of rhetoric that undermines democratic norms and delegitimizes political institutions.

The strategy ties readily into President Donald Trump’s persistent false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election. It also ties into his administration’s strongly anti-immigrant agenda, which spreads fear of noncitizens corrupting U.S. politics.

How does this uncertain political environment influence voters?

There is clear data showing that voter confidence in elections has fallen across party lines: Only 65% of Republicans, 64% of Democrats and 57% of independent voters are very or somewhat confident that the 2026 vote count will be reliable. Conventional wisdom suggests such discouraging numbers would depress turnout.

It’s not as simple as that, however.

What motivates voters

Extensive research confirms the axiom that a sense of civic duty is the strongest predictor of whether someone will vote. It supersedes trust, partisanship and policy preferences.

Any campaign’s quest to mobilize additional voters, therefore, must find them among citizens without a strong sense of civic duty. But among these people, diminished trust in democratic processes can play out in counterintuitive ways.

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Recent research on German voters is relevant to the U.S.: It shows that among more passive voters – those following cues from political elites – reduced trust in elections can depress motivation to vote. That’s because there’s no trustworthy result that voters are seeking to affirm.

Conversely, among voters with greater skepticism about elite messaging, reduced trust can motivate increased turnout as an attempted corrective for a flawed system.

What does this mean for potential voters in the U.S.? Among Republicans, it appears that the party’s strategy carries a strong risk of backlash.

Findings from MIT’s Election Lab confirm that cues from political elites are a powerful factor in voter behavior. Specifically, cues setting expectations of a disappointing or untrustworthy result will reduce motivation. Why vote if you don’t expect it to help achieve the desired result?

The same study finds Republican voters broadly inclined to believe GOP leaders’ cues about voter fraud and to frame their expectations accordingly. And once they’ve made that shift, they cling firmly to the belief, even in the face of contrary empirical evidence or messaging from within the party.

In the current election cycle, 50% of Republicans surveyed distrust mail-in voting, and 51% fear voting by noncitizens. They expect election results to be fraudulent. This likely won’t mobilize them, as there’s no positive result they can expect to affirm. The Republican Party’s messaging has painted its voters into a corner.

Democrats, meanwhile, are less inclined to believe claims of voter fraud. But they are more inclined to be concerned about attempts to undermine the midterms by political elites making such claims. Examples include the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt about voting by mail and about alleged noncitizen voting.

These efforts increase motivation to vote among Democrats. Unlike GOP voters, they see the capacity to correct for the system’s vulnerabilities – the potential and urgency to overwhelm attempts at voter suppression through higher turnout.

     

Truth and trust

Opponents of Trump and the GOP may find these diverging effects encouraging. No matter the results this November, however, we’re left with a precarious dynamic. Increasing numbers of voters lack trust in elections and make their decisions to vote – or not – based on limited or flawed information.

Fortunately, there are signs of hope.

Although voters in general are poorly informed about how elections are conducted, they can and do respond to clear information familiarizing them with election processes.

I’ve seen this myself over the years, working with nonpartisan efforts to register young adults and train them as poll watchers. And in the current election cycle, there have already been widespread efforts to broaden public awareness about the fact that state officials, not federal ones, have authority over voter rolls and election security.

Meanwhile, fewer Americans are expected to vote by mail this year – whether due to fear of fraud or fear of the Post Office. If they instead vote in person, a silver lining is that positive personal experiences with poll workers are also associated with increased voter trust.

Looking beyond November, what Americans can hope for is a cycle in which clear election outcomes provide an opportunity to inform voters of how and why the system works. That’s the way to motivate more political engagement and voter turnout in the future.

Christopher Miller, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law (PPEL), University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read more

about the midterm elections

• The GOP candidates walking back some of their abortion stances
• Abdul El-Sayed’s fighting style terrifies MAGA
• “No Kings” wants voters, not just crowds

The post Why the GOP’s voter fraud messaging may backfire appeared first on Salon.com.

This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”

But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.

A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.

Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).

Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability. 

That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularly argues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”

Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.

“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.

And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.

“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”

The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it? 

In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy. 

While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing. 

Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda

Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.

The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance. 

Congressional Democrats have said that they want to investigate the Trump family’s crypto investments, their solicitation of foreign business investments, whether Trump granted pardons in exchange for money, corruption in government contracting, the jet gifted to Trump by the government of Qatar, fundraising for the White House ballroom construction, whether Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding was funded by a Russian oligarch, and much more.

In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.

The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.

Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress. 

Mary Peltola, running for Senate in Alaska, supports term limits for members of Congress; so does Talarico. Trump’s controversial pardons have also sparked interest from some congressional Democrats in limiting the presidential pardon power, an issue that candidates like Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton have also raised.

It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.

The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.

The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior. 

The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.

To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.

Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers. 

Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.

Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.

But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.

The leader of Spain’s conservative People’s Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, confirmed Tuesday that he is negotiating with the far right ahead of the Nov. 29 snap election to secure a majority in the Senate.

“Vox knows how far we can go; they know we have a sense of state,” Feijóo said Tuesday morning in an interview on Spanish radio station COPE, alluding to an alliance with the far-right party. “It would be a mistake to hand control over to Sanchismo,” he added, in reference to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist government.

Feijóo, who is eyeing the premiership, said he was negotiating with Vox to coordinate Senate lists and counter a potential coalition between the governing socialists and other left-wing parties.

“We are going to continue talking to Vox with discretion and respect. If Vox is up to the task, the PP will also be up to the task,” he said, adding that the two parties were working on a deal to not compete with each other in key areas to ensure a conservative majority in the upper house of the Spanish parliament.

Feijóo’s comments echo those of Vox leader Santiago Abascal the day before: He said in a statement Monday he would negotiate with the People’s Party to prevent Sánchez from “stealing the elections,” accusing him of sowing “coercion and violence” to influence the vote.

“Sánchez’s alliance with the far left demands sacrifices from the opposition parties, and we remain willing to reach some kind of agreement that protects the Senate from the deals Sánchez has struck with the far left,” he said.

In a blow to the Socialist prime minister, the left wing has failed to unite ahead of November’s election, with prominent party Podemos opting out of a broad, joint ticket except in the Canary Islands and the Valencia region.