PARIS — Former French Prime Minister François Fillon has been suspended for 10 years from the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest order of merit, after being found guilty of providing his wife with a fake job in which she was paid a salary using taxpayer money.

The decision to suspend Fillon was published Thursday morning in the French official gazette. It was approved by President Emmanuel Macron after being recommended by the body tasked with handling disciplinary measures for the Légion d’honneur.

The fake jobs scandal emerged during the campaign for the 2017 presidential election and cost Fillon a shot at the presidency, as he was a front-runner in the contest before the allegations emerged.

Fillon was found guilty in 2020 but appealed the decision. He and his wife Penelope, however, could not provide evidence that she had actually worked for her husband over the course of several contracts under which she was hired to be his parliamentary assistant during his time as an MP.

The appeals court last year upheld the verdict, handing him a four-year suspended prison sentence and a €375,000 fine. The 72-year-old did not appeal that decision to a higher court.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, under whom Fillon served, was also stripped of his Légion d’honneur last year after being found guilty of corruption and exhausting all his appeals.

Sarkozy is fighting his conviction in another case for receiving money from Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to fund his first presidential run in 2007. A first court found him guilty and sentenced him to five years in prison, but he has appealed the verdict and continues to profess his innocence.

Labour MPs want a cap on political donations to stave off Nigel Farage’s big-money backers. Andy Burnham is set to disappoint them.

Downing Street will not include a universal domestic cap on political donations in Britain when the elections bill returns on Sept. 2, two officials briefed on government thinking said. But both the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss policy considerations, did not rule out returning to the issue again in the future.

“We’re prioritizing cracking down on foreign interference and crypto billionaires as part of this piece of legislation,” one of the officials said, referencing existing proposals in the elections bill from Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer to cap overseas donors and ban cryptocurrency donations.

That’s despite mounting pressure to act from the British PM’s own MPs as they fret about Farage, whose rise has been aided by a flurry of cash from individual donors — and hints from Burnham himself that he is minded to move ahead. 

There is currently no limit on the amount individual donors based in the U.K. can give to a political party. Donations above £11,180 must be reported to the Electoral Commission watchdog. 

Burnham told transparency campaigners before becoming prime minister that he supported a cap to “guard against the perception of any one party being unduly influenced or swayed by one person or organisation.” 

While indicating a wider review of political funding would be required before setting a firm figure, Burnham said his “gut feeling would suggest somewhere in the region of £500k” for the upper limit. 

Following Burnham’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street in July, officials in Whitehall had been waiting for a signal that they should start work to include a donation cap in the Representation of the People Bill — the official title of the elections bill.

But the two officials quoted above said using that bill as the vehicle for a cap could delay plans also included in the legislation to give 16-year-olds the right to vote at the next general election. 

A third British official acknowledged the Sept. 2 date, when the elections bill returns, is a “crunch point,” and suggested ministers could “kick the can” and commit to considering action when the bill gets to the House of Lords.

A Labour MP pushing for a donations cap said the arguments being put forward for not going ahead with a donations cap are “bullshit,” adding: “They are scared of the unions.”

Complicated landscape

A POLITICO analysis of how a £500,000 donation cap would have hit the main political parties’ finances over the last three years demonstrates the trade-offs Burnham would face in pushing ahead.

The analysis draws on publicly-available Electoral Commission returns for Westminster’s main political parties between Jan. 1 2023 and Dec. 31, 2025.

It shows a £500,000 ceiling would have curbed 55 percent of Reform UK’s reported private donations over the past three years — amounting to some £12 million — suggesting Nigel Farage’s party would have taken the greatest hit of any of the parties in proportional terms over the period.

But the data also shows there is potential peril for Labour in slamming a lid on funding — particularly if cash from trade unions, which represent some of the party’s major backers, is included.

A £500,000 cap over the same period — with no union exclusion — would have wiped out 47.4 percent of all private donations to Labour, or around £34 million in funding. 

An exemption from the cap for unions would leave Labour’s war chest significantly stronger. Labour would have kept hold of £12 million of that money over the same period, which included the donation-rich run-up to the 2024 general election.

The GMB trade union has already urged Labour MPs not to back a cap due to concerns it will damage the labor movement’s historic relationship with the party. 

Parliamentary pressure

Opting for a cap with or without a union exemption carries significant political risk for Burnham. Capping unions alongside individual donors and corporates would dent Labour’s finances and strain relations with the movement seen as foundational to the party’s identity. 

But exempting them from any cap would bolster Farage’s narrative that changes to election rules are part of an intentional establishment campaign to halt his party’s progress.  

Burnham’s predecessor, Starmer, already proposed an annual £100,000 cap on donations from British citizens living overseas.

The measure could create a major hurdle for crypto-entrepreneur Christopher Harborne, who has donated over £12 million to Reform UK despite being based in Thailand.

But MPs are already putting pressure on Burnham’s new government to go further.

Several amendments pushing for domestic caps set at various amounts — up to £1 million — were proposed when the bill was introduced earlier this year. A proposal from Labour MP Stella Creasy, which would mirror the £100,000 cap on overseas donors, gained the most support.

At the time, the amendments were aimed at demonstrating political appetite for a long-running campaign to limit the sway of mega-donors, but MPs and campaigners had hoped Burnham’s previous comments had indicated he was gearing up to act.

One adviser working the parliamentary push for a donations cap said MPs could back down if the government suggests its own cap — regardless of the size of it.

“Our preferred outcome is the government come forward with their own individual donation cap,” the adviser said. “Whatever the level is we will support it.” 

Supporters of a cap also pointed to Creasy’s amendment, drafted with assistance from Transparency International UK, as a potential middle-ground for the knotty union problem. Rather than a blanket policy, Creasy proposes that affiliation fees — an annual political levy usually paid by unions on a per-member basis — would be exempt from the cap, while other donations would be included.

POLITICO’s analysis shows that approach would lessen the blow on Labour’s finances — while not providing unions a complete carve-out.

In 2024, GMB gave Labour £2 million in total — of which £1.1 million was affiliation fees.

Under Creasy’s carve-out for unions, the £1.1 million in affiliation fees would go directly to Labour.

Only the remaining £900,000 would be subject to the cap, wherever it is set — meaning a far gentler loss to Labour.

“The loophole must be closed to prevent mega-rich donors who have the potential to harm democracy — as the government has accepted is possible — that means they can continue to donate just because they claim a U.K. postcode,” Creasy said.

POLITICO’s analysis suggests that the Creasy amendment’s proposed cap — £100,000 — would have eaten into the donation income of leading parties had it been applied over the last three years.

In 2023, a £100,000 cap would have deprived the then-governing Conservative Party of more than £26 million — around 54 percent of all its declared donations.

Labour would have lost between £11 million and £16 million, depending on how the rules were applied to unions — a loss of between 50 percent and 70 percent of its declared donations.

In 2024, both Labour and Conservatives would have lost higher sums of cash as election campaign fundraising hit its peak, although the losses remain similar in percentage terms.

Other parties would have faced similar hits, with the Liberal Democrats losing around 20 percent of their £9 million declared donation income, while around 40 percent of Reform UK’s £3 million of declared funds would have been ineligible.

Analysis of last year’s data suggests a £100,000 cap would have been devastating for Farage’s outfit given its reliance on mega-donors.

Of the £18.8 million declared in donations for 2025, more than £15 million would be lost under Creasy’s plan — around 80 percent of Reform’s total declared donations.

With campaign spending hitting record highs at the 2024 election, even a lenient cap would have had a substantial impact on the country’s major political parties. But successive polls have found public support for the measures.

In January, YouGov’s biannual tracker showed that 67 percent of Brits backed a donations cap of £50,000 or less, with support for the current, unlimited system dropping from 21 percent in 2020 to just 13 percent at the start of this year.

PARIS — After a summer of extreme, climate change-driven heat, France must spend billions of euros to help the country rebuild and ensure it is better prepared the next time the mercury rises and records fall.

Money, however, is hard to come by.

France is sitting on more than €3.5 trillion in public debt, which is becoming increasingly expensive to finance and is well above the European Union’s limit. Paris has already committed to billions in increased defense spending over the next several years, ruled out significant tax hikes and promised to slash its budget deficit, which came in at 5.1 percent of gross domestic product last year, to 3 percent by 2029 to comply with EU rules.

Crafting a budget for next year that can achieve those goals while also allocating enough resources to prepare France for the next summer of extreme heat that cooks livestock alive, plunges the country into drought and fuels wildfires that drive thousands from their homes is like trying to square the circle. But getting a hung parliament to agree on spending in the run-up to a presidential election will make the exercise even more difficult.

“We need billions — let’s be clear-eyed about this,” said Sophie Panonacle, a centrist, pro-government lawmaker who represents the fire-hit southwestern Bassin d’Arcachon area. “We really must urgently consider this issue of adaptation. We are making no progress at all on this matter.”

Budget crunch, meet climate crisis

Visiting the southwestern town of La Porge on Monday, where hundreds of people saw their homes go up in flames last month, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu listed a series of measures crafted to help residents rebuild their homes and keep businesses hit hardest by the fires afloat.

These included a total of €12 million in direct assistance for the two local administrations most affected by the fire, Gironde and the Landes, as well as rebates on property taxes and social security contributions in those areas and more funding to replant forests. Later that evening, President Emmanuel Macron announced that the proposals would also apply to the southern region of Var.

Lecornu said the measures would add up to €100 million, though it’s unclear whether that figure covers costs only in the towns he visited or also in the Var region.

Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut said last week that the total immediate cost of the summer’s heat, including lost homes and incomes, could reach €10 to €15 billion — the equivalent of 0.5 percent of GDP — though she cautioned that those figures were a rough estimate. When asked by French daily Libération about Barbut’s estimate, Economy Minister Roland Lescure later said it was too early to quantify the damage.

Whatever the final total comes to, there’s little doubt it will be difficult to pay given the need to get the country’s finances in order.

In a report commissioned by the French finance ministry, top economists last month said France must cut spending and raise taxes by €125 billion by 2032 to prevent its budget deficit from reaching 7 percent of GDP by the end of the decade.

A comprehensive strategy

Critics of the government say it has failed to provide specific details on how it intends to fund immediate and future budget needs for adaptation and climate change mitigation, frustrating lawmakers.

“We need to respond to climate-related events, but first we need a comprehensive strategic review regarding resources already allocated and promises made around fighting wildfires,” said Jean-François Husson, the Senate’s budget watchdog. “We’re addicted to making announcements which aren’t followed by results, and meanwhile the debt levels are spiraling.”

Husson said that he intends to summon government officials to provide clearer figures in the coming days.

“They cannot treat Parliament the way they do, specifically regarding budgetary matters,” Husson said.

That criticism cuts across party lines. Eric Coquerel, the left-wing head of the finance committee in the French National Assembly, has asked the government to urgently present a revised version of this year’s budget to parliament to address the need for more funds.

With state coffers so depleted, Barbut floated in an interview with Libération tapping private savings to help cover costs, as the French rank fairly high among EU countries in terms of savings but, like the rest of Europe, don’t invest much in stocks and bonds.

Panonacle, the centrist lawmaker, is one of 50 MPs pushing a proposal to use €50 billion in private savings to fund costly adaptation policies, including making buildings more resilient to extreme heat, installing more air conditioning in public facilities, and reinforcing flood defenses.

However, that money is already used to finance public projects, particularly social housing, and the economy ministry last year shot down a similar proposal to use money from a popular savings account to bolster defense spending.

Some ministries are focusing on efficiency gains. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez will present a bill in September meant to modernize France’s civil security providers for example by rethinking its emergency dispatch system so firefighters are no longer deployed for every minor emergency.

“It’s not just about the amounts allocated, but also about how you use resources,” said an interior ministry official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Once summer ends, the clock starts ticking. Lecornu’s government is expected to present lawmakers with a draft budget to be debated by October. The goal is to get the process done by the end of the year — a goal lawmakers failed to meet in 2024 and 2025.

Businessman and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, best known as the founder of My Pillow and a prominent advisor to Donald Trump, refuses to accept his loss in the Republican primary for governor of Minnesota on Aug. 11. Lindell lost by 11 points to the Minnesota house speaker, Lisa Demuth, but did not graciously concede. Instead, he immediately began spouting conspiracy theories that explained away his loss, suggesting there were “anomalies” in the election process.

He’s still not giving up. On Wednesday, he offered to fund a recount of the election.

“One of the few good election laws Minnesota does have is that as a candidate, I have the right to completely audit and hand-count every ballot in the state, and I am going to exercise that right to the full extent of the law,” Lindell said in a press release, which claimed “the effort will be the largest privately funded statewide paper-ballot recount and audit in U.S. history.” It will cost Lindell approximately $825,000, according to CBS News.

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A recount is automatically triggered when there is a 0.25% difference in votes in Minnesota, but obviously 11 points is quite a bit more. Lindell cited counties reporting more votes than were cast, vote totals that moved backward and unusual synchronized vote totals across all seven Republican candidates, as motivation for the recount. It could also have to do with the fact that in early August, Lindell stepped down as CEO of My Pillow to focus on his gubernatorial run, so maybe he needs the job.

Lindell has pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election as well, leading to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, now known as Liberty Vote. In July, the two parties settled the suit for an undisclosed sum. 

The post Mike Lindell refuses to accept he’s an election loser appeared first on Salon.com.

KYIV — Ukraine’s popular former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has emerged as a new rival to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — but his call for an election is facing immediate blowback.

In a video address on Tuesday night, he zeroed in on topics he knew would strike a public chord in one of the most direct internal challenges to Zelenskyy since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He complained that corruption was undermining the war effort and protested about centralized and opaque decision-making in the Zelenskyy administration — for which he worked until only last month.

However, Fedorov’s unexpected appeal for the nation to go to the ballot box sparked immediate retorts across the political spectrum. Critics insisted such an election would be banned by Ukraine’s martial law, would be impossible to organize in wartime, would play into Russia’s hands and would sow division when national unity remains vital.

Zelenskyy still commands broad support as a war leader, and his allies pointed out that, regardless of public frustration, there are limits to how much he can reveal about the inner workings of the state when national survival is at stake.

Fedorov’s emergence as a rival to Zelenskyy was accelerated by his shock dismissal as defense minister last month. The 35-year-old built up a strong following for spearheading Ukraine’s success in using new technologies — from cyberattacks to drones — to damage Russia.

His ejection from office sparked immediate protests, with thousands of people taking to the streets, calling for his reinstatement or for Zelenskyy to properly explain the decision to fire him.

In his address on Tuesday night, Fedorov delivered a thinly veiled criticism of Zelenskyy’s management style, referring to his peremptory approach to hiring and firing.

“People cannot endlessly live in a state where they do not understand why certain decisions are made. Why some reforms move forward while others are blocked. Why decisions needed on the frontlines today spend months circulating through government offices,” Fedorov said.

“It is dangerous when society develops the feeling that the main criterion for an appointment is not professionalism, results, or the ability to transform the country, but personal loyalty to the system,” added the former minister, who had himself been viewed as a Zelenskyy loyalist for seven years.

Election backlash

A top official in Zelenskyy’s office, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about Fedorov’s move, had little time for the criticism that the president should explain his actions publicly.

“The president cannot just explain his hiring choices to the public during war, as those are matters of national security. And it’s his right to decide whom to appoint as his defense minister and whom to fire,” they said.

The official was also scathing about the possibility of holding an election in the face of devastating Russian attacks: “Let’s wait out another massive Russian ballistic attack and then go vote,” the person added, sarcastically.

Olga Aivazovska, head of Ukraine’s election watchdog OPORA, also stressed the practical obstacles to an election, insisting that there were “hundreds of scenarios and actions” that the Russians could use to undermine the electoral process.

Roman Lozynskyi, a parliamentarian from the opposition liberal Holos party and deputy head of the state management committee, feared the call for elections could prove disastrously divisive.

“There is zero positive for the country. Don’t be happy that you will have candidates in the post-war elections. You still have to live to see them,” he said. “People understand that elections during the war are in the enemy’s hands. That it will be a war of all against all.”

Even one of the leaders of the protest movement, war veteran Dmytro Koziatysnkyi, said he didn’t want to see elections during wartime. “I am also very afraid of the disunity of society during the electoral process and how this may affect the course of the war,” he said.

Far from bolstering Fedorov’s political future, the call for an election could even count against him.

Economist Timothy Ash, who frequently writes on Ukraine, suggested the ex-minister had made “an extraordinary political error of judgement which some would likely use against him if he ever pitches in to run as president in the future.”

Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst based in Kyiv, conceded Zelenskyy had become accustomed to “acting like in business,” defined by “single-man leadership” and “quick decisions,” but argued that the president was hardly acting out of step with any other major international leader.

“When his critics say he should appoint professionals instead of loyalists, they sound right but naive at the same time. Even in the West, unless we are talking about coalition governments, such an approach does not work. Any serious politician … and especially in a country like ours, will appoint trusted loyalists,” Fesenko added.

Fesenko also defended Zelenskyy’s record in appointing senior officials. He noted that Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi, new commander-in-chief, Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, as well as new Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara, all had positive reputations, even among Zelenskyy’s top critics in parliament.

Indeed, Khmara was confirmed in his new role to succeed Fedorov by a parliamentary vote on Wednesday, by 312 lawmakers out of 392.

‘People want change’

Fedorov is certainly popular. A poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology said earlier this month that 63 percent of people saw him as trustworthy — a score that put him second only to former military supremo Valeryi Zaluzhnyi, who is now ambassador to the U.K.

But none of that put Zelenskyy, who scored a robust 56 percent, out of the picture.

In line with Fedorov’s attack on a lack of transparency in the centralized state, another survey found dwindling sympathy for Zelenskyy using his powers to intervene over other state authorities. The poll found that 79 percent of people in 2022 — the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion — thought the president could override the constitution’s division of powers, but that had slipped to 52 percent in May 2026.

“People are placing all responsibility for the course of the war on the president. Because of this, the president feels the need to make all these decisions independently, which is against Ukraine’s constitution and legislative procedures. As a result, one person, the president, has a huge number of completely different tasks, incentives, requirements,” said Yurii Hudymenko, head of the Public Anti-Corruption Council at Ukraine’s defense ministry.

Corruption is also a hot topic, as Fedorov identified. Last year, Zelenskyy signed a law to strip Ukraine’s national anti-corruption watchdogs of their procedural independence, only to then backtrack on that decision when it faced criticism from the EU and protests at home.

Later, his former business partner and allies were implicated in a $100 million corruption scheme in the state nuclear energy sector — a scandal that forced Zelenskyy to fire his faithful No. 2, Andriy Yermak. Yermak was charged with corruption and is standing trial.

Several of Zelenskyy’s top allies are also under investigation for corruption, including former Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Olga Stefanishyna, while watchdogs complain they still face tremendous pressure and surveillance when investigating top officials.

On Wednesday, Zelenskyy fired Iryna Mudra as deputy head of his office, hours after anti-corruption watchdogs searched her workplace as part of a sweeping probe into an alleged criminal organization.

Yaroslav Zheleznyak, MP from opposition party Holos, and a prominent Zelenskyy critic, said the cumulative weight of these problems would ultimately count against the president.

He predicted Zelenskyy would suffer the fate of British wartime leader Winston Churchill and lose an election during the tail end of the war.

“No matter the competitors, Zaluzhnyi, [Head of the Presidential Office Kyrylo] Budanov, Fedorov or someone else, I think we will get the situation like in 2019, when anyone but the incumbent will win in the second round. In this case, this is very much a Churchill story, when a guy who won the war got voted out,” Zheleznyak said.

“People want change,” he added.

Oleksandr Saienko, expert at the Center for Political and Legal Reforms, said it was possible to avert a political crisis even without elections, but that would mean shifting some decision-making back to parliament and other state authorities.

“The subjectivity of the parliament must be restored both in terms of the legislative process and parliamentary control. The government must become the main center for the formation of state policy,” he said. “The pause on reform of the judicial system and law enforcement agencies, public administration, must be lifted and people should get a real sense of justice and protection.”

President Donald Trump lost the popular vote in the 2020 election by 4.4%. That hasn’t stopped him, though, from latching on to a highly unusual Census Bureau report published Tuesday afternoon that allegedly found less than two-hundredths of a percent of voters in that presidential election were noncitizens.

According to the report, 24,000 out of 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election were ineligible “non-citizen” voters. Unnamed authors of the seven-page report, partially titled “A Beginning Analysis,” said the bureau still has to analyze 32 million voter records. According to Pew, some 158.4 million ballots were cast in the 2020 election. The Census Bureau’s report found 159.9 million ballots were cast in the election.

“The Census Bureau’s library of administrative records makes it uniquely capable of compiling and publishing statistics on election crime and other forms of fraud,” the report concludes, echoing the Trump administration’s prior attempts to link election and social service spending fraud to immigration.

The Census Bureau report comes after Trump has sought to lean on the statistical agency to uphold his administration’s monomaniacal goal of delegitimizing the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump used the report’s findings to urge the passing of the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter suppression bill that Trump has been pressuring Congress to pass for months, but which does not have widespread support even among Republicans  in Congress. 

“On the first 128,000,000 Voters,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 non-citizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!”

Howard Lutnick, the secretary of the Department of Commerce, under which the Census Bureau falls, backed his boss in a post on X touting the report.

Experts have told TPM that there is “absolutely no basis” to Trump and the MAGA movement’s claims about noncitizen voting. Trump and Republicans have been propping up conspiracy theories about noncitizens voting en masse for Democrats in federal elections for years. Nevermind that the findings of Tuesday’s Census Bureau report obviously does not support any claim that the 2020 election was somehow rigged by a crush of ineligible, noncitizen voters. The bureau’s analysis diverts from normal operations in several ways, researchers and public data experts said Tuesday, which makes the veracity of its findings impossible to confirm.

“It lacks transparency and accountability,” Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow in demographic and socioeconomic analysis at the Georgetown University Massive Data Institute, told TPM.

Neither the Census Bureau nor the Commerce Department immediately responded to TPM requests for comment.

The Census Bureau used a roll of private voter data, compared with various federal data sources, to substantiate its finding. That’s unprecedented, Jarosz said.

“[O]ne of the red flags in the report is that the Census Bureau, when they start to use a new data source, typically goes through a very extensive process of trying to understand the data quality,” Jarosz said. “And I don’t see any evidence that they did that.”

On X, Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation strategy at Common Cause, said the Census Bureau doesn’t collect the information it would have needed to publish definitive findings about alleged noncitizen voting.

“The 2020 Census did not collect citizenship status, and the Census Bureau does not have a comprehensive individual ‘citizenship records’ file to definitively match against voter rolls,” Noureldin wrote. The type of data the Bureau did use in its report, according to its own methodology, “are modeled population estimates, not evidence that 24,000 people voted illegally,” he continued. 

The report doesn’t list any authors or even a bureau department from which the report came. According to Mike Schneider, an Associated Press reporter who covers the Census Bureau, that’s atypical.

“Every other report on the bureau’s ‘Census Publications’ site is credited to a statistician, economist, demographer or researcher,” Schneider wrote on his Substack.

Not even a department within the bureau is listed on the completely anonymous report. The report says its data was analyzed and published with “high confidence,” but lacks any definition on what high confidence means.

Tuesday’s report references legislation from 1902 which made the Census Bureau into a permanent governmental entity and empowers the Bureau to “collect statistics related to… crime, pauperism, and benevolence, including prisoners, paupers, juvenile delinquents,” and the like. The report’s authors cite this provision as giving the Bureau authority to “compile and

publish information on crime.”

This is an oversimplified interpretation of that provision, Mark Mather, the associate vice president of programs at the Population Reference Bureau, said in a data user forum. The legislation’s provision authorized the decennial Census to count “people already in institutions,” Mather wrote, not to identify “potential lawbreakers.”

“I’m concerned about the potential chilling effect of this work,” Mather continued, saying the report “sends a potentially troubling message about how administrative data shared with the Census Bureau might be used.”

Just in the last two months, the administration has:

• Thrown out long-awaited plans to update race and ethnicity data collection;
• Eliminated an umbrella of highly technical, statistical privacy methods, which will result in less published data from the bureau;
• Proposed adding a question to the 2030 Census to identify and eliminate noncitizens from the total population count, and;
• Proposed a regulation that would eliminate the collection of race and ethnicity data for the first time in census history.

The Department of Justice since 2025 has continued escalating its efforts to obtain voter roll data from states. Federal judges have dismissed 23 DOJ suits against states which have refused to turn over voter information.

KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired Iryna Mudra as deputy head of his office Wednesday, hours after anti-corruption watchdogs searched her workplace as part of a sweeping probe into an alleged criminal organization.

“Iryna Romanivna Mudra is hereby dismissed from the post of Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a decree published Wednesday. The one-line order gave no reason for her removal.

The firing adds to a turbulent stretch for Zelenskyy. Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called Tuesday for wartime elections and denounced corruption and a systemic governance crisis, weeks after his ouster triggered prolonged street protests.

Earlier Wednesday, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, announced a new operation targeting an alleged criminal organization involving current and former lawmakers and senior officials in Zelenskyy’s office. The bureau said it was carrying out searches with the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, or SAP.

The investigation, dubbed Operation Forrest Gump, alleges the group laundered around 150 million Ukrainian hryvnia, equivalent to roughly $3 million, through state-owned Sense Bank to fund bail for former Energy Minister German Galushchenko, a key figure in last year’s $100 million Midas corruption scandal.

Writing on Facebook, Mudra said: “I will defend my name in a legal manner – calmly and consistently.”

NABU did not name Mudra directly in its video statement, referring only to a deputy head of the president’s administration, but searched her office.

Ukraine’s corruption watchdog released recordings in which a woman identified in the video only as a deputy head of the president’s office can be heard saying: “Fighting corruption is a wrong approach … Corruption has to be systemized and controlled.” NABU did not identify the woman by name.

This article has been updated with a comment from Iryna Mudra.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency.

CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks.

All that changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The second Trump administration scaled back its support for states, cut back CISA staff, and launched an investigation of its former leader, whom Trump accused of disloyalty because he pushed back on the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. CISA has not had a permanent director since the start of Trump’s second term.

Changes at CISA have paired with the president’s broad focus on controlling how elections are run. The federal government is threatening to arrest election officials if they allow noncitizens to vote. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has vowed to withhold federal funds from states that don’t implement Trump administration election overhaul proposals. A coalition of Democratic states and officials has sued the Department of Homeland Security in a suit that accuses the Trump administration of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency funding in an attempt to coerce states into enacting disputed election changes.

With all that as backdrop, CISA organized this week’s call – and things didn’t go too well.

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After more than a year of near silence, elections officials wondered if CISA would step up to offer classified intelligence briefings on emerging cyber threats from hostile countries, specialized testing of election equipment, or training on how to prepare for potential problems on Election Day.

Instead, CISA leaders provided what one participant characterized as a generic “CYA” (cover your a**) briefing that offered state officials few assurances that the federal government would help thwart threats this November.

Participants said acting CISA Director Nick Andersen and Jim Harrell, the assistant director for integrated operations, offered no concrete support for the 2026 election, which is less than 90 days away. Instead, the participants said, CISA leadership seemed more focused on the 2028 presidential election.

When they were done, according to participants, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, lashed out at the CISA officials. Fontes blasted the Trump administration for threatening state election officials and made it clear he had no confidence in their leadership, they said.

“Fontes got testy with them,” said one participant on the call who asked not to be identified. “‘I don’t trust you,’ [Fontes told the CISA officials.] ‘Your boss came out there and said: We are going to criminalize the work you do. Why should we trust you?’”

When asked about the call, Fontes confirmed that he’d made those comments and expanded on his frustrations

“They don’t work with us, they work against us,” Fontes told Votebeat. “Why should I trust them?”

Fontes said it was difficult for state and local elections officials to have confidence they would get support from the federal government when the administration treats them like an adversary rather than a partner. He and others on the call said CISA leaders offered few assurances they would provide much support in the coming weeks.

“They just wholly and completely abandoned their duties and threatened prosecution,” Fontes said. “If they want to apologize for threatening us and ruining perfectly good systems, that’s a good start.”

CISA did not respond to requests for comment on the call.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, also a Democrat, echoed Fontes’s frustrations.

“It’s unhelpful to have political leaders, including the secretary of Homeland Security, hinting at imprisoning election administrators who don’t do what they want,” Simon told Votebeat. “That’s just not helpful.”

Simon said Minnesota and other states have spent months working to fill the gaps left by the drop-off in CISA support.

“It’s pretty clear states are almost entirely on their own this election cycle and cannot rely on the federal government for election assistance,” said Simon.

Not everyone on the call came away with a sour taste in their mouth, though. Some participants described it as a tentative move that could help repair the strained relationship between state and federal leaders working on elections.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, also a Democrat, described the call as a “positive step” in rebuilding relations between CISA and state election officials.

“While this engagement is encouraging, CISA and our other federal partners must focus on continuing to rebuild trust with election officials,” Hobbs said. “Over the last two years, we have watched this administration systematically dismantle many of the election security resources in place at the federal level.”

With the November election fast approaching, he said, “election officials need sustained commitment to supporting local elections, not renewed attention only as major elections approach. Meaningful support will do more to rebuild relationships than words alone.”

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The post “I don’t trust you”: Tensions reach boiling point on election security call for state leaders appeared first on Salon.com.

PARIS — Center-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann will announce that he’s running in next year’s presidential election in France in the next few days, most likely with a prime-time TV interview on Sunday, according to three people close to him.

The trio, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Glucksmann’s plans, said he plans to take part in a closed primary being organized by the Socialist Party that currently includes Ségolène Royal, the Socialist presidential candidate in 2007 who lost to Nicolas Sarkozy, and MP Philippe Brun. Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure has also said he is considering running.

While a win would guarantee Glucksmann the support of the Socialists, the main center-left force in France, the party has been struggling to make inroads with voters and is beset by infighting.

Several high-profile Socialists, including former President François Hollande and former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, have publicly hinted at plans to sit out their party’s primary and launch independent presidential bids.

However, polls show that Glucksmann, the leader of his own small political party, Place Publique, is the best-placed presidential hopeful on the center left after leading the Socialists and their allies to a strong third-place finish in the 2024 European elections.

Yet he and the rest of the field still lag significantly behind far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen, according to most surveys. France’s presidential election goes to a runoff if no candidate scores more than 50 percent of the vote, and if the polls hold, Le Pen is all but guaranteed to nab one of the final two spots.

To advance to the second round, Glucksmann will have to see off centrist and center-right rivals like Edouard Philippe and the firebrand anticapitalist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Mélenchon, who announced his plans to run in May, is currently polling slightly ahead of Glucksmann, but both are within striking distance of making the runoff.

The two are bitter rivals whose divisions are reminiscent of those across left-leaning parties in the Western world, including the U.S. Democratic Party.

Glucksmann hopes his centrist brand of politics can win over former Socialist voters who backed President Emmanuel Macron. Mélenchon’s hardline messaging is more targeted at low-propensity voters, including younger voters and those from working-class, multicultural communities in major French cities.

Glucksmann and Mélenchon disagree on issues ranging from France’s participation in NATO, — which Mélenchon opposes and Glucksmann supports — to pension reform.

Mélenchon has pledged to lower the minimum retirement age to 60 if elected president, while Glucksmann believes some workers should be required to work longer and that France should move toward a system where retirement age would be based on life expectancy and individual working conditions.

In dieser Episode sprechen Pauline von Pezold und Frederik Schindler dem Spitzenkandidaten der AfD für Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Leif-Erik Holm. Im Vorfeld der Landtagswahlen am 20. September geht es mit Holm um seine Ambitionen auf das Amt des Ministerpräsidenten und sein Vorhaben, notfalls durch eine Kooperation mit der CDU oder Tolerierungsmodelle an die Macht zu kommen. Obwohl er sich gleichzeitig die „Altparteien“ auf den „Müllhaufen der Geschichte“ wünscht.

Zudem konfrontieren die beiden Holm mit seiner energiepolitischen Kernforderung nach einer Rückkehr zu russischem Gas. Sie haken nach, wie sich diese Strategie mit den Importverboten der EU und dem Angriffskrieg Russlands gegen die Ukraine vereinbaren lässt und ob die AfD damit nicht sehenden Auges neue energie- und sicherheitspolitische Abhängigkeiten für Deutschland in Kauf nimmt.

Ein weiterer kritischer Fokus des Interviews liegt auf dem Personal des Landesverbandes.
Schindler und von Pezold befragen Holm zum neuen Generalsekretär seiner Partei sowie Vorstandsmitgliedern der Parteijugend Generation Deutschland, die teils eine Vergangenheit in der rechtsextremen NPD haben.

„Inside AfD“ ist der POLITICO-Podcast über die umstrittenste Partei des Landes. Trotz Radikalisierung und Beobachtung durch den Verfassungsschutz wächst die AfD weiter. Wie ist das möglich? Was treibt ihre Anhänger, Strategen und Gegner an? Wie funktioniert das Innenleben der Partei? Und was bedeutet ihr Aufstieg für das politische System Deutschlands?

Antworten liefern immer mittwochs Pauline von Pezold von POLITICO und Frederik Schindler von WELT — unaufgeregt, aber kritisch.

Fragen und Feedback gern an insideafd@politico.eu.

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A full three decades ago, as Bill Clinton turned 50 in the midst of his successful 1996 reelection campaign, he was sounding even then in an autumnal mood.

“I have more yesterdays than tomorrows” he used to say often that year, a wistfulness that caused those of us who covered him to puzzle. What’s with this misty nostalgia? It was literally true, unless he expected to live 100, that he probably had more yesterdays than tomorrows. But fifty is typically the point when people realize they are no longer exactly young. It is hardly an age that merits a self-conception as old. Clinton’s perspective, however, doubtless left him with an appreciation of the fragility of life. He never met his biological father — a traveling salesman who married five times and died at age 28 in a car accident, three months before the future president was born.

Yet Clinton himself has proved reasonably durable, especially for a man who had serious heart surgery at age 58. The 42nd president turns 80 today — at last at an age that amply justifies a more searching look back on life.

Rest assured that no one in 1996 was contemplating the possibility that the president 30 years later would be a man who is actually two months older than Clinton — much less that this man would be President Donald Trump, who at that time had already been famous as a real estate magnate and professional self-promoter for 15 years or so.

Above all, I think few people then were imagining that the country in 2026 would itself be feeling so old — or, at a minimum, so surly and so bereft of a unifying vision of the future. The very essence of the most powerful and divisive political movement since former President Ronald Reagan’s is expressly backward-looking — Make America Great Again.

Many of the habits that today infuse American politics — the ones that make it so remorseless and infused with indignation and disdain — were present in nascent form in Clinton’s presidency. At the time, those developments seemed exotic — there was scant notion that they represented a shabby new norm.

In the early days, this brand of contempt-driven politics often revolved around arguments about Bill Clinton’s public and private character. This was a theme of his 1992 election against George H.W. Bush, his 1996 election against Bob Dole, and it even shadowed the 2004 dedication of his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.

I am hardly a Clinton intimate. I haven’t been in his company in a decade. At one time, however, I probably knew as much about his presidency — its animating ideas, its decisive moments, its distinctive personalities — as anyone who had not actually served in it. This came from six years covering his White House for the Washington Post, and another two working on a book that aimed to synthesize his years in office and take a preliminary cut at assessing their historical weight. In both journalistic and historical terms, much of this time was devoted to thinking about competing appraisals of Clinton’s character.

It is an argument without end in part because the positive and negative elements of Clinton’s character, the light and the shadows, seemingly flow from the same source: an intense need to win, to matter, to seduce, to prove himself in the world. Imagine if people around Bill Clinton in 1974, the year he ran unsuccessfully for Congress — Hillary Rodham, then a girlfriend but not yet a spouse, showed up in Arkansas to help — had been given a crystal ball to peer into the future. These people would not be surprised to learn that a future president was in their midst; His talent, ambition, and idealism were that obvious. Nor would they be surprised to learn how his campaigns and presidency would at various turns be nearly derailed. As early biographer David Maraniss documented, even then Clinton had a reputation for sexual vagrancy, and the patterns of heedlessness, deception, and hypocrisy such a lifestyle inevitably requires.

He’s been out of political office for more than a quarter-century — as long as he was ever in it, beginning with his first victory as Arkansas attorney general in 1976. By my lights, the years since he yielded the Oval Office to George W. Bush (who turned 80 last month) in January 2001 have abundantly ratified the proposition that the country could do worse — at key junctures plainly has done worse–than Clinton’s character or his record, the strengths and infirmities alike.

As he turns 80, and the country contemplates a post-Trump future two years from now, it seems to me there are at least four ways in which Clinton has prevailed in the great character argument woven throughout his life.

Responsibility

This is a place where my views have not changed much from what I thought at the time and what I think now. A paradox of Clinton’s presidency is that, however reckless he was in his personal life — culminating in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal and Republicans’ unsuccessful attempt to evict him from office through impeachment — he was supremely responsible in his use of power and his willingness to take sober risks for what he thought was right. Yes, he would over-agonize on hard choices — on issues from trade to welfare to war in the Balkans. But at the end of the day — sometimes it could be a very long day — on big subjects there was rarely much variance between what Clinton genuinely thought was the right decision and what he did.

A good many of his policies are out of favor now within his own party. But the political and policy landscape he was navigating was much different than today. Clinton was a thoroughly political creature, but he was not an unduly cynical one — he was willing frequently to risk his political self-interest on behalf of what he conceived of as the public interest.

Persuasion

One reason Bill Clinton and his brand of centrist politics can seem antiquated is that the past generation has been defined by a whole different emphasis: the politics of mobilization. Under this later school of politics, elections are won principally by sharpening divisions and elevating the moral stakes. The aim is not to win over skeptics through the power of reasoned argument. It is to convince your own side that the other side is so repugnant in its character and aims that they should rally behind you and turn out in the biggest possible numbers.

Clinton would in most of his campaigns give a nod to trying to explain what the other side believed, and why he believed his approach is better. “I think one of the ways you win elections is by talking straight with people and giving them permission to vote against you,” Clinton said a few years ago on a podcast. What he meant was that effective arguments don’t hector audiences or assert moral superiority, or the other side’s moral iniquity. They invite or even inspire people to think about an issue differently.

In short, the politics of mobilization harnesses the power of contempt; the politics of persuasion employs the language of respect. Mobilization politics tends to deal in ideological and cultural abstractions like free markets versus socialism, or “traditional values” versus sexual freedom — the kind of debates that are especially potent at pushing people to decide “which side are you on?” Persuasion politics is more likely to center on the concrete human dimensions of policy choices — here’s what an expansion of childcare tax credits might mean for you.

You could argue which brand of politics is more effective, and for the most part advocates of mobilization politics in recent years on left and right have been prevailing. But it’s hard to see how the politics of persuasion is not a more inspiring expression of American character, and also more likely to resolve serious long-term debates.

The fight for power

When Clinton opened his presidential library in Little Rock in 2004, the late Peter Jennings of ABC News in an interview baited Clinton about a recent survey of historians that rated his presidency reasonably well overall, but second to last (ahead only of Richard Nixon) in “moral authority.” Clinton said curtly that the historians were wrong, adding, “I don’t really care what they think.” Jennings replied: “Excuse me, Mr. President. I can feel it across the room. You care very deeply.”

Clinton then snapped: “You don’t want to go here, Peter. You don’t want to go here. Not after what you people did. And the way you — your network — what you did with [Whitewater prosecutor] Kenneth Starr. The way your people repeated every little sleazy thing he leaked. No one has any idea of what that’s like.”

The new library had an alcove about Clinton’s 1998 impeachment and subsequent acquittal called, “The Fight for Power.” The scandal, the exhibit argued, was simply the Republicans’ effort to overturn an election they lost.

At the time, I believed this was mostly Clinton’s tortured rationalization for his own mistakes. Events since then, however, have swung the historical argument irrefutably in his favor. In the 1990s we spent months and even years covering such inane issues as whether the newly elected Clinton acted properly to fire long-term employees of the office that booked White House charter flights and hotels for the media. Now, Trump asserts the right to eliminate cabinet departments and agencies without congressional approval — and the stories often get lost in the rush of other news. There is not a credible argument that says Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater land investments in the 1970s were a worthy subject for ethics inquiries and criminal probes but the Trump family’s crypto investments and overseas deals while the company founder is in the Oval Office are no big deal.

Clinton was right that the attacks on his character were often simply not on the level—but a proxy for other agendas.

Perseverance

In 2000, as Bill Clinton’s presidency was winding down and Hillary Clinton was waging a successful campaign for New York Senate, there was a political skull session at the White House involving a trusted roster of aides and strategists. As one of them described it to me later, Bill Clinton brought up the elephant in the room. Female voters in particular, he noted, wanted to understand why Hillary had stayed with Bill during the sex scandal. The mood was briefly awkward until Hillary Clinton said good-naturedly that she wanted to know the answer too.

“Because you’re a sticker!” the president replied, jabbing the air for emphasis.

Actually, it seems to me, both Clintons are. Across many decades, they have stayed married, and stayed in the fight over the issues they care about—amid plenty of victories and setbacks alike. That is a kind of character, too.

These days, Bill Clinton’s public appearances are fewer. At times he looks frail. His skeptics include many people in his own party. Yet, on his 80th birthday, the main question seems to be less about his character than the country’s: Is there a pathway to a destination in which more people believed with him that politics can illuminate the best and most generous and inspiring parts of national identity? Clinton may be getting old, but that idea should be made young again.

Mykhailo Fedorov has called for elections in Ukraine despite Russia’s ongoing invasion, after his firing as defense minister sparked nationwide protests against President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The president has been under increasing pressure at home following the controversial government reshuffle last month in which he pushed out Fedorov, a popular minister credited with inspiring battlefield innovations.

“People cannot endlessly live in a state where they do not understand why certain decisions are made,” Fedorov said in a video address Tuesday night, alluding to the reshuffle.

“We must not let [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decide when Ukrainians can choose their government,” he said.

Ukraine’s constitution does not allow for it to hold elections while it is under martial law, the state of play since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

Election challenges

Even if Ukraine can find a legal route to new elections, they would likely take place under the specter of war.

Russia is bombarding Kyiv almost daily with missiles and drones, grinding out gains on the battlefield in eastern and southern Ukraine and preparing for a winter onslaught to seize more territory.

Holding elections in these circumstances would be “complex,” Fedorov said. He spoke about the importance of securing voting rights for members of the military, Ukrainians abroad and people in frontline regions.

Russia looms over Ukraine not just militarily but electorally. Moscow has a long record of trying to influence democratic outcomes around the world and would likely view elections in Ukraine as a potential avenue to victory in the war of aggression Putin escalated in 2022.

Putin and Russia-friendly politicians have long sought to portray Zelenskyy’s rule as illegitimate. The Ukrainian president was elected by a landslide in 2019 but has not faced a public vote since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine more than four years ago.

Although Zelenskyy has faced pressure from international leaders to hold elections — including U.S. President Donald Trump — he has steadfastly maintained that they cannot take place during wartime. In February, he offered elections in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin, however, kept the war going.

The Ukrainian leader has been a figurehead for his country since the full-scale invasion, but his initial popularity has begun to visibly wane in the past year, amid allegations of corruption and complaints about the transparency of his government.

“People do not demand that the state never make mistakes,” Fedorov said. “But they have a right to the truth.”

Even before the controversial reshuffle, Zelenskyy was beginning to seem more isolated, having lost members of his inner circle including his trusted chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who was arrested on corruption charges in May, which he has denied.

The president — who has received near-unconditional backing from establishment politicians in Europe — would be able to point toward the progress he has made toward EU membership if he is pushed into an election campaign. Membership of the bloc is seen as crucial to Ukraine’s postwar future.

But whether Zelenskyy would even contest an election is another matter.  

This article has been updated.

President Donald Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure. Tehran may be willing to wait even longer.

Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation “never seen before,” former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to relinquish its desire to toll ships passing through the State of Hormuz and make the other concessions Trump is demanding to bring an end to the war.

“It’s an attrition campaign, and I am sure Treasury tweaks this or that to fill gaps or expand coverage of sanctions,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term. “But, it’s hard to believe [there will be] something decisive after 20 years of U.S. sanctions and Iranian experience of going around them.”

It’s an acknowledgement that underscores the asymmetry of the situation. The Trump administration is staring down a consequential midterm election amid an unpopular war that has sent oil prices back up to roughly $90 a barrel and helped push long-term borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly two decades as hope dims that a peace deal is near.

Iran’s leaders, meanwhile, see the conflict as existential, giving Tehran reason to absorb the extraordinary economic pain rather than accept terms it believes could imperil the regime — especially as U.S. inflation remains elevated and treasuries sell off.

The yield on 30-year U.S. government bonds, a figure Trump has in the past been attuned to, jumped on Tuesday to its highest level since just before the global financial crisis.

The increase in the yield to its highest level in nearly two decades isn’t solely because of the six-month war; global fuel shortages and broader instability have kept energy prices higher for longer, increasing the threat of persistent inflation. And that’s heaped even more risk on global bond markets that have repeatedly blanched at Trump-related shocks.

“We are in a situation where we’re spending more and more to finance more and more,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives. And the war has created “a riskier world full of more frictions, full of more supply shocks.”

Iran’s outsized incentive to muscle through the pain is partly why some former administration officials doubt that the naval blockade, while unprecedented in its scale in the modern era or whatever new strategies Bessent may unveil, will change Iran’s calculus.

“I think the economic pressure would need to hit them in new ways we haven’t seen so far to change the mindset of the regime,” said one former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to candidly assess the impact of the U.S.’s economic pressure campaign.

The administration has yet to indicate what further action it plans to take, but options include going after major Chinese banks that facilitate Iran’s oil trade, expand secondary sanctions on countries doing business with Iran and confiscating Iranian assets under U.S. jurisdiction instead of just freezing them.

Iranian leaders publicly mocked U.S. efforts to sanction them into submission.

“Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, posted on X Tuesday.

“Bessent and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth are way out of their league,” he wrote. “Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made.”

White House aides, however, continue to contend that the leverage is on its side.

“The crushing sanctions and one of the most successful blockades that have crippled Iran’s economy and has left Iran completely broke,” said one administration official, granted anonymity to share the U.S.’s thinking. “There are many levers the president can crank harder in the weeks and months ahead.”

In the half-year since the Iran war began, the president has deployed an array of pressure tactics to choke Iran economically, including physically preventing the country from selling its most important export — oil — as part of an ongoing naval blockade of Iranian ports. The administration has also sanctioned foreign buyers of Iranian oil, targeted the country’s shadow fleet of ships that ferries it and sought to cut the country off from the financial networks it uses to move money.

That economic pressure has sent Iran’s economy, which was already troubled before the war, into a deeper tailspin. Now, Iran is grappling with year-over-year inflation of 88 percent, long lines and rationing at gas pumps and food prices that have more than doubled.

But those who have worked on previous Iran negotiations say that’s far from enough to get the regime to cave, especially after six months of U.S. bombing that has killed, by Tehran’s own measure, more than 3,000 Iranians.

“It’s undeniable that there is economic pressure. The question is whether there is a breaking point, and I would say for a regime that is fighting for its life and has never hesitated to transfer economic pain to its population, there is no breaking point,” said Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director, who helped work to bridge differences between Iran and world powers during negotiations over the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Yet Trump continued to project patience on Tuesday, signaling that he was prepared to let the pressure campaign play out.

“There are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Naval Blockade remains in full force and effect. The Hormuz Strait is open and operating. All water mines have been removed or detonated. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

A senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss the situation in Iran, insisted that Iran will cave long before the pain in the U.S. or world markets become intolerable.

“Ultimately we want a deal, but in the interim, the Iranian economy is tanking … people are lining up for gas, just for a half gallon of gas. And there’s a lot of civil unrest going on in Iran, that’s not being played on the news for whatever reason,” the official said late last week. “We’re fine if that’s the route they want to take.”

Still, there are signs inside the White House that the economic impacts are a growing concern. Vice President JD Vance last week said on Fox News that the administration’s first goal in the Iran war was to “keep oil and gas cheap for Americans all over the country.” The president, meanwhile, has repeatedly insisted voters will bear the pain of higher gas prices for an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The voters have a more dyspeptic view. A Reuters/Ipsos survey released this week showed Trump’s approval rating at 33 percent, the lowest level of his presidency. Roughly 80 percent of Americans — 87 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans — think U.S. involvement in Iran “will go on for an extended period of time,” the poll found.

But some former Trump administration officials, however, are holding out hope that patience will be rewarded and that the administration’s economic pressure campaign will work, in part because they see the other options on the table, including putting U.S. boots on the ground in Iran, as politically untenable.

Fred Fleitz, Trump’s former National Security Council chief of staff and vice chair of the American First Policy Institute’s American Security, predicted that the U.S. could be “dealing with a different Iran” in 30 to 60 days.

“I think patience is the best approach,” Fleitz said. “I don’t believe that a large-scale military attack right now is going to make a difference in changing the regime’s position, and I strongly oppose the idea of seizing Kharg Island or sending in American troops. The American people don’t want that. That would really bog us down in a quagmire.”

BERLIN —Senior conservative and social-democrat lawmakers in Germany’s governing coalition are urging the EU to sanction Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir after he called for nightly targeted killings in Gaza.

“I think targeted killings should be carried out in Gaza, remove 30, 40 [people] every night,” said Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, in a podcast episode released last Saturday. “Not just those who pose an immediate threat. No, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

The comments drew an unusually sharp response from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives.

“Ben-Gvir’s inhumane remarks can only be condemned,” Jürgen Hardt, foreign policy spokesperson for the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union parliamentary group, told POLITICO. “The EU should sanction him as a sign of the universal validity of human dignity and human rights.”

Hardt went further, saying he was convinced an Israeli government without Ben-Gvir or fellow far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich would bring Europe and Israel closer together.

Germany’s Social Democrats struck a similar tone. Adis Ahmetović, the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, said the two ministers had shocked international opinion well before their latest statements, and urged the German government to support sanctions against both.

The criticism extended across the political spectrum.

The Left’s Dietmar Bartsch called Ben-Gvir’s remarks “deeply inhumane,” and urged Berlin and Brussels to consider sanctions, including an entry ban. Markus Frohnmaier, the far-right Alternative for Germany party’s foreign policy spokesperson, said calling for the indiscriminate killing of people who posed no immediate threat crossed “a clear line.” Green Member of Parliament Marlene Schönberger branded Ben-Gvir a “far-right extremist” and said his comments were “deeply inhumane,” adding that they had “nothing whatsoever” to do with Israel’s right to defend itself and its citizens.

The statements mark a significant shift in Berlin. Germany has repeatedly pushed back against EU measures targeting Israel, including proposed sanctions on Ben-Gvir in June and, as recently as last month, restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

EU sanctions require unanimity, giving Berlin considerable sway over whether the bloc can move.

Merz’s government has not yet followed the lawmakers’ lead. The Foreign Ministry declined to take a position Monday, while some in government fear sanctioning Ben-Gvir just weeks before Israel’s Oct. 27 election could play into his hands.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul will meet his EU counterparts in Ireland on Sept. 1 and 2, where Ben-Gvir’s remarks and the war in Gaza are likely to loom over discussions.

Maximilian Heimerzheim contributed to reporting.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

PARIS — The Paris prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into disinformation efforts targeting two prominent candidates in France’s upcoming presidential election, according to Agence France-Presse.

Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, two former prime ministers who are high-profile contenders for the 2027 race, were reportedly the subject earlier this summer of fake news reports posted on social media aimed at undermining their campaigns.

Fabricated videos posted on X that used branding from leading French news platforms claimed Philippe, who suffers from alopecia, was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, while fake reports on X and TikTok alleged Attal had Parkinson’s disease and was using drugs.

Attal denounced the reports as fake and filed a complaint. Philippe has refrained from publicly commenting on the posts, though his top allies have framed them as likely Russian interference.

Two networks that Western authorities say have links with Russia, Storm-1516 and Matriochka, were involved in the disinformation operations targeting Philippe and Attal, respectively, according to a French official with knowledge of the technical investigation led by Viginum, the French agency responsible for combating digital interference.

Storm-1516, which the French government says is tied to Russian military intelligence, was also involved in a similar disinformation operation targeting center-left MEP and likely presidential contender Raphaël Glucksmann. The prosecutor’s office announced the launch of a separate probe into that case earlier this month.

Viginum alerted the candidates and recommended that they not publicize these operations in order to avoid giving them visibility, according to the same official.

LONDON — Britain’s Liberal Democrats are holding fire against Andy Burnham — for now.

The centrist party has studiously avoided criticizing the new Labour prime minister during his first weeks in power, instead pushing the same “constructive opposition” approach followed during predecessor Keir Starmer’s early stint in Downing Street.

“I like what he’s doing,” says 2024-intake Lib Dem MP Martin Wrigley. “I like the way he’s going, focusing on things that matter.” The question is: how long can it last?

A person familiar with Lib Dem Leader Ed Davey’s thinking, granted anonymity because their job does not authorize them to speak publicly, says the party hopes Burnham removes the “performative hostility” from Westminster.

“That style of politics really suits the populist parties, both on the left and the right, and it isn’t the sort of politics that we as Liberal Democrats want to do,” they argued.

But while not rocking the boat has landed well with Lib Dem MPs, there is still a call for a distinctive identity for the party in a highly competitive political environment, with Labour enjoying a “Burnham bounce” in the opinion polls on the left, and Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch’s personal brand on the up.

Duty of care

Davey — whose party enjoyed its best-ever result at the 2024 election but remains only just in double digits in national polls — has already made one big play in the Burnham era: being helpful on reforming social care.

The creaking social care system in England is a policy challenge governments of all stripes have failed to meet — leaving families with drained finances and cash-strapped local authorities plugging the gaps.

The Lib Dem leader, who cares for his disabled son, attended a virtual cross-party meeting after Burnham, whose own father is in a care home with Alzheimer’s, called for an open conversation on a fix.

This proactive approach has so far landed well with Davey’s troops. “I don’t think we’re going to sink the process if we don’t get everything we want,” says Lib Dem Shadow Commons Leader Bobby Dean. “If we can get cross-party consensus on one element, then we should get on with that element straight away.” 

Indeed, Mike Storey, the Lib Dems’ co-deputy leader in the House of Lords, says the party will “cooperate fully on social care … and we’ll do it with no strings attached.” 

The person familiar with Davey’s thinking laid out the approach, saying “People are put off” by opposition parties that “decide to just immediately say ‘oh, they’re terrible. They’re breaking everything again’” when a new government arrives.

Tom Lubbock, co-founder of polling agency J.L. Partners, agrees a conciliatory approach makes sense for now as “you just look a bit mad if you just go in studs-up within the first couple of months.”

But there’s some angst about making sure the Lib Dems clearly separate themselves from Labour.

Party of the countryside 

It’s not the first time the Lib Dems have tried to play nice with a Labour prime minister.

But Davey’s party soon found ways to differentiate themselves from the increasingly unpopular Keir Starmer.

After Starmer’s government changed inheritance tax rules for farmers, the Lib Dems spied an opening — dubbing it the “family farm tax” and ramping up campaigning.

The party has an “extraordinary niche and an extraordinary opportunity” to pose as the “Countryside Alliance arm of the Labour Party,” argues Lubbock — in other words, a progressive rival to Labour that rural voters can still get behind.

Burnham’s focus on reviving urban areas may lend itself to this approach, with Lib Dem figures poised to exploit any perception “Avanti Andy” is shuttling between London and Manchester, another major city.

Adam Dance, who represents the rural constituency of Yeovil, warns Burnham “can’t be a prime minister just for Manchester and the biggest cities” and says “he needs to understand rural areas.” 

Northern MP Tom Gordon also challenges the prime minister’s claim to represent northern England, arguing this “does feel slightly performative.” He reckons voters “don’t hate him [Burnham] yet” as “he’s not had long enough to make any really unpopular decisions.”

Left vs. right blocs 

Much of the Lib Dems’ success under Davey has come from wooing disillusioned Conservatives, targeting Tory-held seats in the home counties — dubbed the “blue wall.”

But winning remaining Tory areas next time round could be harder if the Lib Dems appear too closely aligned with a Labour government. 

Lubbock argues the Lib Dems will do “much worse” if supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK “get on the Conservative bandwagon” to help defeat Labour nationally. That would be a mirror of the way some Labour supporters tactically backed the Lib Dems in 2024 to oust the Tories.

Though the Tories are still stuck below 20 percent in most polls, there are signs of recovery. YouGov data last month put Badenoch’s net favorability score at the highest of any Conservative leader for more than five years. Her position is undeniably more stable than it was 12 months ago.

While Lib Dems are optimistic Badenoch’s moves to the right on net zero and human rights will push more One Nation, centrist Conservatives in their direction, their Tory rivals sound bullish.

Tory MP Gregory Stafford, who saw off a challenge by the Lib Dems to win Farnham and Bordon two years ago, doesn’t think there are more Tories left for the Lib Dems to poach.

“All I’m seeing is those people coming back, not the other way round,” says Stafford about voters who bid the Tories farewell in 2024. Despite his narrow win, he thinks some of the 6,000 Reform UK voters in his seat will return — thanks to Badenoch.

“They see demonstrably in Kemi a leader that both they like as a person, but also speaks their language and speaks to the policies that they’re concerned about,” he argues.

As such, the Lib Dems may settle for a stronger attack against the right.

“People just don’t feel listened to,” says the party’s Scotland spokesperson Susan Murray. “When they don’t feel listened to, they are open to populism.” She argues that both the Lib Dems and Labour are “not succeeding in getting that message [of hope and opportunities] across.” Dean adds, “There’s a massive demand out there for a liberal party to make a bold offer to the country and at the moment that space feels vacated.” 

It’s a perceived weakness Stafford, the Conservative MP, plans to leap on at the next election. “The real danger for the Liberal Democrats is that they are seen as a patsy party that might champion local issues locally, but actually have nothing to say distinctive on the national stage,” he argues.

Roz Savage, who entered the Commons for the Lib Dems in 2024, recognizes the outfit has a “PR challenge that people think of us as the nice party.” Instead, a “bigger story” is required about a future Lib Dem government, she says.

“When we talk to Lib Dem voters in focus groups, they don’t really have a clear vision for what the Lib Dem party should stand for,” says Merlin Strategy’s Head of Research, Julian Gallie. People often back them as a vote against other parties, the political analyst says.

MPs also want the Lib Dems to reach beyond their traditional strongholds and target historically Labour areas — including Newcastle and Hull. Both have Lib Dem-run city councils, but are the kind of areas in which Burnham will fancy he can improve Labour’s standing. Meral Hussein-Ece, the Lib Dems’ Lords equality spokesperson, says the party must also do more to understand “the diversity of this country, which I don’t think we’ve done very well so far.” 

Lib Dem conference in Brighton next month will give the party a chance to lay a marker for the expected general election in 2029. But MPs want more than set-piece events to present a distinctive vision. 

“We do have to do better at utilizing the likes of social media and capturing the attention all the time, not just when we get the spotlight shined on us,” argues Gordon, the Harrogate and Knaresborough MP.

The Lib Dems, he says, have to drive “conversation on our own terms, rather than always having to just respond.” 

From threats to the safety of poll workers to voters who can’t distinguish between odds and results, prediction markets are already scrambling the political process.

It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.

“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.

“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.

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According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.

The administration plowed forward anyway.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.) 

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.

“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.

Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)

For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)

The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”

Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy

As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.

From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.

Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.

“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.

“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.

Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.

CREW filed a lawsuit in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.

“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”

Collapsing Claims

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.

“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted 

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.

Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.

“Far-Reaching Consequences”

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.

Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”

“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.

“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.

Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens. Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”

The post How Trump’s unprecedented effort to prosecute noncitizen voters fell apart appeared first on Salon.com.

Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico portray their U.S. Senate campaigns as a fight for the soul of America — one in which God plays an active yet vastly different role.

Talarico, believing God is on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized, focuses his message to voters on equity and protecting personal freedom.

Paxton sees God as on his side — a force safeguarding his ability to protect Texas and the nation from disaster at the hands of the “radical left.”

“I truly believe that God just delivered me, not because I am a great person, because God is sovereign and he does what he wants to do,” Paxton said on Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s podcast, referring to tribulations that included an unsuccessful 2023 impeachment on corruption charges.

“I don’t take credit for it, it’s really by the grace of God,” Paxton said.

In Texas — where two-thirds of the adult population identifies as Christian and 45% say religion is “very important” in their life — the candidates are asking voters to choose between two dramatically different views of Christianity. Paxton’s version insists conservative Christian values — such as protecting the unborn and preserving the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage — must prevail. Talarico’s Christianity celebrates pluralism, affirms LGBTQ+ individuals and believes God transcends all partisan divisions.

“Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people,” Talarico, a seminarian, said in a sermon posted on TikTok in December 2025. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor.”

“We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God,” he said.

Talarico has made the New Testament command to love thy neighbor a centerpiece of his campaign. That focus has also given Paxton ammunition to portray his opponent as out of touch with Texas values and Scripture.

“So, what are the differences between me and my opponent?” Paxton said in a July campaign rally in McAllen in a now viral X clip. “I’m sure you know some of them. One of them is family.”

“Actually, let me talk about faith first,” he said.

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Paxton spent the next minute critiquing Talarico’s faith, stating the Democratic nominee had said that God is nonbinary and that supporting the oil and gas industry is un-Christian.

Talarico has dismissed the criticism, saying his statements were taken out of context, but the Republican continues to assail his opponent’s faith, implying and outright stating that Talarico cannot be considered a Christian. 

Talarico’s views, Paxton said on Patrick’s podcast, are “antithetical to historical Christian views” and “adopted from liberal theology that do not reflect what Scripture says.”

The message is a frequent theme in Paxton’s stump speeches.

Talarico has gone on the offensive as well, criticizing Christian nationalism, an ideology that depicts the U.S. as a nation founded on Christian principles that must be protected by the government. Many Paxton-supported policies, according to Talarico, advance that agenda.

Talarico pointed to a state law requiring Texas public school classrooms to display donated copies of the Ten Commandments — a law that Paxton supports and has defended in court as state attorney general.

“It’s using political power to elevate one religious tradition over all the others,” Talarico told podcaster Joe Rogan in July 2025. “It’s using governmental power to dominate our neighbors instead of loving them as ourselves, which is exactly what we’re called to do as Christians.”

The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service requested interviews from both candidates. Paxton’s campaign did not respond to the interview request but had sent an earlier statement criticizing Talarico’s understanding of Christianity. Talarico’s campaign pointed to the Democrat’s extensive comments about his faith in sermons, speeches and interviews.

“Founded on the rock of Biblical Truth”

Paxton is an evangelical Christian, though his denominational affiliation is unclear, who has questioned a strict separation of church and state, arguing the phrase does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Last year he encouraged Texas students to recite the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer in support of a law allowing school districts to dedicate class time for prayer.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton wrote in a message on the office of attorney general’s website. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society.”  

The U.S. was “founded on the rock of Biblical Truth,” he wrote, vowing to fight “far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

Paxton has also said his faith — and the Constitution, which he said was “written by people of faith” in a 2015 interview with the Tribune — informs his opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and he has called gun ownership a God-given right protected by the Second Amendment.

Paxton’s combination of religion and politics is rooted in the alliance between the Republican Party and conservative Christianity that dates to “the late 1970s and early 1980s in the formation of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition,” said Janine Giordano Drake, a professor of history at Indiana University.

There were “many efforts at that time to define a so-called Christian moral politics around what they call family values, personal responsibility, what they defined as appropriate expression of sexuality and patriotism,” Drake said.

Talarico, disagreeing with many of the theological and political positions commonly associated with the religious right, rejects the idea that faithful Christians must oppose abortion and says he trusts women to make decisions about their own bodies.

“That’s a belief I have not despite my faith, but because of it. Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion,” he said in an interview with Jamie Kern Lima in late May.

Talarico’s campaign emphasizes the need to get the government out of private personal decisions, and the Democrat advocates for a version of Christianity that accepts all people as made in God’s image.

Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination. He is currently on leave from his degree program.

Both Senate candidates have been criticized for falling short of being an authentic or true Christian — Talarico for his progressive Christian message, and Paxton for two alleged extramarital affairs whose wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds” in July 2025.

Elesha J. Coffman, a professor of American intellectual and religious history at Baylor University, traces debates over the “correct” practice of Christianity to the Civil War, when Christians on both sides of the conflict disagreed over interpretations of the Bible.

“The pro-slavery factions were picking on specific verses like ‘slaves obey your masters’ and saying, ‘Well, we’re clearly advancing the more biblical society because look, the Bible says exactly what we’re doing,’” Coffman said.

“The Northern abolitionists had some specific verses, but it was also bigger picture — what do we understand to be true about God? What do we understand to be true about human nature and human flourishing? So even if the Bible says these specific things, like let’s nuance that, let’s contextualize that, let’s acknowledge that our world is different,” she said.

A recent Fox News poll found 78% of white evangelicals would choose Paxton over Talarico. Support for Paxton drops to 57% for “regular worship attenders.” The same poll found 51% of registered voters in Texas preferred Talarico, as did 63% of moderates.

“Forcing our religion down their throats”

Protecting religious freedom and practice has been a Paxton priority since he became attorney general in 2015, generating loyal support from grassroots conservatives.

“I was thinking about one of my very first cases when I was attorney general,” he said during a July campaign speech in McAllen. “There was a teacher in Bell County, just an innocent teacher who put up a Linus cartoon over Christmas that said ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.’ And the school board voted to make her take that down.”

“We defended her,” Paxton said. “She has a right to her free expression, her religious liberty.”

Over the last 10 years, Paxton has championed religious freedom in court, often defending groups or individuals with conservative Christian views, particularly on marriage and gender.

Paxton has filed legal briefs defending Christian prayer as an acceptable way to open court proceedings, supporting an employer’s right to refuse to supply contraceptives, defending foster parents who “hold traditional beliefs about marriage,” defending a baker who refused on religious grounds to make a cake celebrating a “gender transition,” supporting a football coach who was fired for praying after games, and more.

Tisa Wenger, a professor of American religious history at Yale Divinity School, said religious liberty has long been understood as “an all-American ideal that many Americans are very proud of.”

“It’s a kind of principle that lots of people can claim, and do claim — and they claim it for their own purposes,” Wenger said in an interview.

“It is not restricted to one group or one side of the political spectrum,” she said, adding that the past two decades have seen a “more conservative approach to religious freedom.”

This shift prioritizes the expression of conservative Christianity over other religions, replacing “older American traditions” that believed the separation of church and state was the foundation of religious freedom, Wenger said.

At the nation’s founding, “the fear was religious tyranny of one particular church over others,” she said.

“In some ways, we are also returning to that moment now,” Wenger said. “Conservative Christians have a lot of public power, and there are many minorities — including Christians who are more on the left — who are protesting that on very similar grounds that people like Baptists did in the Revolutionary period against a kind of established church.”

As the Republican Party has increasingly embraced blurring the line between religion and government, Paxton has called the Ten Commandments an expression of America’s legal, moral and historical heritage, even as families have sued — and are suing — to remove them from classrooms, arguing the displays violate their right to practice religion and improperly expose students to religious doctrine.

On the floor of the Texas House, where Talarico has served since 2019, the Austin-area representative said displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools was un-American and un-Christian.

“I believe this bill is idolatrous, I believe it is exclusionary, and I believe it is arrogant,” he said in a May 2023 clip that went viral on X with over 5.7 million views. “And those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.”

Talarico expanded on the notion during a February appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, saying: “We are called to love all of our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors.”

“Forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I’ve fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment,” he said.

“If God wants me here, no one can stop me”

Paxton, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, has frequently portrayed himself as a victim of political witch hunts. And like Trump, Paxton believes he is destined to usher in a greater, God-ordained future.

“Despite the fact that the left and the establishment wanted me out, there’s a greater power,” Paxton said during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in June.

“I’m not here because of some great thing I did, I’m here because God delivered me,” Paxton said, likening himself to other “not particularly perfect” biblical figures like Peter, Paul and David. “If God wants me here, no one can stop me. If God doesn’t want me here, no one can help me.”

Daniel Shelton attended an early August campaign rally in Houston and said he admired Paxton’s common sense.

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, he’s got baggage, he cheated on his wife.’ Well, so did King David. Get over it,” said Shelton, 66. “I’m voting for the office. I’m praying for the man that’s going to fill that office.”

Across the political spectrum, invocations of divine favor have a long history in the United States, said Heath Carter, professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of “Union Made,” a book about the 19th-century labor movement in Chicago.

“The workers that I write about in Union Made, they believed God was on their side,” Carter said. “They looked at the Bible and they said, look, Jesus said the labor is worthy of his hire.”

Black Christians during the civil rights movement also understood “that God was on their side, that God was the God who led the Israelites out of Egypt and out of slavery and into liberation,” he said.

Over the last four decades, members of the Christian right “felt that they have the momentum, the kind of wind in their sails, and that God is with them in their righteous fight to take back America,” Carter said.

Talarico said he does not believe Jesus would be on the side of Democrats or Republicans. ”Jesus is far more radical than any political party. … I think he would challenge both political parties to keep working toward a more radical vision for democracy,” he said in an interview with The Breakfast Club.

Paxton has described his political fights with Democrats in terms of spiritual warfare.

“The fight is vicious,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition crowd after encouraging them to pray for him and the future of the country. “They try to put us in jail. They try to disparage us. … They try to ruin our families.”

“This is a battle not with flesh and blood, as we know, this is a spiritual battle,” he said.

Colleen DeGuzman contributed to this report.

This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.

Disclosure: Baylor University and Fox News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post Paxton, Talarico tap contrary versions of God and Christianity in appeal to Texas voters appeared first on Salon.com.

LONDON — Nigel Farage’s victory in the Clacton by-election is emphatic — but it won’t let him off the hook.

Winning back his seaside House of Commons seat by an increased margin allows the Reform UK leader to claim victory in the “people vs the establishment” contest he triggered in response to intense scrutiny of his finances.

Farage won the backing of 22,239 constituents, or 63 percent of the vote. That’s 1,014 more votes in this by-election than at the U.K. general election two years ago, and a 17-point swing in his favor.

But second-placed this time was Count Binface, a comedian with a trash can on his head who secured — by many thousands — his highest ever vote count in a palpable protest against Farage. None of Britain’s mainstream parties took part in the contest, branding it a circus.

The Reform UK leader’s refusal to turn up at the count to hear the result Friday — a move that would have seen him pictured alongside a cast of comedy characters — underlined the struggle for him to get back on the front foot he is used to contesting politics from. 

More significantly, Farage’s triumph means that parliamentary investigations into his financial affairs will now resume. That could lead to another by-election — one in which serious rivals are far less likely to stand aside to allow Farage to face-off against a long list of no-hopers.

Labour MPs switched out their own leader in part because of Farage’s storming success at local elections in May, but the focus on this contest has also made it harder for Farage to land blows on Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

This week, Labour overtook Reform in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls after months on the back-foot for the governing party.

Snubbing the count

Clacton is Farage’s fiefdom. It was one of the most Brexit-voting constituencies in the country and was the place that first sent him to the Commons on his eighth time of trying.

But Binface, a proud proponent of the British tradition of satirical candidates contesting elections, had never won more than 308 votes in a parliamentary election before. Against Farage, he secured 9,455 votes. That means 28 percent plumped for the comedy candidate with a bin on his head.

Farage on Friday snubbed the leisure center count and the mild embarrassment of accepting victory alongside Binface that three prime ministers — Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Andy Burnham — have endured before him. 

He told his own “Farage Fest” jamboree organized in secret away from the results venue that he’d been advised by Essex Police of an “organized campaign to disrupt and degrade the result.”

“I’m not scared of these people, far from it,” he told fans. “But I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory, a ringing endorsement of all that I’ve tried to fight for, and you’ve tried to fight for, and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies, and I will not sadly be attending the count.”

That meant, according to reports, Farage became the first winning candidate not to turn up for a result since jailed Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands won Fermanagh and South Tyrone in 1981.

Instead, Farage railed against the media and the “establishment” in his own event fit with branded pint cups, a ferris wheel and yurts for overnight stays. It was yet another demonstration of his attempt to bend the norms that accompany mainstream politics to his will.

Essex Police assured a “proportionate and robust policing operation” was in place at the count — while it was made clear that Farage was not advised to avoid the event. He cancelled a scheduled speech in Clacton, too.

Farage had gambled that a strong victory would inhibit the chances of parliamentary watchdogs imposing a severe enough sentence to set up a recall, should he be found to have breached the rules. “The bigger the vote, the bigger the message. Let’s tell the establishment where to go,” Farage said as polls opened on Thursday.

In the event, the turnout — at 44 percent — was not astonishing. That it’s less than the general election may not be surprising, but it was lower than another high-profile by-election held in this seat a decade earlier.

In 2014 Douglas Carswell resigned as the Conservative MP for the area to run for Ukip, Farage’s Eurosceptic party that helped drive Brexit. 

Clacton returned Carswell in his new guise, making him the first MP elected under the Ukip banner. He won 60 percent of the vote, on a 51 percent turnout.

That day was described as a “mini-earthquake in British politics” — but Friday’s result is producing less stable ground for Reform. “Farage’s distraction by-election doesn’t clear his name – it just shows he likely has so much more to hide,” argued Labour Party Chair Bridget Phillipson Friday morning.

Probes continue

So now the uphill battle. The parliamentary standards commissioner will resume two investigations into Farage — one centering on a £5 million donation from a crypto-entrepreneur, the other into support provided by a convicted fraudster.

The MP denies wrongdoing in both instances, arguing he didn’t need to declare the donations because they were given in a personal capacity before he was elected. 

But if there’s a finding of a serious rule breach then the Commons could vote to suspend Farage and trigger a recall petition.

The signatures of just 10 percent of registered voters in Clacton would then be needed to expel Farage from parliament — and trigger another by-election in which he could stand. Farage has expressed hopes that there isn’t such an appetite in his constituency — but the support for Binface throws that into doubt.

Clacton’s electorate is 79,785 — the 9,455 votes that Binface secured represents around 12 percent of those eligible voters, a comfortable margin for recall to be successful. 

Tactical errors?

That is all potential peril for the future. Right now, the August by-election has even some supporters questioning whether this was a rare miscalculation from a veteran campaigner.

Farage has in recent years dominated the summer break when many MPs vacate the political playing field.

But broadcasting rules on election periods stymied this year’s effort. Media invites to the press conferences Farage did throw had to assure broadcasters he would not be mentioning Clacton. And every mention of Clacton meant presenters were obliged to read the full 34-candidate list — namedropping Nick the Incredible Flying Brick and Baron Von Thunderclap in the process. 

Reform has also been struggling to grapple with a squeeze on its right from Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain splinter party. Farage’s one-time Reform comrade touted the possibility of a pact to unite the right — but deeply held grievances on both sides mean the distraction has dragged on.

A row over one of Reform’s most senior officials, Zia Yusuf, calling a Conservative former defense secretary a “traitor to Britain” has also been generating unwanted headlines and exposing rifts inside Reform.

If that second by-election does emerge in the coming months then the Conservatives have already vowed to fight it. Farage, should he choose to stand again, would face a far tougher contest against the backdrop of parliament having ruled against him, and many voters in Clacton had been unimpressed by the “laughing stock” caused by the first election.

The Reform hardcore may be buoyed by Farage’s railing against the “establishment” — but what this saga does to his reputation with the wider electorate he needs to propel him into Downing Street remains the biggest unanswered question.