Raw Story

The decision by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) not to run for reelection despite reported pressure from the White House to remain in the race, has Iowa Republicans on their heels coming right after Democrat Catelin Drey won a key race in the state this past week that altered the balance of power in the state legislature.

According to a report from Politico’s Liz Crampton and Holly Otterbein, Democrats see a chance to make major inroads in the reliably red state where the GOP is faced with not only coming up with a suitable candidate for the Senate seat, but also face a challenge holding onto the governorship.

Earlier in the year, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) announced she too would not run for reelection in 2026 in order to spend more time with her family and that has Democrats anticipating a challenge with a candidate Rob Sand, Iowa's state auditor, already amassing a substantial warchest.

According to Politico, “The idea that Democrats are going to reclaim any ground in Iowa two years after they lost complete control in Washington — and while they piece their party together amid record-low approval ratings — is difficult to imagine,” adding, “But Democrats in Iowa think Republicans are vulnerable because they have fumbled both hyper-local and national issues in the state, and believe that anti-Trump sentiment will drag down the GOP.”

The report notes, “a GOP strategist, granted anonymity in order to speak freely, said Republicans are more worried about Sand’s gubernatorial campaign, which raised $2.25 million in the first 24 hours after its launch, breaking a state record."

Politico is reporting, one local Republican thinks the state party establishment needs to do some soul-searching after Drey’s win.

“I don’t think it was about Donald Trump at all,” Republican Woodbury County Supervisor Mark Nelson wrote on Facebook . “I think it was about Kim Reynolds and I think it’s about what the Republicans have done in the Iowa legislature for several years now.”

You can read more here.

While the Trump administration has rationalized its escalating hostilities with Venezuela as an effort to combat drug trafficking, several officials within the Trump administration are suggesting there to be an ulterior motive behind the escalation.

President Donald Trump ordered eight warships carrying 4,500 troops this week to sit off the coast of Venezuela in what the administration described as an “enhanced counter narcotics operation.” Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro has seen a $50 million bounty placed on him by Trump for what his administration says is his involvement in drug trafficking.

Three Trump officials, however, say there’s more to the operation than meets the eye, speaking with Axios under the condition of anonymity and reported by the outlet on Friday.

“Leaving Maduro in power in Venezuela is like making Jeffrey Epstein the head of a daycare,” said a Trump official, suggesting regime change may be an unofficial goal of the increased hostilities.

Another Trump official likened the operation to the United States’ operation to capture Panama President Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno, who in 1989 was captured after the United States invaded the Central American nation.

“This could be Noriega part 2,” a second Trump official told Axios. “The president has asked for a menu of options, and ultimately, this is the president's decision about what to do next, but Maduro should be s------- bricks.”

The United States has a long history of enacting regime change in South America, sometimes through direct military intervention, and others, through more covert operations. Perhaps the most prominent example is the United States-backed coup in 1973 that overthrew the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, done so largely at the behest of American mining and communications companies that were stripped of their control of Chile’s labor and resources under Allende’s leadership.

A third Trump official told Axios that, while the operation was still largely about combatting drug trafficking, ousting Maduro would also be a favorable outcome.

“This is 105% about narco-terrorism,” the official said. “But if Maduro winds up no longer in power, no one will be crying.”

FBI Director Kash Patel's girlfriend is suing a former agent who is claiming whistleblower protections after he alleged she was a spy and part of a "honeypot" operation.

CNBC reported Friday that Alexis Wilkins filed a lawsuit against Kyle Seraphin, claiming he "has maliciously lied" about her by “falsely asserting that she—an American-born country singer—is an agent of a foreign government, assigned to manipulate and compromise the Director of the FBI,” the lawsuit alleges.

Seraphin, a conservative podcaster, refers to himself as a "recovering FBI agent," the report noted. Wilkins claims that he is using the accusations against her as "self-enriching clickbait."

Seraphin, in response, claimed on his show that he never directly accused Wilkins of being a spy, adding that similar rumors have circulated widely online. However, the lawsuit contends that, as a former counterintelligence FBI agent, Seraphin’s comments carry serious weight and can’t be dismissed as exaggeration or internet gossip. Indeed, Seraphin never says Wilkins' name when speaking about it.

Through her attorney, Wilkins flatly denies any ties to Israel, intelligence agencies, or covert activity.

The complaint continues, noting, “Ms. Wilkins is not even Jewish, let alone Israeli, and has never set foot in Israel,” calling Seraphin’s claims both baseless and insulting.

The suit also emphasizes that labeling her a “honeypot” essentially accuses her of being an agent of a foreign government attempting to undermine U.S. national security and law enforcement, which amounts to an accusation of treason.

Patel “has had his own little ‘honeypot’ issue that’s been going on of late, so we’re just going to acknowledge it real publicly,” Seraphin said on the podcast episode cited in the lawsuit.

“He’s got a girlfriend that is half his age, who is apparently is both a country music singer, a political commentator on Rumble, a friend of John Rich through [FBI deputy Director Dan] Bongino, who also now owns a big chunk of Rumble, and she’s also a former Mossad agent in what is like the equivalent of their NSA," he continued.

“But I’m sure that’s totally because, like, she’s really looking for like a cross-eyed, you know, kind of thickish built, super cool bro who’s almost 50 years old who’s Indian in America,” Seraphin said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Like it has nothing to do with the fact that uh we’re really close to the Trump administration,” he added. “Anyway, I’m sure that’s totally just like love. That’s what real love looks like.”

The suit asks for $5 million in damages.

Read the full report here.

With the midterms more than a year away, Donald Trump and his enablers have launched a new war on voting rights. Its immediate target is November 2026; its ultimate goal is the institutionalization of one-party control of the federal government. This political “final solution” is the last step in MAGA’s quest to extinguish liberal democracy in America.

The war is being fought along legal and political fronts that stretch across the marble halls of the Supreme Court, Trump’s executive orders, Steve Bannon’s seedy podcast, the transformation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a latter-day Praetorian Guard, and threats to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Supreme Court and voting rights

When it comes to voting rights, no single institution has been more destructive than the nation’s top judicial body under the hypocritical leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts.

In his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing, Roberts promised to serve as chief justice in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” That was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now.

Roberts has always been a Republican insider and activist, dating back to his stint in the early 1980s as a crusading young lawyer in the Justice Department, where he wrote upward of 25 memos suggesting strategies to limit the scope of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark legislation passed by Congress in 1965 to outlaw racial discrimination in voting.

In 2013, he made good on his lifelong mission by authoring the infamous 5-4 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, one of the most regressive rulings in Supreme Court history.

Shelby gutted sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which had required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter suppression, to obtain advance federal approval — a process known as “preclearance” — before making changes to their election procedures. Roberts declared in Shelby that “things have changed dramatically” since the passage of the VRA and that racial discrimination in voting no longer took place.

Shelby left Section 2 of the VRA as the last remaining bulwark of the law. That section prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or language.

Both the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have long recognized the right of private parties and organizations to file lawsuits under Section 2 to challenge “racial gerrymanders,” which occur when a state uses race as the primary factor in redistricting to dilute the voting power of minority populations. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have used Section 2 litigation to force the creation of numerous majority-Black or “majority-minority” voting districts to give minorities a fair chance to elect candidates that reflect their views.

All that could change when Roberts and his Republican benchmates hear oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais on October 15.

The case stems from a complaint brought by a group of individuals who describe themselves in court filings as “non-Black voters.” They contend Louisiana violated their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection when it created a second Black-majority voting district in 2024 to give Black voters, who comprise nearly a third of the state’s electorate, proportional representation in the state’s six-member congressional delegation. If the court agrees with them, it could gut Section 2, leading to the elimination of an estimated 11 Black-majority districts, all held by Democrats, across GOP-controlled Southern states.

Such a decision would neuter what little remains of the VRA.

Texas and California

Even if the court rules against the “non-Black” plaintiffs in Callais, it has given its blessings to another method of election rigging known as “partisan gerrymandering” — the practice of drawing state voting districts to benefit the political party in power.

In 2019, by way of a 5-4 majority opinion penned by Roberts, Rucho v. Common Cause, the court held that partisan gerrymandering, no matter how disproportional or extreme, presents a “nonjusticiable political question” that lies beyond the jurisdiction of federal judges to alter or correct.

Both parties have traditionally engaged in partisan gerrymandering, but the GOP has perfected the technique in the wake of Rucho, with Texas as a prime example. Responding to a direct demand from Trump, the state has drafted a new congressional voting map designed to give Republicans an additional five House seats. Other Republican states, including Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio, are likely to heed Trump’s plea and revise their voting maps before the midterms.

The GOP’s moves have finally awakened a fighting spirit among Democrats, but the outcome of the counterattack is uncertain. Led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, California has set a special election for this November to consider a ballot proposition that would suspend the state’s current congressional map, which was drawn by an independent commission, and replace it with one that could give Democrats a five-seat boost to match the Texas power-grab.

Democrats in New York, Illinois, and Maryland reportedly are exploring ways to follow Newsom’s lead.

Meantime, the Texas redo is a done deal, offering Trump and the GOP a clear path to retaining their stranglehold on federal power. Redistricting experts predict that if the GOP gambit in Texas and elsewhere succeeds, the party could hold the House until 2050.

Executive orders, proclamations, rants

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s 2024 Roberts-authored decision on presidential immunity (Trump v. United States), Trump has made good on his pledge to be a “dictator on Day One” of his second term, releasing a torrent of autocratic executive orders and proclamations.

These include an executive order issued on March 25 with the Orwellian title of “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” Among the order’s many directives is a requirement for voter ID to prove citizenship, and a prohibition on counting mail-in ballots that are sent in by Election Day but delivered afterward.

On April 24, federal district court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who sits in Washington, D.C., issued a preliminary injunction, blocking the ID requirement and other provisions, noting that “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states — not the president — with the authority to regulate federal elections.”

Unfortunately, the judge’s order failed to address the constitutionality of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which in many respects tracks the executive order. The SAVE Act was passed by the House on April 10 and is now pending before the Senate.

Undeterred by the courts, Trump has doubled down on his demands, vowing to impose nationwide voter ID by presidential fiat, ban mail-in ballots and replace voting machines with hand counting. In remarks delivered at the White House on August 18, he claimed that “mail-in ballots are corrupt,” and no other country permits them. In fact, some 34 countries allow them.

Trump has also demanded a new census that would exclude undocumented aliens to be conducted as soon as possible. The census is mandated every 10 years by the Constitution and is used to determine how many House seats are apportioned to each state. To date, no census has been conducted mid-decade, and never have the undocumented been excluded.

Impact on women

The election law changes demanded by Trump and the GOP will also undermine the voting power of women.

According to the Pew Research Center, despite the Democratic Party’s declining approval ratings, women remain 12 percentage points more likely than men to affiliate with the Democrats.

Exit polling conducted by CNN after the last election found a similar gender gap, showing that women nationwide voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump by a 10 percent margin. Black women in particular have been the most reliable supporters of the Democratic Party. In 2024, a whopping 92 percent of Black women opted for Harris, continuing a decades-long trend.

Women also hold more liberal values than men on a variety of key political issues, such as abortion access, gun control, environmental protection, and racial justice. This is especially true of younger women between the ages 18 and 29. A permanent one-party state controlled by Trump and the GOP will set back women’s interests indefinitely.

Steve Bannon and ICE

On his War Room podcast on August 19, right-wing fulminator Steve Bannon upped the ante in the voting rights war, calling for the deployment of ICE to monitor polling places to ensure that “If you don’t have an ID — if you’re not a citizen — you’re not voting.”

It is, of course, illegal under federal law to deploy the military or armed federal troops to patrol polling places as monitors or observers unless they are needed to repel an armed invasion. A section of the US Code makes it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison to do so. The Voting Rights Act also prohibits federal agents from intimidating voters, and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1868 generally proscribes using the military as civilian law enforcement.

These safeguards could easily be circumvented by an ICE army that will be 10,000 strong by the midterms simply by staging high-profile immigration enforcement operations anywhere in blue cities on Election Day. The intimidation effect would be palpable.

Insurrection Act

Should all other options for election-rigging appear unavailing by 2026, Trump will have one final card to play: declaring a national emergency and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to delay or even suspend the elections. The act provides an exception to the prohibitions of the Posse Comitatus Act, and as Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department will no doubt argue, all other federal statutes.

Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in 2020 in response to the George Floyd protests, and again this past June in response to protests in Los Angeles. Never in American history has the act been invoked to disrupt an election. But if Trump feels sufficiently threatened by a potential loss of power, there is little reason to believe he would not choose to become the first. Nor could we count on the Supreme Court to try to stop him.

In the end, as always, the fate of the American experiment with democracy will depend not on our institutions, but on our collective will to preserve it at the ballot box and beyond. Each of us has an obligation to spread the word and peacefully resist in whatever way we can.

President Donald Trump's Federal Housing Finance Agency director, Bill Pulte, has emerged as a surprise attack dog for the president's agenda, fishing up a series of document discrepancies and using them as the basis to file shaky mortgage fraud complaints against various politicians and civil servants who have angered the president, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James, and most recently Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.

But it turns out his own financial record may not be squeaky clean.

According to Mother Jones, Pulte, who inherited a vast real estate fortune, "got his job in the administration about three years after his wife, Diana Pulte, donated $500,000 to a super PAC backing Trump. The donation was channeled through a Delaware shell company, ML Organization LLC, that Bill Pulte controlled. It came at a crucial moment, as the former president was just beginning to get his new campaign off the ground following his reelection defeat and the 2021 Capitol insurrection."

At the time, the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint alleging that this illegally obscured the source of the campaign fundraising.

"A resulting Federal Election Commission investigation concluded only this year, when the FEC quietly announced that the Trump-controlled PAC had erred by failing to properly disclose that Diana Pulte was the real source of the money," said the report — however, the FEC did not assert that either Bill Pulte or his wife broke the law.

A spokesperson for the housing agency told Mother Jones, “The FEC looked at the issue and determined that there was no violation by Director Pulte.” However, neither Pulte nor anyone at the agency addressed the fact that the paperwork falsely claimed an LLC, rather than his wife, donated the money, which "looks like the same kind of paperwork sloppiness — in information ultimately provided to the federal government — that Bill Pulte is now harassing Trump foes over."

Jeff Hauser of the watchdog group Revolving Door Project said, “I am extremely skeptical that Bill Pulte would come across 1/100th as well as Lisa Cook if his paperwork were scrutinized as closely as he has scrutinized Cook’s paperwork.”

All of this is occurring as litigation still continues over Trump's $550 million civil fraud judgment for his own mortgage valuation scams against the state of New York, which a state appeals court just tossed while upholding the fraud finding — a decision both parties are certain to appeal.

Ty Cobb, former White House attorney during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, said he had an immediate reaction upon hearing of the FBI raid on the home of former national security advisor John Bolton.

“I went down and locked my door,” Cobb said, speaking with National Public Radio in an interview published on Monday.

The Friday raid on Bolton’s home was just the latest example of what critics have characterized as a weaponization of the Justice Department against Trump’s political enemies. It was followed by a direct threat from Trump to investigate former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who, like Bolton, has become an outspoken critic of the president.

Cobb, who has spoken out against Trump since leaving his administration in 2018, said those who have gotten on the president’s bad side had every reason to be fearful.

“I think anybody that’s critical of the president has justifiable paranoia at this stage of the game,” Cobb said. “There is certainly retribution involved [in the raid on Bolton’s home], there is certainly an abandonment of traditional norms at the Justice Department in going back and doing this.”

Trump’s DOJ has opened multiple criminal investigations targeting individuals who drew the former president’s ire.

A criminal probe was launched in May against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted Trump for fraud, winning a $454 million judgement against the president and his real estate company. A DOJ official and Trump ally has drawn scrutiny for sharing a threatening social media post against James in posting a photo of themself standing outside her New York home.

And in July, Trump’s director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced a criminal probe into former President Barack Obama, suggesting he may have committed “treason” for pursuing an investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election. Critics have largely labeled the probe into Obama as baseless.

Regarding the raid on Bolton’s home, which DOJ officials say related to mishandling of classified documents, Cobb said he didn’t think charges would stick, and characterized the incident not as an investigation into any wrongdoing, but rather, a “campaign of vengeance.”

“I’m not sure he will be charged, I differ from others on those who say he’s certain to be indicted,” Cobb said.

“That’s the sea change that people are ignoring here; this is no longer a Justice Department with independent thinkers acting ethically," Cobb added. "These people are so totally devoted to Trump and his campaign of vengeance, and they made that clear when they walked into the great hall and (Attorney General) Pam Bondi declared the fealty to the president as opposed to the Constitution, which is actually what their oath is for.”