MAGA Report Cards — Billionaires & Big Business

Trump Left the Labor Board Without a Quorum for Nearly a Year and Moved to Turn Employees Into Contractors. Workers' Share of the Economy Just Hit Its Lowest Level Since 1947.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:58:26 +0000

The federal government keeps a number that tells you how much of everything America produces actually goes to the people who produced it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked it since 1947.

It has never been this low.

Labor's share of Gross Domestic Product was 52.8% in the second quarter of 2026, according to new BLS data. That beat the record set three months earlier, when it was 53.7% — which was itself a record.

For scale: in the first quarter of 2000, workers' share was 63.9%.

Over the same three months that workers hit bottom, corporate profits went the other way. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that profits increased $400.9 billion in the second quarter, compared with an increase of $74.4 billion in the first.

That is not a coincidence of two separate trends. It is one pie, measured twice.

Why 76% of Americans say the economy is bad

Unemployment is relatively low. GDP is growing. And in a July 2026 Pew Research survey, 76% of Americans rated economic conditions in the U.S. as "poor" or "only fair."

People are not confused about the statistics. They are describing the statistic that actually reaches their household. When the share of national output that comes back as wages and benefits falls to a postwar low, "the economy is growing" and "I am falling behind" are both true at once.

Two policy decisions behind the number

Two federal actions bear directly on this, and both were choices.

The contractor rule

In February 2026, the administration proposed a rule making it easier for a company to classify a worker as an independent contractor instead of an employee. It would replace the stricter 2024 standard with a looser "economic reality" test.

The distinction is not paperwork. It decides which protections and employer-paid benefits come with the job. Employees can cost a business up to 30% more than contractors — which is exactly why reclassifying them is worth doing.

The Economic Policy Institute has costed that out for eleven jobs where misclassification is common. For a typical worker, per year:

Worker	Annual loss in income and benefits
Construction worker	as much as $20,399
Truck driver	as much as $23,266
Home health aide	as much as $10,963

Those are the top of EPI's estimated range, in 2025 dollars — what a typical worker in each job would lose against doing the same work as an employee.

The labor board

The National Labor Relations Board is the agency workers go to when an employer fires them for organizing, or refuses to bargain. It cannot act without a three-member quorum.

In January 2025, Trump fired board member Gwynne Wilcox. That left two members. The board was therefore unable to issue any new decisions for nearly a year. He also removed the board's General Counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, and installed Crystal Carey in the job.

Organizing fell off after that. The Center for American Progress counted 1,498 union elections overseen by the board in 2025, a 30% drop from 2024, with 59,000 fewer workers taking part — a 42% decline.

An agency that cannot rule is an agency an employer can ignore. Workers noticed before the economists did.

Congress had a say and used it

None of this was beyond Congress's reach. Republicans in the House have repeatedly voted on the side of the employer when the question came up.

When an executive order stripped the union contract from one in every fourteen union members in America, 195 House Republicans voted to keep it that way. In Iowa, Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn all voted against the one union bill that reached the House floor this year. We have collected the Republicans with the worst records on workers and unions in one place.

And where the crackdown has cost workers their jobs directly, the same pattern holds: the administration shut down 110 truck driving schools over an English rule, in the same industry where reclassification would cost a driver as much as $23,266 a year.

What the record shows

Labor's share of American economic output fell to 52.8% in the second quarter of 2026, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began measuring in 1947, while corporate profits rose $400.9 billion in those same three months. The administration has proposed a rule that would let employers reclassify workers as contractors — worth as much as $20,399 a year to a construction worker and $23,266 to a truck driver — and left the National Labor Relations Board without the quorum it needs to decide cases for nearly a year, after which union elections fell 30% and participation fell 42%. Three-quarters of Americans say the economy is poor or only fair.

Source

Popular Information, A new low for American workers.

John James Pitched Repealing Michigan's Marijuana Tax at a Fundraiser the Industry Threw Him. It Raised Nearly $90,000.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:56:10 +0000

In July, executives of the JARS Cannabis dispensary chain hosted a campaign fundraiser for Michigan's Republican nominee for governor. About 100 people came, by one attendee's count. It brought in nearly $90,000.

At that fundraiser, according to a longtime marijuana advocate who was in the room, the candidate told the industry exactly what it wanted to hear about the new state tax on its product.

"He was clear as a bell: He wants to get rid of that 24% tax," Tim Beck told Bridge Michigan.

Weeks later, in mid-August, John James said it in public: he would "repeal or sharply reduce" Michigan's 24% wholesale marijuana tax.

What that tax was for

The 24% wholesale tax is not a stray line in the budget. It was a central piece of the bipartisan road funding deal Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed last year — the deal meant to put $2 billion a year into fixing Michigan's roads.

The House Fiscal Agency projected the marijuana tax alone would bring in $420 million a year toward that.

It has not. State budget officials reported it produced just $73.4 million in its first six months, below even the revised estimates. James points to exactly that shortfall as his argument for killing it.

Here is what he has not done. James has not said how, or whether, he would replace the road money if the tax goes away. His campaign did not respond to Bridge Michigan's requests for comment.

So the plan, as it stands, is: remove a revenue source dedicated to roads, and leave the roads question blank.

The industry says the arrangement was clear

The people who would benefit are not being coy about it.

Robin Schneider, executive director of the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association, attended the JARS fundraiser. Her association gave James $1,000. She told Bridge that the James campaign came to her about the tax issue before the fundraiser.

"We didn't do anything," she told Bridge. "They made it clear that they support us."

Beck, a member of the association who owns no marijuana business himself, said he feels owners are "pretty united" around James.

Schneider also said her association reached out to the Democratic nominee, Jocelyn Benson, "repeatedly," and has not heard back. Benson has not taken a firm position, calling the tax a "new and emerging issue" and saying she wants to know where the money is going before making changes.

That contrast is the point. One candidate has not committed. The other committed at a fundraiser the industry organized for him, and then said it out loud.

He was against legalization before he was for its tax break

In 2018, Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana with 56% of the vote. James was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, and he said he would vote against the proposal — while promising to respect the result if it passed.

Eight years later, he says "state government has a responsibility to respect" the voter-approved law while keeping products from children and enforcing the law against bad actors.

There is a version of that evolution that is just a politician learning. There is another version, and the industry group suing over the tax has articulated it: the group argues the wholesale tax violates the will of the 2018 voters. James has landed on the side of the argument that his donors are making in court.

This is the pattern

James' record on who gets heard is already documented here.

He took utility cash while Michigan electric bills kept going up. He says his data center priority is "frankly local control," but he voted three times in committee to bar states and towns from regulating AI for a decade. He attacked an opponent for getting rich in office while his own net worth grew by as much as 1,000% during his time in Congress.

The $90,000 fundraiser was a fraction of the nearly $1.2 million James raised from late July onward. That is the part worth remembering. It did not take much to get a public commitment on a $420 million tax.

Adding it up

Marijuana industry executives hosted a fundraiser for John James in July that raised nearly $90,000, and a participant says James told the room he wanted Michigan's 24% wholesale marijuana tax gone. In mid-August he publicly pledged to repeal or sharply reduce it. That tax was written into the bipartisan road funding deal and projected to raise $420 million a year for Michigan roads. James has not said how he would replace that money, and his campaign did not answer questions about it.

Source

Bridge Michigan, John James pitches marijuana tax repeal, courts industry donors. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press, via Bridge Michigan.

Ashley Hinson Wrote a Bill to Void Other States' Farm Rules. Iowa Farmers Say It Punishes the Ones Who Already Paid to Follow Them.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:46:52 +0000

On Wednesday, September 9, a group of Iowa hog and dairy farmers stood on a farm in Elkhart and asked a Republican congresswoman to stop protecting them.

The congresswoman is Ashley Hinson, who is running for the U.S. Senate. The bill is hers: the Save Our Bacon Act, H.R. 4673, which she introduced on July 23, 2025. It would block individual states from enforcing conditions on livestock products sold across state lines, as the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported from the farm that day.

Hinson sells the bill as a shield. Her own announcement called California's Proposition 12 and Massachusetts's Question 3 "a major threat to family farms and food security," and promised "there will be no bacon ban on my watch."

The family farmers who showed up in Elkhart do not want the shield. They say it takes away the only market where their work is worth more.

What the farmers actually said

Proposition 12 is the California law that says certain pork sold in the state has to come from hogs given at least 24 square feet of usable floor space. California voters passed it in 2018 with 62.7% of the vote, and it was not fully in force until 2024, after the Supreme Court upheld it.

Some Iowa farmers spent real money to meet that standard. Hinson's bill would make the standard unenforceable, and with it the market those farmers invested to reach.

John Gilbert, a Hardin County farmer whose operation runs on dairy and hogs, said the Save Our Bacon Act would "punish" producers who invested in upgrades to comply with the California law. Tony Thompson, a farmer and candidate for the Iowa Senate, said the bill would stop markets from rewarding farmers who "do something different":

"Small family farms aren't going to win a race against multinational, vertically integrated corporations on producing the cheapest pound of protein. Frankly, I don't want them to, because when lowest cost becomes the only goal, everything else starts to look like a cost to be eliminated."

That is the whole argument in two sentences. A small Iowa hog farmer cannot beat a corporate operation on price. Sometimes they can beat it on how the animals were raised — and only if a state is allowed to let its own shoppers ask for that.

Gilbert also raised something Hinson's press release does not mention. He is worried the bill would wipe out state laws that keep diseased animals out of the state. A legislative analysis from Harvard Law School identified 13 Iowa laws that the Save Our Bacon Act could affect.

And he named what bothered him most — not the money, the message:

"People like you and me, it's telling people you don't have a right … you're not entitled to have a say in what you eat."

Who is asking for this

Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, said the things that would actually help struggling Iowa livestock farmers are mandatory country-of-origin labeling, antitrust enforcement, support for local meat processing, and closer ties between farmers and the people who eat their food.

"We know how to make meaningful changes to help Iowa livestock farmers," Lehman said. "We just need the political will to demand that they be put in place. The Save Our Bacon Act won't get it done."

He also put a number on the squeeze: farmers receive less than 15 cents out of every food dollar spent in this country. That is why, as he put it, farmers can be struggling to make a living at the same time shoppers are paying more at the register.

The groups backing Hinson's bill are the other end of that arrangement. Her own announcement lists the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation among its endorsers. The Iowa Farm Bureau's political action committee has also endorsed Hinson in the Senate race.

Holly Bice, of a producers' alliance opposing the bill, told Food Tank it "would primarily benefit large China-owned pork corporations, not independent family farmers." Pork farmer Anna Pesek told Food Tank that if Prop 12 is preempted, "it is just another signal from our policymakers that what they care about are the interests of a handful of multinational companies" — and that profits would flow out of rural communities, states and even the country.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Hinson's record on who gets protected in Iowa agriculture is already on the record here.

Iowa has the fastest-rising cancer rate in America, and Hinson has taken $77,000 from pesticide and meat companies. When a company sought to seize Iowa farmland for a carbon pipeline, the man who founded it co-hosted a fundraiser for her. Now the bill she calls a defense of family farms is opposed by family farmers and endorsed by the trade associations of the industry's biggest players.

Her opponent in the Senate race, Democrat Josh Turek, has said he opposes the Save Our Bacon Act.

The bill was written into the farm bill the House passed. It is not in the Senate version, which is still in committee — so it is still live, and Hinson is still running on it. At the Iowa State Fair on August 21, she called Proposition 12 "an over-regulatory policy, Californians trying to tell Iowans what they know how to do already best".

Nineteen days later, Iowans who raise the animals stood in a field and told her she had it backwards.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson's Save Our Bacon Act would strip states of the power to set conditions on livestock products sold inside their borders, voiding a California standard 62.7% of that state's voters approved and putting 13 Iowa laws at risk. She describes it as protecting family farms. The Iowa Farmers Union, a Hardin County dairy and hog farmer, and a farmer running for the Iowa Senate all stood in a field on September 9 and said it does the opposite — while the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau, whose PAC has endorsed her, are the ones asking for it.

Source

Iowa Capital Dispatch, Iowa farmers argue Hinson's Save Our Bacon act would hurt small producers, by Cami Koons. Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Elon Musk's Super PAC Is Spending $5.1 Million on the Midterms, Almost All of It in Races With 18 Republicans on This Site. It Spent $3.7 Million of That Attacking Democrats.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:44:19 +0000

In early September, a super PAC funded by Elon Musk dropped more than a million dollars into Michigan's Senate race in a matter of days. The money went to digital ads and mailers boosting Republican Mike Rogers (MI), the former seven-term congressman trying to win the seat, and attacking his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed. It was part of $28 million in outside spending on that one race since the August 4 primary, according to Detroit News reporting.

Michigan is not the exception. It is one stop on a national tour.

We pulled every independent expenditure that Musk's America PAC has reported to the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle. The filings show $5.1 million spent so far, spread across Senate and House races in seventeen states. Eighteen of the Republicans that money is meant to elect have report cards on this site. About $4.95 million of the total is in races those eighteen are running in; the remaining $199,000 is spread across four other races.

How the spending breaks down

America PAC's reported spending divides in two. Some of it pays for ads and mail supporting a Republican. The rest pays for ads and mail attacking that Republican's Democratic opponent. Here is how the support side breaks down for the eighteen candidates we track:

Candidate	Race	Reported in support
Mike Rogers (MI)	Michigan, Senate	$520,499
Jon Husted	Ohio, Senate	$397,848
Ken Paxton	Texas, Senate	$124,595
Randy Fine	Florida, 6th District	$87,134
Susan Collins	Maine, Senate	$78,306
Dan Sullivan	Alaska, Senate	$58,004
Ashley Hinson	Iowa, Senate	$27,300
Gabe Evans	Colorado, 8th District	$12,220
David Valadao	California, 22nd District	$12,220
Juan Ciscomani	Arizona, 6th District	$12,220
Jimmy Patronis	Florida, 1st District	$10,244
Rob Bresnahan	Pennsylvania, 8th District	$6,690
Scott Perry	Pennsylvania, 10th District	$6,431
Ryan Mackenzie	Pennsylvania, 7th District	$6,388
Tom Kean Jr.	New Jersey, 7th District	$5,908
Mike Lawler	New York, 17th District	$5,563
Derrick Van Orden	Wisconsin, 3rd District	$5,225
Jen Kiggans	Virginia, 2nd District	$5,000

That adds up to about $1.38 million. The other $3.7 million went somewhere else.

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

Of the $5.1 million America PAC has reported this cycle, $3.7 million — about 73 cents of every dollar — was spent opposing Democratic candidates rather than supporting Republican ones.

The biggest single target is not a Republican's ally. It is James Talarico, the Democrat running against Ken Paxton in Texas, with $1.49 million spent against him. Sherrod Brown in Ohio drew $941,000. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan drew $527,000. Josh Turek in Iowa, Troy Jackson in Maine, Chris Pappas in New Hampshire and Mary Peltola in Alaska each drew six figures of opposition spending.

Put plainly: the single largest expense in Musk's entire 2026 portfolio is attacking one man in Texas. It is bigger than everything the PAC has spent supporting all eighteen Republicans on this list combined.

That is a choice about what the money is for. Ads that make a case for a candidate have to say something about the candidate. Ads that attack an opponent do not.

Four races got most of it. Eleven candidates got a rounding error.

The support money is not spread evenly either. Rogers, Husted, Paxton and Fine account for $1.13 million — 82% of everything America PAC has reported spending in support of the eighteen.

Eleven of the eighteen got less than $13,000 apiece. Five of them — Gabe Evans, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani and two candidates without pages here — each show exactly $12,220, all of it billed to the same mail vendor on the same day — the signature of a single bundled buy split across districts rather than a campaign built for any one of them. Jen Kiggans shows $5,000 in support and $4,500 spent against her opponent Elaine Luria, which is to say Musk's PAC spent nearly as much attacking her opponent as backing her.

For most of this list, the money is not the point. Being on the list is.

What the man writing the checks wanted

Musk is not a stranger to these candidates. He ran the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation that took an axe to federal agencies, contracts and grants — and several of the Republicans his PAC is now paying to protect defended those cuts while their own constituents absorbed them.

Jen Kiggans called the DOGE cuts "so necessary" while her Hampton Roads district lost at least 70 contracts with veteran-owned businesses. In Arizona, 700 people in Casa Grande lost their jobs, and six weeks later Juan Ciscomani brought the Speaker of the House there to celebrate. Susan Collins is running for a sixth term, and Musk's money went to Maine to keep her in the seat.

Ken Paxton is the clearest case of what the money buys. Republican donors spent months keeping their distance from a nominee who dragged out three felony counts including securities fraud for nearly nine years before settling them, and whose own party's Texas House impeached him 121 to 23. Trump and Musk are trying to buy him the seat anyway.

And America PAC's spending is not only ads. On August 29, the PAC's voter registration site gave itself the right to sell the personal information people type into it — the same registration push the PAC is running alongside these ads in Michigan.

Why this matters where you live

Every one of these eighteen races is a race for a seat that votes on your health care, your grocery bill and your taxes. None of the eighteen candidates raised this money. They do not have to disclose it, coordinate it, or answer for it, because independent expenditures are legally supposed to be independent.

But the money is not neutral about outcomes. One man with one fortune has picked eighteen Republicans on this site, and one Democrat to spend seven figures against, and he is doing it in seventeen states at once. When those eighteen get to Washington, the person who spent $5.1 million to put them there will have interests before the government they run — and every one of them will know exactly who it was.

What the filings show

Elon Musk's America PAC has reported $5.1 million in independent spending for the 2026 cycle, almost all of it in races with eighteen Republicans who have report cards on this site. Only $1.38 million of it — 27% — paid for anything supporting those candidates. The other $3.7 million paid to attack Democratic candidates, with $1.49 million aimed at Ken Paxton's opponent alone. Four races collected 82% of the support money; eleven of the eighteen candidates got less than $13,000 each.

Source

Detroit News, Elon Musk group wades into Michigan Senate race, boosting Mike Rogers. Spending figures are from America PAC's independent expenditure filings with the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle, committee C00879510, retrieved September 10, 2026, with duplicate 24-hour-notice filings removed.

Greg Abbott Left Home Insurance Off His List of Seven Emergency Priorities. Eighteen Months Later He Says Premiums Are Up 79%.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:11:21 +0000

On August 24, 2026, Greg Abbott sent a letter to the Texas Department of Insurance ordering it to bring down what Texans pay to insure their homes. He explained why in a single sentence.

"The average annual homeowners' insurance premium in Texas has risen 79 percent in six years," Abbott said. "High insurance costs hit Texas families hard."

That is his number, not ours. Six years is 2020 through 2026. Abbott has been governor of Texas for every month of it, and for five years before that.

What Texans are actually paying

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas ran the comparison in April 2026. The median Texas homeowner paid 60% more for home insurance in 2024 than in 2019. Nationally, the increase over those same years was 30%. Texas homeowners absorbed twice the national rate of increase.

The Dallas Fed pointed at three causes, none of which are anybody's fault: construction costs after the pandemic, more severe weather, and the rising price insurers pay to insure themselves. Billion-dollar disasters in Texas grew 250% between 2017 and 2024.

So nobody is claiming a governor can stop hurricanes. The question is what the state did with the years in between, and there is a clear record of that, because in 2025 Texas lawmakers tried twice.

Both fixes died in 2025

Heading into the 2025 session, lawmakers said home insurance would be a priority. Two serious bills came out of it, one from each chamber, both authored by Republicans.

The roof bill. State Representative Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican, wrote House Bill 1576 to create a state grant program helping homeowners rebuild roofs to a national standard called Fortified, the kind that survives a storm instead of becoming a claim. The House passed it on April 30, 2025, by a tally Texas Policy Research recorded as 120-21. It went to the Senate Business and Commerce Committee the next day and never got a hearing. Oliverson asked budget writers for $500 million to start the program. They gave him nothing.

The insurance industry was not the obstacle. At the House hearing on Oliverson's bill, insurers overwhelmingly supported creating the program.

The rate bill. State Senator Charles Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican, wrote Senate Bill 1643 to require insurers to get approval before raising rates more than 10%. The bill's own subject line names what Texas does not currently require: prior approval of a rate increase. Schwertner also filed a bill to put the insurance department under a three-member commission that would include a consumer advocate, saying it would "return consumers to the forefront of their mission."

Both of Schwertner's bills passed the Senate over strong industry opposition. Both stalled in a House committee. His rate bill was left pending on May 20, 2025 and died there. The chairman of the House insurance committee, Representative Jay Dean, did not respond to the Houston Chronicle's interview request about it.

Oliverson, a Republican describing his own party's session, put it plainly: "I would argue that nothing was done to lower property and casualty rates for the average homeowner."

He went further. "I would think that people back home may look back on it and say that one of the major missed opportunities of this session is that we failed to act," he said. "And as a result, people got zero relief for the rising cost of insurance."

Insurance was not one of Abbott's seven emergencies

A Texas governor gets a specific power at the start of every session. He names emergency items, and lawmakers can pass those in the first sixty days, before anything else moves. It is the strongest signal a governor sends about what he actually wants done.

On February 2, 2025, Abbott named seven: property tax relief, education savings accounts, teacher pay, water infrastructure, bail reform, career training and a state cyber command.

Home insurance was not on the list. By then Texas premiums had already risen sharply, and the state was still paying for Hurricane Beryl, which had torn through Houston the previous July.

The session ended in June with both big bills dead. Lawmakers did pass smaller consumer changes, barring insurers from raising a widow's rates after a spouse's death and making them refresh a credit report used in underwriting. Neither touches what a rate can be. Abbott then called lawmakers back that summer, which is a power only he holds, and only he sets the agenda for. His July 9 call carried 18 items: flood warning systems, redistricting the state's congressional map in the middle of the decade, hemp THC regulation, a bathroom bill, abortion pill restrictions, property tax relief. Not one of the eighteen was about insurance. Lawmakers sat through two special sessions that summer on the agendas he set.

Texas is the only Gulf Coast state that doesn't do this

The Fortified idea Oliverson was pushing is not experimental, and Texas is the outlier for not having it. Every other Gulf Coast state offers homeowners some combination of grants and required insurance discounts for building to withstand storms. Texas offers neither, despite leading the country in losses from catastrophic weather.

Alabama pairs grants for stronger roofs with a legal requirement that insurers discount the policies on them. Experts credit that program with stabilizing Alabama's home insurance market.

Now it is an election year

Abbott's August 24 letter went to a commissioner he chose. Amanda Crawford was appointed Texas insurance commissioner by Abbott in January 2026; the governor names whoever runs that department. Nothing in the five directives he issued required a legislative session, a committee chairman or a vote. He asked the department to count Fortified roofs in rate calculations, stop insurers from denying policies over a home's age, ban the practice his own order calls "price optimization," which it defines as insurers using personal data unrelated to insured risk to set prices, start a fraud task force, and study inflated claims costs.

Eleven days later, on September 4 in Lubbock, he built it into a campaign platform. Alongside a plan to cut property taxes in half, Abbott pitched a fortified roof program and a good-driver discount as his answer to insurance costs.

The roof program is Oliverson's, the one the Senate killed. Abbott's version puts $400 million behind it and offers up to $10,000 per homeowner. The savings his own proposal claims are up to 8% on an annual premium.

Eight percent, against 79%.

The timing keeps repeating

This is the fourth time we have watched Abbott run the same sequence.

He spent years selling Texas to data centers, then announced a pause and an audit in August of an election year, with the findings due 37 days after Texans vote. He is running on cutting property taxes in half after eleven years in which statewide property tax levies rose from $51.2 billion to $89.4 billion. And he wants to break up the San Antonio utility with the cheapest residential rates in Texas, on behalf of retail providers whose PACs have given his campaign at least $230,000.

Each one arrives the same way. A problem builds for years while he holds the office that could act on it, and the action shows up in the campaign.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott says the average Texas homeowner's insurance premium has risen 79% in six years, all six of them on his watch. In 2025 his own party's legislators passed a roof-hardening bill through the House 120-21 and a rate-approval bill through the Senate, and both died in committee in the other chamber. Abbott named seven emergency items that February and eighteen special session items that July, and homeowners insurance was on neither list. In August of an election year he ordered the commissioner he appointed to act, and in September he began campaigning on a grant program his own Legislature had already killed, one his proposal says would save homeowners up to 8%.

Source

Mateo Rosiles, USA TODAY NETWORK, Texas Gov. Abbott pitches 50% property tax cut in affordability plan, September 8, 2026, and the Houston Chronicle's reporting on the 2025 session, Texas lawmakers push off big home insurance relief: 'Nothing was done'. Photo: Raquel Natalicchio / Houston Chronicle, a home in Meadowcreek Village after Hurricane Beryl, July 16, 2024.

Elon Musk's Super PAC Is Paying to Send You to a Voter Registration Site. On August 29 It Gave Itself the Right to Sell What You Type In.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:56:00 +0000

Before an election, checking that you are still registered to vote is a sensible thing to do. The federal government runs a page for exactly that, at vote.gov, and it points you to your own state's system.

Vote.gov asks you for nothing. Its privacy policy says the Election Assistance Commission "does not collect personally-identifiable information about you when you visit our site, unless you choose to provide such information to us," and that "no cookies used by EAC ever store any information that may be used to identify you personally."

Elon Musk is spending heavily to send people somewhere else.

Judd Legum of Popular Information documented on September 8 what happens at votesafe.org, the registration-check site run by America PAC, Musk's super PAC, and promoted in ads across the states where the midterms will be decided.

What the site takes

Vote.gov collects nothing. Votesafe.org collects:

Your first, middle and last name
Your date of birth
Your full home address
Your email address
Your cell phone number
Your IP address and location, used to work out your city, ZIP code, approximate latitude and longitude, time zone and internet provider
Your browser, operating system, screen size and device language
Which website sent you there
Every link you click and every page you look at
Your voter registration status, taken from a voter file held by America PAC or its vendors rather than from your state's actual records
Your district and ballot

That is not a registration check. That is a file on you.

The sentence that disappeared on August 29

Until recently, votesafe.org promised limits. Its privacy policy said:

Personal Identifying Information collected via the www.votesafe.org will only be used to support America PAC's activities, and it will not be shared with any advertisers, political organizations, or third parties not directly affiliated with America PAC.

On August 29, 2026, that language was removed.

The replacement lets America PAC "share" or "sell" your personal information to "our business partners." What it may sell includes "where you are registered to vote, whether you are registered to vote and how you submit your vote" — the policy says the PAC may "sell this information to our business partners, where permitted by law." Those business partners may then pass your information on to others still.

It may also sell the conclusions it draws about you. The policy covers selling "inferences" about your "psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude."

And if you give the site your phone number, you agree to receive calls and texts — not only from America PAC, but from its "affiliates and related entities as well as third parties."

Where your information goes as you use the site

Legum found the site is already wired to hand your details to a list of companies as you use it:

Your street address goes to Facebook and Google.
Your name, email, phone number, ZIP code and date of birth go to an America PAC server that feeds Facebook's ad-matching system, which uses them to find your Facebook and Instagram accounts. Your contact details also go to Google's ad system.
A scrambled version of your email goes to The Trade Desk, an advertising firm, which builds an identifier that follows you across websites, apps and streaming TV.
Your activity is shared with X, the social network Musk owns, which tries to match it to an X account.
Your email goes to Iterable, a marketing company that sends emails and texts.
A "device fingerprint" is built from your device's technical traits, so you can be tracked even after you delete your cookies.

What it is for

Musk has pledged to spend more than $100 million on the midterms, focused on turnout. In one week alone, America PAC spent more than $180,000 promoting votesafe.org on Meta. Some of those ads are simple reminders to vote. Others attack "socialists" or name specific Democratic Senate candidates. On Sunday the PAC launched YouTube ads attacking Democratic candidates, nearly all of which promote votesafe.org at the end.

This is the same operation that is planning to spend up to $120 million across eight states, including a campaign to keep Susan Collins in the Senate.

It is being handed to other groups too

Votesafe.org is not only a website. It is a platform other groups can put their own name on, with the data flowing back to America PAC's servers.

The Sentinel Action Fund, the super PAC affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, used it to build its own registration site and then spent $650,000 advertising it during Fox News coverage of the State of the Union. Its president, Jessica Anderson, said the site made registering "easier" and made sure "voter information isn't going into the hands of extremist Democrat organizations." The information goes to Musk's super PAC instead. Popular Information reports that this connection had not been reported anywhere before.

A second group, Ready to Register, runs on the same platform. In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections said Ready to Register "sent mailings to an unknown number of citizens with an outdated voter registration application which includes four political parties that are no longer recognized in North Carolina." The board also said it had "received reports that mailings are being sent to deceased individuals and that the group may be using outdated voter data," and that "QR codes on the mailings may cause information from other people to pre-populate on a form." The Washington Post reported in July that the source code of Ready to Register's website "links to another group affiliated with Musk's political outfit, America PAC."

Why this matters beyond the privacy policy

Republicans on this site have had a great deal to say about who can be trusted with voter data. Pennsylvania's Stacy Garrity said she would "absolutely" be more cooperative with a federal request for her state's voter rolls. New Jersey's Jeff Van Drew threatened subpoenas over errors in his state's registration system.

The same movement is now routing millions of people through a private site that gathers more about them than any state ever asked for, and reserves the right to sell it.

If you want to check your registration, vote.gov does the same job without asking for any of it.

What the record shows

Votesafe.org, run by Elon Musk's America PAC and promoted with more than $180,000 of Meta advertising in a single week, collects a voter's name, date of birth, home address, phone number, email, device details and every click. On August 29, 2026 its privacy policy dropped the promise that this data would not be shared, and now permits America PAC to sell it — including whether someone is registered and how they submit their vote — to unnamed "business partners," along with inferences about their psychology and intelligence. The same platform has been rebranded for the Heritage Foundation's super PAC and for a group North Carolina election officials say mailed an outdated registration application listing parties the state no longer recognizes, and that they received reports was sending mail to deceased people. The federal government's own vote.gov does the same job and asks for no personal information at all.

Source

Judd Legum, The hidden dangers of Musk's votesafe.org, Popular Information, September 8, 2026. Image: Popular Information.

Rick Jackson Promises More Jobs Than Any Governor in Georgia's History. A Company He Owns Paid Nearly $2 Million to Workers Who Said It Shorted Them on Overtime.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:47:00 +0000

Rick Jackson's entire case for being governor of Georgia is that he is good at business. He built a health care staffing empire. He is spending his own fortune to say so. He has promised to "create more jobs than have ever been created in the history of Georgia."

The Daily Beast went and looked at how his companies treated the people who worked for them. It found millions of dollars paid out to settle claims that they were not paid what they were owed.

Nearly $2 million, about 300 workers, five years in court

In 2017, workers sued Jackson Nurse Professionals, the travel-staffing arm of the company Jackson founded. Their claim was not complicated. They said the company failed to properly pay their overtime, failed to pay bonuses they had earned, and failed to pay the wages they were owed when they left the job.

The case ran for five years. In 2022, the company settled for "almost $2 million," the Daily Beast reports, covering "about 300 workers."

About 300 people said they did the work and the money did not come, and after five years the company paid instead of taking it to trial.

The Daily Beast is clear about one limit on this: none of the settlements included a finding that Jackson personally broke labor laws. Companies settle for all sorts of reasons. But he owns them, he ran them, and he is running for governor on the strength of how he ran them.

It happened again, with foreign nurses

The overtime case is not the only one.

Avant Healthcare Professionals, another company inside Jackson's business, settled in June 2026 for $3 million with more than 5,000 current and former international workers. As we reported in August, the nurses who sued said Avant paid them less than the nurses hospitals hired directly, demanded tens of thousands of dollars from anyone who tried to leave, and had staff threaten to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One nurse was billed $41,832 and given 30 days to pay it.

That settlement landed days after Jackson became the Republican nominee for governor, while his television ads promised that immigrants who break the law would be "deported or departed."

Two companies. Two groups of workers. Two payouts. One pattern: the people doing the work said they were shorted, and the money came out at the end.

He is not short of money

Jackson's answer to almost every question about his campaign is that he is rich enough not to need anyone. "I have built a $3 billion business without any outside financial help, and when you know how to do stuff like that, you can do a lot of things to solve problems, and that's what I plan to do all over the state," he told a campaign audience in Augusta in April.

He is now spending close to $200 million of that fortune on the governor's race — an $87 million ad buy in late July, the largest in the race so far, on top of an estimated $100 million-plus already spent.

The company found nearly $2 million for those workers only after they sued and waited five years.

What he wants to do with the state

The gap between what Jackson says he will build and what his companies did shows up in his policy too.

He is invested in a data center in Texas, and told a room of Georgia business leaders that Georgia counties should be able to let data centers operate with no property taxes at all — "It's totally up to them," he said. His company signed a new state contract on July 22, and three weeks later he told voters that as governor he would never do business with the state of Georgia. Asked about Georgians without insurance, he said they still have healthcare, because they can go to an emergency room — a doctor serving in the legislature called that "battlefield triage."

Trump has credited Jackson's success to exactly the thing this record calls into question — his business acumen. "Congratulations to Rick Jackson, who very successfully campaigned on being 'TRUMP', and won," the president said after Jackson won the June Republican run-off.

What the record shows

Rick Jackson is running for governor of Georgia on a promise to create more jobs than any governor in the state's history. A company he owns, Jackson Nurse Professionals, was sued in 2017 by workers who said it shorted them on overtime, bonuses and final wages, and settled in 2022 for close to $2 million covering about 300 workers. A second company he owns, Avant Healthcare Professionals, paid $3 million this June to more than 5,000 current and former international workers who said they were underpaid and threatened with immigration authorities when they tried to quit. Neither settlement found that Jackson personally broke labor law. He is spending close to $200 million of his own money on this campaign.

Source

Farrah Tomazin, MAGA Billionaire Rick Jackson's Ugly Business Baggage Exposed, The Daily Beast, September 7, 2026. Photo illustration: Thomas Levinson / The Daily Beast / Getty / Reuters.

Mike Rounds Pays His Senior Adviser More Than $153,000 a Year. Meta and a Tobacco Giant Were Paying Him Too.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:44:00 +0000

The man who runs Senator Mike Rounds's political operation has two employers. One of them is you.

Robert Skjonsberg has worked for Rounds for more than a decade. He managed Rounds's first Senate campaign in 2014, served as his chief of staff from 2015 to 2022, and is now his senior adviser. Rounds's Senate office paid him more than $153,000 in the last 12 months on record.

At the same time, POLITICO reported on September 7, Skjonsberg has been a registered lobbyist in South Dakota — since 2023 — for more than a dozen clients. The list includes Meta, the tobacco company Altria, the conservative Freedom Foundation, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, the South Dakota Dairy Producers and the South Dakota Pork Producers.

The records POLITICO reviewed had never been reported before.

What the Senate's rules actually say

This is not a gray area the Senate has failed to think about. The Senate Select Committee on Ethics publishes the rule in plain language on its own conflicts of interest page.

Anyone on the Senate payroll earning an annual rate of pay above $25,000, and employed more than 90 days in a calendar year, may not:

Affiliate with a firm, partnership, association, corporation, or other entity for the purpose of providing professional services for compensation;

Permit his or her name to be used by such a firm, partnership, association, corporation, or other entity;

Practice a profession for compensation to any extent during regular office hours in the employing Senate office.

The committee spells out what that leaves: an employee below the higher salary line "may provide professional service for compensation, but only as a solo practitioner, without affiliating with a professional services entity."

Skjonsberg is listed on the website of 605 Strategies, a South Dakota government affairs firm founded in 2012, as a "co-owner" and "founding member." The firm itself does not appear on his lobbying registrations; his own name does. The firm's own site, as the Daily Caller noted, credits him with guiding Rounds to victory in the 2002 governor's race, his 2006 reelection, and his Senate wins in 2014 and 2020.

There is a second, stricter tier for staff paid at or above $151,661 — the 2026 figure — which bars paid professional services entirely. POLITICO reported that Rounds's office paid Skjonsberg more than $153,000 over the last 12 months on record, but that he did not cross that threshold in calendar year 2025.

The bills that followed

The reason the rule exists is that a person cannot separate what they learn in a Senate office from what they sell in a statehouse.

Since Skjonsberg registered to represent Meta last year, Rounds has introduced several bills on artificial intelligence, including one that would create a commission to study what AI does to the American workforce.

Rounds also sits on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture. This year he introduced legislation to open new grazing land for the cattle industry, and legislation to stop people and companies controlled by foreign adversaries from buying American farmland and agricultural businesses. Skjonsberg's client list in Pierre includes the state's dairy producers, its pork producers, and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.

Nobody has shown that a bill was written to order. That is not the standard. The standard is whether the arrangement creates a conflict, and two ethics watchdogs said it plainly.

"It's wholly inappropriate for somebody who's working as a Senate staffer to be lobbying, [even if] it's only at the state level, because you can't draw this line or wall between all the kinds of information you gain," said Meredith McGehee, an independent congressional ethics expert who used to lead the watchdog group Issue One. "To me, this is pretty much a no-go, and it's an outside employment that should not be permitted."

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the advocacy group Public Citizen, went further: "It poses the most obvious conflict of interest I can imagine. Serving a public official, you're supposed to be working on the public's behalf, but then simultaneously working as a hired lobbyist, you're now working also on some private special interest's behalf and getting directly paid for it."

What Rounds's office says

Rounds's spokesperson, Dezmond Ward, told POLITICO that the office's general counsel "consulted with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics, which provided guidance to make certain there was and is no conflict of interest," and that "Senate Ethics guidance continues to be followed today."

The guidance itself is not public, and POLITICO's account does not include it. A senior staffer for the ethics committee did not respond to POLITICO. Skjonsberg did not answer questions about the scope of his work.

Two clients moved to distance themselves. The Association of Equipment Manufacturers said it has not worked with Skjonsberg since March 2026. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said Skjonsberg's contract ended after South Dakota's legislature wrapped its 2026 session that same month. Altria did not respond.

Rounds already takes the money directly

The lobbying arrangement is not the only place Big Tech money reaches Rounds. It reaches him through the front door too.

Rounds sits on the Senate Banking Committee, which writes the rules for banks, payments companies and cryptocurrency. His donors this cycle include $70,100 from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic — $68,600 of it from people who work there and $1,500 from its PAC — $56,400 from people at Alphabet, Google's parent, and $36,000 from people at Andreessen Horowitz. The cryptocurrency industry's super PAC spent $411,748 supporting him while he sat on the committee that writes crypto rules. Counting everything raised since 2020, only 5% of his money came from small grassroots donors, which ranks him 78th out of 100 senators.

His independent challenger, Brian Bengs, put the money at the center of the race last week. "He has taken over $215,000 American dollars from AI data center interests, and is backed with hundreds of thousands more from super PACs that support big tech interests," Bengs told South Dakota Public Broadcasting on September 3, as Dakota Free Press reported.

This keeps happening, and it is always the same shape

A senator's most trusted aide is worth a great deal to the industries that senator regulates — not because the aide will hand over a secret, but because the aide knows what is coming, who is movable, and how a bill gets written.

Ohio's Jon Husted has the same problem. His senior adviser and counsel collected $22,652 from a Columbus lobbying firm while working in Husted's office, which produced a formal complaint asking the Senate to investigate Husted himself.

And Rounds has been here before, at the other end of his career. As governor he privatized South Dakota's EB-5 green card program, handing it to a private company owned in secret by the state employee who gave out the contract. It ended with a bankrupt beef plant, roughly $100 million of foreign investors' money gone, and a cabinet secretary dead six days before a grand jury was set to indict him.

What the record shows

Mike Rounds's Senate office paid Robert Skjonsberg more than $153,000 over the last 12 months on record. During that period Skjonsberg was also a registered South Dakota lobbyist for more than a dozen clients, among them Meta and the tobacco company Altria, and is listed as a co-owner of a South Dakota government affairs firm, though that firm is not named on his registrations. Senate rules bar a staffer at his pay grade from affiliating with such a firm or letting it use his name. Since Skjonsberg registered for Meta, Rounds has introduced multiple AI bills; from his seat on the agriculture spending subcommittee, he has introduced bills touching industries Skjonsberg is paid to represent in Pierre. Rounds's office says the ethics committee cleared it; the guidance itself has not been made public.

Source

Jacob Wendler, with Andrew Howard, Senate aide's lobbying side gig raises ethics questions, POLITICO, September 7, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.

Republican Billionaires Didn't Want to Touch Ken Paxton. Trump and Elon Musk Are Trying to Buy Him the Seat Anyway.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:15:22 +0000

On Saturday, September 5, 2026, a filing with the Federal Election Commission showed that President Donald Trump's super PAC, MAGA Inc., had bought $10 million of advertising in the Texas Senate race.

Half of it is positive ads for Ken Paxton. The other half is negative ads about his Democratic opponent, state Representative James Talarico. Reuters reported the split the same day: $5 million to praise Paxton, $5 million to attack the other guy.

It is the first money MAGA Inc. has spent on the fall campaign anywhere in the country. Trump's operation looked at every competitive Senate race in America and decided the first check should go to Texas.

That is not a compliment to Paxton. It is a rescue.

His own campaign has barely spent anything on ads

Here is the number that explains why the cavalry showed up.

Talarico's campaign has spent $40.1 million on general-election advertising, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. Paxton's campaign has spent about $264,000, most of it on digital platforms, the Texas Tribune reported.

The fundraising gap is just as wide. In the second quarter of 2026, Talarico raised more than $30 million. Paxton raised more than $9 million.

So when Texas Republicans say the state is at risk, this is what they mean. Their nominee cannot pay for his own campaign, and outside money has to do it for him.

We already knew why the money wasn't coming

Back in July we wrote about Ken Paxton cold-calling wealthy Republicans and getting turned down. The Wall Street Journal reported that the day after Paxton beat Senator John Cornyn in the May 26 runoff, his campaign called billionaire Bob Rowling — a man who had given more than $750,000 to groups backing Cornyn — and Rowling initially said no. He had been turned off by the reporting on Paxton's personal conduct.

That was the story of the summer. Some of the party's biggest donors knew the record and did not want their names on it. And the record is long: three felony counts including securities fraud that he dragged out for nearly nine years before settling, a bribery complaint to the FBI from eight of his own senior deputies, and an impeachment by the Texas House, 121 to 23.

Nothing about that record changed between July and September. What changed is who is paying.

Musk is in too

Elon Musk's America PAC has now spent $1.4 million against Talarico on digital media and printing, the Tribune reported. Musk lives in Texas. He reportedly authorized his PAC last November to spend more than $100 million this cycle, and gave more than a quarter-billion dollars in 2024 to elect Trump and other Republicans.

Paxton was already being carried by outside groups before either man arrived. Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main pro-Paxton super PAC, has spent $18.9 million. A dark-money group called Preserve Texas Inc. is in. So is an outside group funded by West Texas billionaire Tim Dunn.

As of the day of the buy, before any MAGA Inc. ad had run, Republicans had spent $24.3 million on advertising in this race — and almost none of it was Paxton's.

What that money buys

The MAGA Inc. ads are about taxes. "Talarico? Higher taxes," one says. "Paxton? Lower taxes. A clear choice."

Trump told reporters on Friday, September 4, that he has close to $1 billion under his control across various PACs and nonprofits, and expects to spend $400 million to $500 million on the midterms. MAGA Inc. alone had more than $400 million on hand at last count.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whose own aligned super PAC has put nothing into Texas in the general election, went on Fox in the days before the buy and asked the president to step in.

"All of our allies out there, including the president and his team and their resources, need to be brought to bear on Texas, because it's not one that we can lose if we're going to hang on to a Republican majority. We flat have to win there."

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was blunter on Fox the weekend before that. Senate Republicans, he said, "don't have the money budgeted for Texas" — and he was hoping Trump would spend "$100 or $200 million" there.

That is the party talking about a nominee its own leaders will not fund out of their own committee.

The part Texans should hold onto

A senator who owes his seat to two men owes those two men. Paxton's campaign is not paying for the ads that will elect him. Trump's super PAC is, and Musk's is, and a handful of billionaires' groups are.

Texans are already finding out what a Paxton attorney general's office does when the White House costs them money. Trump is holding back $10 billion from Texas hospitals, the same fight Paxton once sued Joe Biden over and won, in a case his own office announced as a "major nationwide legal victory," and Paxton has not filed anything. Texas hospitals say they are losing $27 million a day.

He was silent then, before he owed Trump $10 million.

What the filings show

Trump's MAGA Inc. put $10 million into Ken Paxton's Senate race in an FEC filing dated September 5, 2026, and Elon Musk's America PAC has spent $1.4 million more against Paxton's opponent. Paxton's own campaign has spent about $264,000 on advertising, against his opponent's $40.1 million. Two months ago Republican mega-donors were refusing his phone calls over his scandals; those scandals have not changed, only the people willing to pay for him.

Source

Trump's MAGA Inc gives $10 million to Paxton's Senate campaign ahead of midterms, Reuters, September 5, 2026, and Trump's PAC spending $10 million for Paxton in Texas, The Texas Tribune. Photo: Johnathan Johnson for The Texas Tribune.

Gambling Companies Put $650,000 Behind Vivek Ramaswamy. Asked Where He Stands on Expanding Gambling in Ohio, He Said He'd Take 'a Fresh Look.'

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:52:54 +0000

Ohio lawmakers are weighing two bills that would legalize online casino gambling across the state. Whoever is governor next year may be handed one of them to sign or veto.

On September 3, 2026, Statehouse News Bureau chief Karen Kasler asked the Republican nominee for governor where he stands. She did not leave the money out of the question.

"Where are you on expanded gambling? Since actually gambling interests have been donating to get you elected."

Vivek Ramaswamy did not say.

"I'm going to take a fresh look and a fresh perspective to this whole discussion."

He talked about listening to lawmakers on both sides. He said he wanted to protect young Ohioans from addiction. He never said whether he supports legalizing online casino gambling.

The money

The Sports Betting Alliance has given $650,000 to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC formed by Ramaswamy allies to elect him governor. It came in two pieces: $500,000 in 2025 and another $150,000 in January 2026, according to federal filings reviewed by Signal Ohio.

The money did not go to his campaign directly, and federal law bars a super PAC from coordinating its spending with a candidate. That is the technical answer, and it is true.

It is also not the point. The people paying for the ads that elect him want a specific thing from the office he is running for, and he will not tell voters whether he intends to give it to them.

Who the Sports Betting Alliance is

This is not a group with a general interest in Ohio policy. Its members are Bet365, BetMGM, DraftKings, Fanatics and FanDuel, and it exists to expand legal online sports betting and online casino gaming.

It has already come to Columbus to ask for exactly that. In May 2025, alliance representative Scott Ward testified to the Ohio House Finance Committee.

"I am here in support of legalization of igaming in Ohio."

The pitch was the usual one: consumer protections, pulling gamblers off illegal sites, more tax money for the state.

The bills are real and they are pending

Two competing proposals are live in the Ohio General Assembly:

House Bill 298 would legalize and regulate internet gambling and tax the companies offering it.
Senate Bill 197 would legalize internet gambling and also allow internet lottery games and online betting on horse races.

Neither has passed. If one does during the next governor's term, it lands on that governor's desk.

So this is not a hypothetical about a distant issue. It is a decision the next governor could well be asked to make, on behalf of an industry that has already put $650,000 into electing one of the candidates.

He has had months

This is not the first time he has been asked. Signal Ohio reported in April 2026 that Ramaswamy had taken no public position on sports betting while the gambling money was flowing into V-PAC. His spokesperson didn't respond to that request for comment either. His campaign did not respond to TiffinOhio.net for this story.

The September interview was the clean opportunity — on camera, with the donations named out loud in the question. He promised a fresh look.

What he says about candidates who won't answer

Earlier in that same interview, Ramaswamy made a point of saying this:

"I do think it's really important that candidates actually take voter questions and tell the voters where we're at."

He said that, and then declined to tell voters where he's at.

The pattern is documented. He spent months refusing to state positions until a newsroom badgered him into one answer. The same super PAC taking the gambling money is funded largely by five men who don't live in Ohio. And when he promised Ohioans free electricity, energy-industry PACs had just given his campaign $97,000.

The short version

The gambling industry's trade group has put $650,000 into the super PAC working to make Vivek Ramaswamy governor of Ohio, while two bills to legalize online casino gambling sit in the legislature awaiting a governor's signature. Asked on camera where he stands, with the donations named in the question, he would not say. In the same interview he said it was "really important" that candidates tell voters where they stand.

Source

Bonnie Lucas, Ramaswamy dodges gambling question after industry money backs his campaign, TiffinOhio.net (September 5, 2026). Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

Four Republicans Filed a Bill to Ban the Government From Preferring Contractors Who Pay Union Wages. Trump's Own Budget Office Kept That Rule in Place.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:51:55 +0000

On September 3, 2026, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma introduced a bill with a mild-sounding name and one blunt sentence in it.

The bill is called the No Preference Act. Here is what it would add to federal contracting law:

"The head of an executive agency may not require or give preference to an offeror on the basis of whether the offeror will use workers subject to a collective bargaining agreement."

Then it says the same thing again for the Pentagon.

That is the whole bill. Two sentences. It would make it illegal for any federal agency to treat a contractor better because that contractor's workers have a union contract.

Steve Womack of Arkansas signed on the same day as an original cosponsor. John Rutherford of Florida and Jack Bergman of Michigan added their names the next day.

What the rule they're trying to kill actually does

Big federal construction jobs — anything costing $35 million or more — currently have to use something called a project labor agreement, unless the agency can justify an exception. It is a contract, negotiated before the first shovel goes in the ground, that sets the pay and benefits for everybody who works on the site.

The Economic Policy Institute describes what those agreements contain: they "specify workers' wages and fringe benefits," they can set up a process for settling disputes on the job, and they typically bar strikes for the length of the project while also barring the employer from locking workers out.

In other words, the deal cuts both ways. The workers get a wage floor and benefits in writing. The government gets a job site that doesn't shut down.

Take the preference away and the wage floor goes with it. As EPI put it about a Pentagon attempt to do exactly this, workers on those projects "will no longer have the guarantee of negotiating PLAs that include higher pay."

Trump's own administration looked at this and said no

This is the part that ought to end the argument.

In February 2025 the Defense Department tried to stop using these agreements on its large construction projects. A federal judge blocked it in May. And on June 12, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget — Trump's own budget office, run by Russell Vought — issued a memo saying the requirement stays.

The memo called some agencies' moves to scrap the agreements "overly broad" and stated plainly that further attempts to prohibit them across the board "are precluded."

So the sitting Republican administration reviewed this exact policy and kept it. Bice, Womack, Rutherford and Bergman want Congress to override that.

What they say it's about

Bice frames it as fairness between states:

"Every qualified contractor deserves a fair opportunity to compete for federal projects. The government should not favor one individual over another simply because their workers are part of a union. This legislation ensures that right-to-work states, like Oklahoma, have an equal footing when competing for contracts."

Womack frames it as thrift:

"The playing field shouldn't be skewed toward contractors who choose to use union labor."

Neither of them mentions what the agreements guarantee the workers. That is the thing being removed, and it does not appear in either quote.

Who asked for this

The bill is backed by Associated Builders & Contractors and the Association of Oklahoma General Contractors.

Associated Builders and Contractors is the national trade group for non-union construction companies. Fighting project labor agreements is one of the things it exists to do. This is not a bill a contractor who lost a bid asked for. It is a bill the industry association whose members would collect the work is pushing.

The people on the other side of that transaction are the ones who currently have their wages written into the contract before they show up.

This keeps happening

The four names on this bill are not the only Republicans on this site pushing the same direction. Tom Tiffany has signed on to take right-to-work national, and he was the only member of the entire House who missed the vote on workers' right to organize. In Pennsylvania, the building trades council that endorsed Stacy Garrity in 2024 is now campaigning against her, and her campaign won't say whether she'd sign a right-to-work bill.

The No Preference Act is the federal-contracting version of the same fight. It doesn't ban unions. It just makes sure the government can never prefer the contractor who pays union scale — on a Pentagon base, a courthouse, a dam, or anything else the public is paying for.

What the bill says

Stephanie Bice wrote a two-sentence bill that would bar every federal agency, including the Defense Department, from giving any preference to a contractor whose workers have a union contract. Steve Womack, John Rutherford and Jack Bergman cosponsored it. It is backed by the national trade association for non-union builders. And it targets a rule that Trump's own Office of Management and Budget reviewed in June 2025 and expressly kept in force.

Sources

Bice, Womack seek to eliminate union labor preferences in federal contracts, Ripon Advance (September 4, 2026).
H.R. 10250, the No Preference Act — full text and cosponsor list, 119th Congress.
Department of Defense orders end to project labor agreements, Economic Policy Institute Federal Policy Watch.

Ashley Hinson Says She Is 'Laser Focused on Lowering Taxes for Working Families.' She Signed a Letter to Save a Tax Break for Private Equity Managers.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:55:15 +0000

Ashley Hinson is running for Joni Ernst's open Senate seat in Iowa, and her campaign website says she is "laser focused on lowering taxes for working families."

In April 2025, she signed a letter asking the chairman of the House's tax-writing committee to protect a tax break that goes almost entirely to private investment managers.

Mother Jones reported the letter on September 4, along with the money that has followed.

What the tax break does

Private equity managers get paid two ways. They take a fee for managing a fund, and then they take a cut of the profits when the fund's assets are sold. That cut is called "carried interest."

The management fee is taxed like a paycheck. The cut of the profits is not. It is taxed at the lower rate reserved for long-term investments, even though it is compensation for doing a job.

Oscar Valdés Viera of Americans for Financial Reform put it plainly to Mother Jones. If you get a bonus at work, he said, you pay tax on it at the rate for your income. Fund managers should be no different.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that closing it would raise about $13 billion over ten years.

This is not a partisan question among people who study taxes. Jonathan Choi, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, surveyed American tax law professors and got 167 replies. On carried interest, 143 said it should be taxed as ordinary income. Ten said it should not. He calls it "the single policy on which tax professors are most strongly agreed."

It is not much of a partisan question among presidents, either. Obama tried to close it. Biden tried to close it. Trump tried to close it in 2017 and again in 2025 — he once said private equity executives were "getting away with murder."

What Hinson signed

In 2025, Trump signaled again that he wanted it gone. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith said all options were "on the table."

Hinson joined a few dozen other House Republicans in a letter asking Smith to leave it alone.

"We recognize that the issue of carried interest has been heavily politicized and frequently mislabeled as a loophole."

The letter called it "a critical, longstanding investment management tool beneficial to our nation's economy," and warned that closing it would "harm millions of partnerships in real estate, private equity, and venture capital by disincentivizing entrepreneurial risk-taking and investment, potentially jeopardizing jobs in every state and district."

Choi's response to that argument is worth quoting in full, because he does not really disagree with the wording:

"The funny thing is, in some sense, I agree with the letter — it's not a loophole. It's not a loophole anymore because Congress has considered it and decided to leave this terrible policy on the books so many times. At this point, it's intentional malfeasance on the part of Congress."

The letter also argued that America would fall behind other countries if the break went away, and named the United Kingdom. This year the United Kingdom moved carried interest into its income tax system, taxing it as trading profit rather than as an investment gain.

Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee dropped the idea. The break survived.

Who is paying for her Senate campaign

Hinson's race against Democrat Josh Turek is close, and the money behind her is not coming from Iowa.

A hybrid super PAC called Fight On Iowa has raised $1.77 million to boost her. $1.5 million of that came from a single donor: Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire. The second-largest contributor is a California hedge fund manager who gave $100,000. The third-largest individual donor is a banker from Connecticut.

Mother Jones found that none of that $1.77 million came from anyone living in Iowa, and none of it from named individuals outside the financial services industry.

Griffin has also given $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which is running ads for Hinson. He is one of the biggest Republican donors of this cycle, with a reported $40 million spent on the midterms so far — the same donor who put $10 million into a PAC backing Byron Donalds in Florida's governor's race.

Her own donations tell the same story. Democrats have criticized her for taking $30,000 from Apollo Global Management's chief executive Marc Rowan and other Apollo employees — the private equity firm that owns a group of struggling Iowa health care facilities. She took $26,500 from Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, who once compared Obama's attempt to close this very loophole to Hitler's invasion of Poland, and later apologized for it.

Across her three previous campaigns, Hinson raised more than $1 million from people and PACs tied to the securities and investment industry.

We have written before about the nearly $90,000 she and her PACs took from billionaires named in the Epstein files, Schwarzman among them — $30,500 of it while she was refusing to sign the petition that would force those files into the open.

The contrast she set up herself

Six months after arriving in Washington, Hinson ran an online video ad asking for grassroots donations. Democrats, she warned, "believe that with their outside money, and their deep-pocketed donors, they can spend their way to a victory."

Her own Senate super PAC has raised $1.77 million and $1.5 million of it came from one hedge fund billionaire who does not live in Iowa.

This is a pattern on her record rather than a single episode. Her first Senate ad promised she would take on big insurance — and her husband, it turned out, had arranged the insurance lobby's meeting with Iowa's House delegation, including her. Her 2025 financial disclosures show he owned between $1 million and $5 million in privately held stock in High Street Insurance Partners, a private equity-backed insurance brokerage.

She has also backed major cuts to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices Wall Street, and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which handles complaints about scams and bad financial products.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson campaigns on lowering taxes for working families. In April 2025 she signed a letter asking House Republicans to preserve a tax break that lets private investment managers pay the investment rate on money they earn for doing a job — a break the Congressional Budget Office says costs about $13 billion a decade, and that surveyed tax law professors said should be taxed as income by 143 to 10. The committee killed the repeal. A hedge fund billionaire has since put $1.5 million into the super PAC boosting her Senate campaign, which raised that $1.77 million without a dollar from anyone in Iowa.

Source

Ashley Hinson Fought to Save Private Equity's Favorite Loophole, Mother Jones, September 4, 2026. Photo: Charlie Neibergall / Getty.

Ashley Hinson Doubled Iowa's Tax Credit for Small-Town Housing Developers. Four Years Later Her Husband Co-Founded a Development Firm, and It Was Awarded $1 Million of Them.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:49:41 +0000

Ashley Hinson spent her time in the Iowa House making a state tax credit for rural housing developers bigger. She then ran for Congress promising to expand tax breaks for rural developers.

Four years after her first vote, her husband co-founded a rural housing development company. Less than two years after that, it was awarded $1 million in credits from the program she had enlarged.

The votes

In 2017, Hinson was a state representative. American Journal News laid out the sequence.

Iowa already offered housing projects approved by the state economic development agency a sales tax refund and an investment tax credit worth up to 10% of a project's cost. S.F. 488, which Hinson backed, did two things:

It set aside $5 million of those incentives specifically for housing projects in smaller cities.
It doubled the credit for those projects, from 10% to 20% of project cost.

In practical terms, a developer building a $2 million project in one of those smaller cities could now claim a $400,000 credit instead of $200,000. The bill defines a small city as one outside Iowa's eleven most populous counties — a category that did not include Hinson's own Linn County seat.

In 2019 she voted again, this time to raise the set-aside from $5 million to $10 million.

Then she ran for Congress in 2020 on a platform that included expanding tax incentives for rural developers.

Who ended up collecting

In 2021, Hinson's husband, Matthew Arenholz, co-founded BAM Development LLC, which builds and operates apartment complexes across the Midwest.

His co-founders were two sitting Iowa state representatives: Joe Mitchell — now the Republican nominee in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District — and Michael Bousselot. Mitchell was not in the legislature for the 2017 vote; he arrived in January 2019, served alongside Hinson, and joined her in voting for the 2019 bill that doubled the set-aside.

In 2023, BAM Development was awarded $1 million in tax credits made possible by S.F. 488, for its Emerald Place Townhomes development in Clear Lake, Iowa. The state program requires a local match, and the Clear Lake city council voted to put up $1 million — as a 100% property tax abatement for four years plus the extension of 14th Street.

Two Republican legislators voted to double a developer subsidy. Two years later, one of them and the other's husband co-founded a development company, and it was awarded that subsidy.

The letters of support came from her donors and her earmark

To win the S.F. 488 credit, BAM had to submit letters of support from local stakeholders. Two of them are worth naming.

One came from Sukup Manufacturing Co., an Iowa grain-equipment maker. Members of the Sukup family have given a combined $47,500 to Hinson's congressional campaigns and another $4,000 to her leadership PAC.

The other came from the North Iowa Corridor Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit covering Mason City, Clear Lake and greater Cerro Gordo County — all inside Hinson's congressional district. In February, Hinson used her seat on the House Appropriations Committee to secure $3 million for the North Iowa Corridor Workforce Housing Initiative — a project that carries the group's name, though the money's intended recipient is Cerro Gordo County. Her written funding request asserted she had no financial interest in the project.

So a company her husband co-founded needed backing letters, and got one from a family that has given her over $50,000 and one from the economic development group whose namesake housing project she later won $3 million for.

This is the second time her husband's business has run through her office

On August 27, NOTUS reported that Arenholz helped arrange a 2023 meeting between Hinson, other members of Congress, and an insurance industry lobbying group he was working with.

We covered that one: her first Senate ad promises she will take on big insurance, while her husband chaired the government affairs committee of the insurance lobby's Iowa branch and helped set up its meeting with all four of Iowa's U.S. House members, including his wife. The group's PAC has given her campaign $45,000.

Arenholz is also a stakeholder in a private-equity backed brokerage firm.

Her business partner is running on the opposite position

The other half of this story is on the ballot in Iowa's 2nd District.

Joe Mitchell, BAM's co-founder, now campaigns as a critic of housing subsidies, calling the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit "a disaster" that needs to be "totally reformed" and complaining it is "too much paperwork." We wrote about that this week: his companies collected $2,559,880 from the Iowa credit he voted to expand, including the Clear Lake project.

Iowa's housing subsidies are a disaster when someone else claims them and a business plan when this group does.

The money keeps arriving from people with business before her

This is a recurring shape in Hinson's finances, not a one-off. The man whose carbon pipeline company won the power to seize Iowa farmland by eminent domain has given her committees $42,000 and hosted her Senate fundraiser.

Iowans looking at the state's housing shortage are entitled to ask whose housing the subsidies were meant to build.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson backed a 2017 bill that doubled Iowa's investment tax credit for rural housing developers and set aside $5 million for them, then voted in 2019 to double that set-aside to $10 million. In 2021 her husband co-founded a development firm with two of her legislative colleagues. In 2023 that firm was awarded $1 million in credits created by the law she backed, supported by letters from a family that has given her more than $50,000 and from the economic development group whose namesake housing project she later won $3 million of federal funding for. One of the firm's co-founders is now running for Congress against housing subsidies.

Source

Jesse Valentine, "Hinson backed tax credits that helped her husband's company", American Journal News, September 1, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall.

A Federal Judge Ruled That Vivek Ramaswamy Must Face a Whistleblower Who Says He Demanded She Break Securities Laws

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:43:50 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy built a political career on the argument that he is good at business, and that being good at business qualifies him to run Ohio. His campaign biography calls him "one of the most successful business leaders of his generation."

On August 25, 2026, a federal judge ruled that a former senior executive at the investment firm Ramaswamy co-founded has alleged enough to keep him in the case over her claim that he personally demanded she break federal securities laws — and then took part in firing her when she refused.

What the judge decided

U.S. District Judge Julien Xavier Neals issued a 24-page ruling in Rosely v. Strive Asset Management. Ramaswamy had asked to be thrown out of the case personally, arguing that the complaint never showed he was actually involved in the firing.

"The Court disagrees," Neals wrote.

The judge listed the four things Joyce Rosely alleges, and found they were enough:

Ramaswamy supervised her.
Ramaswamy demanded she and another employee violate securities laws.
She and the other employee objected repeatedly, directly to Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy took part in the decision to fire her after she refused.

"Taking her allegations as true, Plaintiff sufficiently states a CEPA claim against Ramaswamy," the judge wrote — CEPA being New Jersey's whistleblower law, which protects workers who refuse to do something they reasonably believe is illegal.

The judge has not decided whether any securities law was actually broken. What he decided is that Ramaswamy does not get out of the case at the start of it. Three years after Rosely sued, he tried to get his name off the lawsuit, and failed.

What she says he wanted her to do

Rosely was Strive's executive vice president and co-head of institutional sales. She started in August 2022. She alleges that "almost immediately," Ramaswamy and Strive co-founder Anson Frericks demanded she violate securities laws.

The specifics were not abstract compliance disagreements. Contemporaneous Forbes reporting on the complaint, cited by TiffinOhio.net, said she accused Ramaswamy and Frericks of pressuring her to use sales materials that promised customers future investment returns, and to let employees who were not properly registered pitch securities to customers. She also objected to Ramaswamy's own social media activity, which she believed amounted to unlawful sales of securities.

Promising future returns to investors is one of the oldest things securities law forbids, for the obvious reason.

The other employee who objected was fired too

Ramaswamy's lawyers argued that seven months passed between Rosely's complaints and her March 2023 firing, which is too long a gap to call it retaliation.

The judge did not buy it, and the reason was the second person.

"According to Plaintiff, Defendants asked her and Nye to break the law; Plaintiff and Nye repeatedly refused to do so and complained to management; and Defendants fired Plaintiff and Nye seven months later," the opinion states.

The judge found that firing both of the people who complained was enough, at this stage, to support the inference that the complaining is why they were fired.

A third name is in this story too. John Phillips, a former Strive regional sales chief, filed his own lawsuit in 2023 alleging Ramaswamy misrepresented Strive's financial condition to employees and investors, and that he too was pressured to violate securities laws. Phillips had left a job at JPMorgan to join Strive. He was terminated in the same March 2023 restructuring.

Two separate former employees, in two separate lawsuits, accusing the same firm of the same thing.

The company was supposed to be the fix for this

Strive is not incidental to Ramaswamy's politics. It is the proof.

He co-founded it in 2022 as the anti-BlackRock — the firm that would put fiduciary duty and financial performance first, against a Wall Street he said had sold out investors for environmental and social politics. He was running for president when the lawsuit landed, holding Strive up as evidence he could disrupt the industry.

The allegation is that inside that company, the founders were leaning on the sales staff to do exactly the kind of thing the rules exist to stop.

Not every claim survived. Neals dismissed Rosely's separate age discrimination and related claims without prejudice. But the two counts at the center of the securities allegations — retaliation by Strive, and individual liability for Ramaswamy and Frericks — are both still alive.

It is not the first time the money and the story have not matched

This site has documented Ramaswamy's business record before, and it keeps producing the same shape.

He bought a discarded Alzheimer's drug for $5 million, put his mother on the payroll to reanalyze the failed trial data, raised $315 million, and took a $1.1 billion SoftBank investment into the parent company 20 days before the drug failed its decisive trial. A California teachers' pension fund lost more than $1 million.

And Strive is still in his portfolio and still in his politics: he holds a stake worth about $137 million in the company, which lost $257.6 million in a single quarter.

What the record shows

A federal judge ruled on August 25, 2026 that Vivek Ramaswamy must personally face a whistleblower claim from Joyce Rosely, a former executive vice president at the firm he co-founded, who alleges he demanded she violate securities laws, heard her object directly, and helped fire her seven months later. The other employee who objected was fired the same day, and a third former employee filed a separate suit making similar accusations. Ramaswamy is running for governor of Ohio on the strength of that company.

Source

Bonnie Lucas, "Federal judge refuses to toss whistleblower case alleging Vivek Ramaswamy demanded employees break securities laws", TiffinOhio.net, September 1, 2026. Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, published by TiffinOhio.net.

Gabe Evans Told the Union He Would Stand With 3,800 Striking Meatpackers. A Month Earlier He Had Cashed a $5,000 Check From the Company.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:04:06 +0000

On March 16, 2026, at 5:30 in the morning, workers walked out of the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado. By that afternoon more than 2,700 of them were on the picket line. The plant employs 3,800 people and turns out roughly 5% of the beef in the United States. It sits in Colorado's 8th Congressional District.

A week into the strike, on March 23, their congressman called the union.

Gabe Evans phoned Kim Cordova, the president of UFCW Local 7, and told her he was with the workers. "He had committed that he was going to stand with the workers who are actually the constituents in Greeley," Cordova told the Colorado Times Recorder. The union asked him for two specific things: come stand on the picket line, and send a letter to JBS telling management to come back to the bargaining table.

He did neither. For the full three weeks his constituents were out, Evans never walked the line, never sent the letter, and never said anything about the strike in public.

What the FEC records show

A month before that phone call, Evans's campaign took a check from the company his constituents were striking against.

Federal Election Commission records show JBS USA Food Company PAC gave Evans's campaign committee $5,000 on February 23, 2026. That was weeks after Local 7 members had already voted 99% to authorize the strike. It was the second such check — the same PAC gave him another $5,000 on May 12, 2025.

The money did not stop at the company's own PAC. Senior employees at Cornerstone Government Affairs, the firm registered to lobby Washington for JBS at the time, gave Evans's campaign more than $10,000 across 2024 and 2025 — a dozen separate contributions, which we confirmed line by line in the FEC's own database.

Evans's campaign did not respond to questions about any of it.

What the workers were striking over

This was not a dispute about a rounding error in a benefits package.

Deborah Rodarte, a worker at the plant, told the Colorado Sun that when her knives went dull she couldn't get them switched out, and that a coworker's protective mesh tunic had a ripped section over her chest for "a year, maybe two" because the company said her size wasn't available. Dull knives take 25% to 63% more force to cut, which is how blades slip. The plant processes about 420 cattle an hour.

Cordova said JBS was insisting on poverty-level wages — average annual raises under 2%, well below Colorado inflation — while pushing rising health care costs onto workers. JBS disputed the workers' account of conditions, saying employees can leave the line for approved reasons and that the company hands out newly sharpened knives frequently.

The strike ended after three weeks. Workers ratified a contract on April 12 with 93% approval, winning raises, a one-time $750 bonus, and a requirement that the company pay for protective equipment — the same things they'd walked out over.

The photo he didn't get

Evans did finally set foot in the plant, on April 2 — after weeks of silence, and two days before negotiations resumed. He met with union members. According to Cordova, his team wanted pictures.

"They wanted to do a photo op with our members, and I said, 'No, we want to see what you're going to do first, but you're not here to take a photo op as if you stood side by side with us.' We told him about all of the human rights violations, the allegations of human trafficking, what was going on with wage theft. … He just never did anything about it; he stood on the side of the company."

Workers learned their congressman was in the building the way anyone else would have: JBS put a screen up in the plant lobby welcoming "Congressman Gabe Evans," next to a photo of a staffer from his office. The company announced the visit. The union didn't.

This is a familiar shape for Evans. We've written before about how he keeps posing for photos at Colorado businesses while voting eight times to protect the tariffs squeezing them. The pattern is the same here: show up, get the picture, change nothing.

Who he actually works for

Evans's ties to JBS predate the strike. On February 4, 2025, he was one of two members of Congress quoted in JBS's own press release announcing $200 million in U.S. beef investments — $50 million of it a new distribution center in Greeley. "This announcement ensures that the cattle producers and the local businesses that support the facility will continue to thrive and prosper," Evans said. He has also posted photos of himself touring the plant and meeting JBS executives.

That fits the rest of his funding. Only 10% of Evans's money comes from small grassroots donors, while 63% comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors — ranking him #358 out of 440 House members in grassroots support. The Koch network's super PAC alone spent $1,243,948 to put him in office.

It is also consistent with how he has voted on the things his constituents need. Evans said his vote for the Republican budget law would protect "the people who need it most" — and 12 Colorado hospitals are now at risk. About 90,000 people in his district get food assistance, and he voted to cut it.

Cordova, who has dealt with plenty of politicians, put the standard plainly:

"I don't like any politician to just show up at a picket line for a photo op. We really want to see real advocacy for workers, for human beings. We don't want to hear from you every four years, right? We need to see you every day."

Colorado's 8th District is one of the most competitive in the country. Evans faces Democratic state Rep. Manny Rutinel in November.

What the record shows

Gabe Evans told the president of UFCW Local 7 he would stand with 3,800 striking meatpackers in his own district. He never walked the picket line, never sent the letter the union asked for, and said nothing publicly across all three weeks of the strike. One month before he made that promise, his campaign accepted $5,000 from the striking workers' employer — the second $5,000 check from that PAC — on top of more than $10,000 from the company's lobbyists. The one time he entered the plant, it was the company that announced he was there.

Source

Rep. Gabe Evans promised striking workers solidarity. He took a check instead — Cooper Baldwin, Courier Colorado, August 28, 2026, building on original reporting by the Colorado Times Recorder. Contribution figures independently verified against Federal Election Commission records. Photo provided by UFCW Local 7.

Dan Sullivan Sold Up to $100,000 of His Family's Stock After Closed-Door COVID Briefings. Two Weeks Later It Fell by a Third.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:28:03 +0000

In early 2020, before most Americans understood what was coming, U.S. senators were getting closed-door briefings from federal health officials about COVID-19. Dan Sullivan was in those briefings. On social media, he was telling Alaskans not to panic and pointing the blame at China.

On February 27, 2020, he sold up to $100,000 in stock.

About two weeks later, the pandemic shut down the global economy and that stock — RPM International, the multi-billion-dollar chemical company his family owns — fell by roughly a third.

That is one of four suspiciously timed trades identified in a new review of Sullivan's Senate financial disclosures by The Alaska Current.

Four sales, four convenient moments

Here is what the disclosure records show, according to that review:

February 27, 2020 — sold up to $100,000 in RPM stock, after meeting with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials about COVID-19 preparedness, and at a time when RPM itself was publicly signaling steadiness or growth. The crash came about two weeks later.
September 25, 2018 — sold up to $15,000 in RPM shares one week before the company released weaker-than-expected earnings that pushed the stock down.
November 30, 2022 — sold up to $50,000 in RPM stock one month before the company reported "tepid" earnings, sending the price down about 6%.
March and May 2018 — two RPM sales that were not officially reported until late July 2018, well past the 45-day deadline the law allows.

Sullivan has sold roughly $800,000 worth of RPM stock during his time in the Senate. He still holds up to $5 million of it.

The 2020 briefings were not a secret scandal that only he had

Sullivan was not alone. In April 2020 the Campaign Legal Center reviewed congressional stock trading in the weeks before the crash and counted at least 227 Senate transactions, worth up to $98.3 million, by 12 senators. Sullivan is one of the 12 named in its table, with two transactions ranging up to $200,000. CLC accused none of them of insider trading — it wrote that these transactions "have not been tied to allegations of insider trading," unlike Richard Burr's — and argued that the volume of it was the problem on its own.

What the Campaign Legal Center's report did not capture is the part that makes his case worse than most: the stock he was selling was his own family's company.

RPM International was founded by Sullivan's grandfather. It is run today by his brother, Frank C. Sullivan, as chairman and CEO. We've written before about what else that company has done — RPM paid nearly $61 million in 2013 to settle charges that it cheated the federal government, and kept winning federal contracts anyway, while Sullivan profited the whole time.

So the man selling ahead of the crash was not an ordinary investor reading the news. He was a sitting senator, in closed-door briefings from federal health officials, holding up to $5 million of stock in a company his brother runs.

He was already caught once, and used the same excuse twice

Sullivan was publicly identified in 2022 as having violated the STOCK Act — the 2012 transparency law that requires members of Congress to report their trades within 45 days, so the public can see them while they still matter.

His explanation then was that his stock managers hadn't told him about the trades in time.

The new review shows he had used that same excuse before. The March and May 2018 RPM sales weren't reported until late July 2018, and in a comment attached to one of those late filings Sullivan again said his stock managers didn't notify him until after the deadline had passed.

Two sets of late filings, four years apart, same explanation. The law does not have an exception for that. Members of Congress are responsible for their own disclosures — that is the entire design. He is not the only one who has tested it: Susan Collins helped write the STOCK Act and then failed to report up to $395,000 in trades, and Sheri Biggs was months late on more than 170 trades worth up to $13.6 million.

The rest of Alaska's delegation doesn't do this

The comparison inside his own state is the sharpest part of the record.

Over the past decade, Sullivan is the busiest stock trader in Alaska's congressional delegation — an estimated $2 million in trades while in office. Republican Rep. Nick Begich, in his first term, has reported up to $550,000 in transactions, including up to a $500,000 investment in a venture capital fund.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, former Rep. Mary Peltola, and the late Rep. Don Young all reported no trades at all while in office.

Sullivan's own assets, meanwhile, have grown to a disclosed range of $4.1 million to $12.3 million. Federal disclosure forms let filers report ranges instead of exact numbers, which is why every figure here is a "up to."

His business dealings are now a central issue in his re-election. Peltola, who finished seven points ahead of him in Alaska's open Senate primary, is running an ad whose line is that "Dan Sullivan is really good at looking out for Dan Sullivan."

What the filings show

Dan Sullivan's Senate disclosures record four well-timed sales of stock in the company his brother runs — including up to $100,000 unloaded on February 27, 2020, after closed-door COVID-19 briefings and about two weeks before that stock fell by roughly a third. Two more sales landed just ahead of disappointing earnings reports. Two others were filed months late, and when he was caught he blamed his stock managers, the same explanation he gave when he was caught again in 2022. He has traded an estimated $2 million while in office. Three of the four other Alaskans who have held those seats over the same period traded nothing.

Source

Matt Acuña Buxton, Dan Sullivan's time in the US Senate has been marked by well-timed stock trades, The Alaska Current, August 27, 2026. Photo: Mariam Zuhaib / AP.

Tommy Tuberville Called Alabamians' Data Center Worries 'Bull Crap.' Twenty-Five Days Later, a Data Center Developer Gave Him $25,000.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:26:42 +0000

On August 7, 2026, a Dallas company called Applied Digital Corporation wrote a $25,000 check to the campaign of Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama.

Applied Digital owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, in Tuscaloosa County. It has pulled some permits for an industrial project there. It will not confirm whether it is building a data center on the land. The Tuscaloosa Thread, which has been covering the site for months, describes the company plainly as one of the developers wanting to build a data center near Brookwood.

The people who live around those 1,300 acres cannot find out what is going in next to them, because Brookwood's own officials have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

Tuberville, meanwhile, has spent the summer telling Alabamians that their objections to data centers are not real.

What he said in July

On July 13, Tuberville stood in front of the Alabama Sheriffs Association in Opelika and dismissed the concerns of nine or more Alabama communities that have organized against data center projects — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Mobile. He said the worry about noise and the environment was "bull crap," and blamed the opposition on Chinese propaganda. We wrote that story at the time: Alabama Towns Are Saying No to Data Centers. Tommy Tuberville Says That's 'Bull Crap' — and Blames China.

That post ended on an open question — who is on the other side of the deal Tuberville keeps selling.

Twenty-five days later, part of the answer arrived as a campaign contribution.

The company, the land, and the gag order

Here is what is publicly known about Applied Digital in Alabama, and what is not.

It owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, according to county property records.
It has received some permits for an industrial project on that land.
It will not confirm whether a data center is planned. An Applied Digital spokesperson did not immediately respond to AL.com's request for comment.
Brookwood Mayor Joe Barger has signed a non-disclosure agreement tied to data center proposals, according to city officials. So the town's elected leadership is legally barred from telling residents what it knows.
The company is developing a data center campus in Louisiana called Delta Forge 1 and has facilities in North Dakota, so it is not a small operator testing the waters.

Fifty Brookwood residents have signed up to speak at a public meeting about the project. They will be speaking to a mayor who cannot answer them.

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project"

Tuberville's campaign confirmed to AL.com that the senator met with Applied Digital recently. His communications director, Mallory Jaspers, drew a careful line around it:

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project, it was an overview of how they communicate their projects to communities they want to invest in."

Read that again. The meeting was not about the specific project the company owns land for in Alabama. It was about how the company talks to communities it wants to build in.

Jaspers also said neither Tuberville nor anyone on his team has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Applied Digital. That is worth something. It is also not the problem. The problem is that the mayor of the affected town has signed one, and the man who wants to run the state took the company's money twenty-five days after telling those residents their concerns were nonsense.

Terry Grammer, a Brookwood-area resident who is currently raising money for legal fees to try to stop the project, told AL.com what it looks like from where he lives:

"This going on is almost like a pay to play deal. This is corruption at its finest."

The industry group asking the state to go easy

Applied Digital is a listed member of the Data Center Coalition, the industry's national lobbying group. Earlier in August, that coalition asked Alabama's Public Service Commission to make sure any new rules governing data centers and electricity rates allow "sufficient flexibility."

That is the fight that decides whether Alabama families or the data centers pay for the new power plants and transmission lines these facilities require. The industry is at that table. Tuberville's answer to the people who aren't is that they've been fooled by China.

This is not an Alabama-only pattern. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany campaigned against data center subsidies while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for the state's data center coalition. In Ohio, Jon Husted promised to protect people's electric bills while collecting $69,750 from the tech and utility companies driving those bills up. Same industry, same script, three states.

What $25,000 buys in this race

The contribution is not an outlier in size. Tuberville reported several comparable checks in August: $50,000 from Rapid Deployment Inc. of Mobile, $35,000 each from Trimed Billing Solutions of Hoover and K12 Management of Reston, Virginia, and $25,000 each from Schola Management of Birmingham, Newlight Healthcare of Austin, Advantage Capital Management of New Orleans, and Long & Long of Mobile.

He does not need the money. Tuberville ended July with $9.2 million on hand. His opponent, former U.S. Senator Doug Jones, had $1.7 million — and actually out-raised him that month, $622,000 to $289,597.

So this is not a candidate who took a check because he was desperate. It is a candidate who took a check from a company with 1,300 acres and a gag order in a town whose residents he had just called dupes of a foreign government.

Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new Alabama data centers while the state updates its water and energy rules. Tuberville's position is that data centers are a "gold mine" and that opposition is imported disinformation. Only one of those two positions has a $25,000 contribution attached to it from a company that stands to build one.

What the filings show

Applied Digital Corporation, which owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood and will not say what it is building there, gave Tommy Tuberville's campaign for governor $25,000 on August 7 — twenty-five days after Tuberville publicly called Alabamians' data center concerns "bull crap" and blamed them on China. The town's mayor has signed a non-disclosure agreement, so the fifty residents signed up to speak at next week's public meeting cannot get a straight answer from their own government. Tuberville, who is sitting on more than $9 million, took the money anyway.

Source

Ruth Serven Smith and Hannah Denham, Data center company tied to Alabama project donates $25,000 to Tuberville campaign, AL.com, August 28, 2026. Photo: Will McLelland / AL.com. Additional reporting from Don Hartley, Tuberville Gets $25,000 From Data Center Developer With Land in Brookwood, Tuscaloosa Thread, August 28, 2026. Fundraising figures from Andrea Tinker, Jones outraises Tuberville in July; Tuberville retains financial edge in governor's race, Alabama Reflector, August 6, 2026.

Jon Husted Pushed Washington to Put Billions Into Intel. His Wife Owned Intel Stock the Whole Time.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:02:14 +0000

Jon Husted is Ohio's junior U.S. Senator. He was not elected to the job. Governor Mike DeWine appointed him at the start of 2025 to fill the seat JD Vance left when he became vice president.

On Friday, August 28, 2026, the Ohio Capital Journal reported something Husted has never volunteered: while he was working to rescue Intel's troubled factory outside Columbus, his wife owned as much as $15,000 of Intel stock.

His office was asked about it. His office did not answer.

What the disclosures show

Husted's Senate filings show that as of January 21, 2025 — the day he was sworn in — his wife owned up to $15,000 in Intel common stock. His most recent financial disclosure, covering all of 2025, shows the same holding.

That is the entire period in which he was pushing the company's Ohio project forward.

Husted says he personally lobbied the Trump administration to put federal money into Intel. In August 2025, the government took a roughly 10% stake in the company, buying 433.3 million shares for about $8.9 billion. Critics said Washington was picking winners and losers. Intel's stock went up.

Husted's reaction, to The Columbus Dispatch, was not the reaction of a bystander:

"It's foundational. It's a big deal. It's the perfect relationship. And they had no relationship before. It's something I've been working on and hoping for for some time."

Three times he knew first

The Ohio Capital Journal found three occasions where Husted was privy to Intel developments before they were public, and where the news moved the stock his family owned.

August 2025. The federal government announced its stake. Intel shares rose 6%. Husted said he had been working on it.
May 2026. Husted told the Dispatch he had discussed a preliminary chipmaking deal between Intel and Apple. Intel would not confirm it. After Trump posted about the deal, the stock rose 10%.
July 2026. Husted told the Dispatch that Intel had informed him of a possible partnership with the South Korean firm SK Hynix. Shares jumped nearly 9% when the news broke — even though SK Hynix denied there was a deal.

Nobody has shown that Husted's family traded on any of it. That is not the point. The point is that a sitting senator's household held a position in a company that was calling him with market-moving news, and he saw nothing worth fixing about that.

The lobbyist who paid him

The Intel connection does not stop at the stock.

Josh Rubin signed on as a lobbyist for Intel in 2022 — the same year DeWine and Husted announced the Ohio plant. That year Rubin and his wife gave nearly $15,000 to Husted's state political committee. The year before, they gave at least $20,000. Rubin has given $60,000 to DeWine's committee over the years, according to the watchdog group Transparency USA.

In September 2023, DeWine appointed Rubin — an active Intel lobbyist — to chair the board of JobsOhio.

JobsOhio is the state's private economic development arm. It is funded by the state liquor business, which Ohio leases to it for far less than it is worth. It has handed out more than $2 billion. It is exempt from most of Ohio's ethics and transparency laws. And it gave Intel more than $27 million.

Lobbying records show Rubin was registered to lobby JobsOhio for Intel — the agency whose board he ran — until the end of 2025. JobsOhio would not say whether he ever declared a conflict or stepped back from a funding decision. Intel declined to say how much it paid him. Rubin did not respond. DeWine's press secretary said there was no conflict.

Husted was Ohio's second-ranking executive for all of this. The state gave Intel more than $600 million.

Catherine Turcer of Common Cause Ohio put the problem plainly to the Ohio Capital Journal: "The problem has to do with how very cozy everything is." When you own stock in a company, she said, "it's very hard to look just at economic policy."

The project Ohioans were sold

The reason any of this matters to people who do not own Intel shares is what Ohio bought.

The plant was announced in 2022 as a $20 billion investment that would bring chipmaking back to America. The state pledged $2 billion in incentives. JobsOhio pledged $150 million more.

Then Intel delayed construction at the start of 2024, citing weak chip sales. In July 2025 the company laid off 24,000 people worldwide, walked away from two European projects, and pushed Ohio back again. The factory was supposed to be making chips by the beginning of this year. The earliest it will now make anything is 2030.

Ohioans are still on the hook for the incentives. Husted's family was on the upside of the stock.

The ban he won't take a position on

There is a straightforward fix for this, and Congress has been circling it for years: ban members and their families from trading individual stocks.

Bipartisan bills to do exactly that were filed in both chambers last year. One passed the House this summer — but only after Republicans welded an unrelated photo-ID voting mandate onto it, which cost it Democratic support. We wrote about who built that trap: Virginia Foxx's Rules Committee wrote the closed rule that fused the voter ID mandate to the stock ban and barred every amendment.

In February, Husted would not take a position on a trading ban, Columbus television station WCMH reported. His office did not answer the Ohio Capital Journal's question about it either.

Husted is not the only Republican with a stock problem. John James of Michigan bought SpaceX stock the day it went public while sitting on the committee that oversees the agency regulating Starlink.

Nor is Intel the only industry money question around him this summer. His campaign has taken $69,750 from the tech and utility companies at the center of Ohio's data center fight — the same fight over who pays for the electricity those companies use.

What the filings show

Jon Husted's wife held as much as $15,000 in Intel stock through the entire period in which he pushed Washington to put about $9 billion into the company and was told in advance about three developments that each sent Intel's share price up between 6% and 10%. Intel's own lobbyist and his wife had given Husted's state political committee nearly $15,000 in 2022, the year the plant was announced, and at least $20,000 the year before. The Ohio he helped run gave Intel more than $600 million and JobsOhio gave it another $27 million, for a factory that will not make a chip until 2030 at the earliest. Asked whether members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks, his office said nothing.

Source

Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal: "As he worked to advance the Intel project, an Ohio senator's wife was invested in it" (August 28, 2026). Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal.

Ashley Hinson's First Senate Ad Says She'll Take On Big Insurance. Her Husband Arranged the Insurance Lobby's Meeting With Her.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:52:20 +0000

Here is the promise in the first ad of Ashley Hinson's Senate campaign:

"Health care companies are ripping you off, and members of Congress should not trade stocks."

"I'm working with President Trump to take on big insurance companies, and I'm fighting to ban stock trading in Congress."

That is the pitch. She is the one who takes on the insurance industry.

Now here is what NOTUS reported on August 27, 2026, after reviewing the insurance industry's own magazines.

Her husband ran government affairs for the insurance lobby

Hinson's husband, Matt Arenholz, is a longtime insurance executive. That much was already public. What was not public until now is that he chaired the government affairs committee for the Iowa branch of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America — a national insurance trade association and lobbying group. Archived material from the Iowa group's website shows he took the role in 2019 and still had it in 2023.

Government affairs is the industry's term for dealing with lawmakers. And according to the trade group's own magazine, Arenholz used the job to open a door.

Tom O'Meara, the Iowa group's chief executive officer, wrote this to members about a trip to Washington:

"In fact, Matt was able to arrange a meeting with all four of our congressional members in one large conference room. This not only saved us a lot of time but prevented us from having to bounce around from building to building in D.C."

Iowa has four members of the U.S. House. One of them is his wife — and NOTUS reports that officials at the group credited Arenholz with helping them gain access to Hinson and other Iowa lawmakers.

O'Meara was proud of the access. In another edition of the magazine, he described being asked at a national conference how many Iowa lawmakers his group had gotten in front of:

"I was given several strange looks when I responded that we met with all six of ours from Iowa. Several replied to me that they were not talking about congressional staff members rather the actual elected officials themselves. My answer remained the same, ALL SIX!"

In a fall 2023 edition of the magazine, O'Meara also acknowledged that Arenholz and Hinson are married.

What that access is worth, in the group's own words

The national organization does not hide what this is for. Its political action committee, InsurPac, explains on its own website exactly what the money buys:

"InsurPac allows Big 'I' federal lobbyists and agents to attend fundraising events where they develop relationships with members of Congress and their staff. Those relationships help open doors to advocate for or against legislation that directly impacts the independent agency system."

Open doors. That is the group's phrase, not ours. In the 2025 election cycle, it says, its agents used InsurPac money to attend more than 1,600 fundraising events, and it gave out more than $2.6 million to 278 federal campaigns.

Hinson has been one of the beneficiaries. NOTUS reports the PAC has, over the years, given more than $67,000 to her campaign and to PACs affiliated with her.

We checked the Federal Election Commission's own database for her principal campaign committee. It shows eleven checks from the trade group's PAC totaling $45,000, and the first one landed on September 16, 2019 — the same year her husband took the government affairs job, and more than a year before she was sworn in.

Separately, NOTUS reports the national group has spent more than $5 million lobbying the federal government since Hinson was elected.

The family's money is in insurance too

Hinson's annual financial disclosures show her household's stake in the industry is not small.

In her 2025 disclosure, she reported Arenholz held between $1 million and $5 million in High Street Insurance Partners, a large insurance brokerage.
In 2021, she reported he sold his interest in a private insurance company for more than $1 million.

High Street is owned by private equity. The Boston firm Abry Partners announced it was acquiring the brokerage from another private equity firm, Huron Capital, in April 2021.

Jeff Hauser, who runs the Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group that tracks lobbying, told NOTUS that Arenholz's position "blurs the line."

"No one's saying that if your significant other gets elected to Congress, you have got to stop being in insurance. Then you tell me he's involved in government affairs, right off the bat that's not normal. Most people don't do government affairs work."

Hauser also argued that national groups use state chapters for a reason. Instead of sending a Washington lobbyist to an Iowa lawmaker, he said, the group can hand talking points to its Iowa affiliate — "and then the lobbying occurs from a constituent."

Now check the ad against the record

Hinson's ad makes two promises. Look at what she has actually done on each.

"Take on big insurance companies." On December 17, 2025, Hinson voted for H.R. 6703, a bill House Republicans named the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." It does not extend the tax credits that were about to expire and that keep marketplace insurance affordable; their expiration is what is driving the 2026 premium increases. The Congressional Budget Office found the bill would leave about 100,000 more people uninsured. We wrote up that vote and everyone who cast it. In November, the Iowa Insurance Division and the Kaiser Family Foundation put some Iowa married couples' average premium increases at more than $1,000 a month.

"Ban stock trading in Congress." Hinson did cosponsor a bill — the Stop Insider Trading Act, which she signed on to the day it was introduced in January 2026, and which passed the House in July. Read what it covers. It bars members and their spouses from purchasing "a security issued by a publicly traded company or any comparable economic interest acquired through synthetic means," and requires public notice at least seven days before selling one.

High Street Insurance Partners is not a publicly traded company. It is private, and owned by a private equity firm. The insurance-industry stake Hinson's household holds today is exactly the kind of asset a ban written around publicly traded stock is least likely to reach.

What the campaign says

A Hinson campaign spokesperson, who declined to be identified by name, said the meeting O'Meara bragged about was "arranged just like any other meeting with an advocacy group is arranged through the proper and appropriate channels."

The spokesperson said Arenholz has been part of the Iowa insurance organization since 2003, that his government affairs role was focused on state-level issues, and that the panel meets once a year to hear from state lobbyists about the Iowa legislature.

"Matt's not a lobbyist nor has he ever lobbied Ashley on anything — they maintain the highest ethical standards."

The campaign also said the PAC's support "had no relationship to her husband's membership" in the Iowa group. The Iowa organization itself did not answer NOTUS's questions.

Two things about that response. First, nobody has to be a registered lobbyist to arrange a meeting; O'Meara's own magazine says Arenholz arranged the meeting, and the meeting was with federal officials in Washington, not the Iowa statehouse. Second, "he never lobbied her" is a narrow denial of a claim nobody made. The reporting is about access — who gets a room with all four Iowa House members at once, and who does not.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Hinson's campaign is built on the idea that she is not part of the system.

Three weeks ago, Bruce Rastetter co-hosted her Senate fundraiser — the agribusiness figure whose carbon pipeline company won the power to take Iowa farmland by eminent domain, and who has given her committees $42,000.
She tells Iowans she is "a working mom" refueling the minivan, while her campaign spent nearly $40,000 at one private Republican club in Washington and $9,500 at a steakhouse chain.
The insurance trade group is not an outlier in her fundraising. Our own donor research on her report card puts it alongside the Koch network's super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, and a super PAC funded with $35 million from Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

Family conflicts like this are not unique to her, either. Earlier this month we covered Shelley Moore Capito voting to confirm her own son as a U.S. Attorney without recusing.

The Iowa Senate race is a dead heat. Hinson leads Democrat Josh Turek by less than a percentage point in the RealClearPolitics polling average, and the Cook Political Report moved the race to a toss-up last week.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson's first Senate ad promises she will take on big insurance companies. Her husband chaired the government affairs committee of an insurance lobbying group's Iowa branch from 2019 through at least 2023, and the group's CEO credited him in print with arranging its meeting with all four Iowa House members — one of whom is his wife. That group's PAC has written her principal campaign committee $45,000 in eleven checks since September 2019, its national organization has spent more than $5 million lobbying Washington since she was elected, and her household holds between $1 million and $5 million in a private-equity-owned insurance brokerage. In December she voted for a health bill that left the premium increases in place.

Source

Stephen Neukam, "Rep. Ashley Hinson's Husband 'Arranged' a Meeting Between Lobbyists and Iowa Lawmakers — Including His Wife", NOTUS, August 27, 2026. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images.

A NASA Contractor in Julia Letlow's District Gave $100,000 to a Super PAC Backing Her Senate Run. Federal Law Bans Contractors From Giving at All.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:31:54 +0000

There is one rule in federal campaign finance that almost nobody argues about anymore. If your company has a contract with the federal government, you cannot give money to federal candidates or the committees that support them. Not while you're negotiating the contract. Not while you're performing it. Not a dollar.

The reason is obvious enough that a full panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban unanimously in 2015. If contractors could write checks to the politicians who steer federal money, then contracts and campaign contributions start moving through the same pipe.

On August 26, 2026, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that a Baton Rouge company did exactly that, and that the money went to a super PAC backing Julia Letlow's campaign for the U.S. Senate.

What the complaint says

The company is MMR Constructors, Inc., at 15961 Airline Highway in Baton Rouge. Its parent, MMR Group, describes itself as a world leader in electrical, instrumentation, construction, maintenance, management and technical services.

Here is the timeline the complaint lays out, all of it from public records:

December 15, 2025 – April 17, 2026: MMR Constructors holds an active federal contract with NASA, for high-pressure industrial water services, according to USAspending.gov — the government's own database of federal awards.
March 31, 2026: MMR Constructors contributes $100,000 to Hope in Action PAC, a super PAC. The contribution is disclosed in the PAC's own quarterly FEC filing, listing the same Airline Highway address.

March 31 falls inside December 15 to April 17. That is the whole case. Under 52 U.S.C. § 30119, a federal contractor may not make a contribution to any political committee from the moment contract negotiations begin until performance is complete.

Louisiana's 5th Congressional District takes in part of Baton Rouge, including the Airline Highway address MMR Constructors gave the FEC. Letlow has represented that district since 2021.

Where the money went

Hope in Action PAC is not a general-purpose committee that happens to have given Letlow something. Follow what it did with the money:

It spent $74,130 on independent expenditures directly supporting Letlow during the 2026 cycle.
It gave $2,863,500 to Accountability Project, Inc. — a second super PAC that, in the complaint's words, has exclusively backed Letlow this cycle, and which has spent $9,522,193 on independent expenditures supporting her Senate candidacy.

That second PAC is one we've written about before. In August we traced where the Accountability Project's $9.2 million came from: liquefied natural gas money, Occidental Petroleum, a stack of Louisiana LLCs, four corporations that disclose no donors at all, and $205,586 routed from Letlow's own joint fundraising committee.

Now there's another entry in that chain. Nearly $3 million of what the Accountability Project spent for Letlow came from Hope in Action PAC — and $100,000 of Hope PAC's money, the complaint alleges, came from a company that was legally barred from giving it.

MMR Group, the parent company, had also given Hope PAC $50,000 back on October 19, 2023.

The excuses that don't work

The FEC has already closed most of the exits here, and the complaint walks through them.

"It went to a super PAC, not a candidate." The Commission settled that in 2011. A contractor giving money to a committee that makes independent expenditures is still making a contribution, and contributions are what the statute bans. In 2017 the FEC found reason to believe a contractor violated the ban by giving $200,000 to exactly this kind of committee.

"Federal work is a tiny slice of our business." The FEC has said there is no de minimis exception. A company doesn't stop being a federal contractor because the federal share is small.

"We got the money back." Doesn't matter either. In 2019 the Commission found reason to believe Ring Power Corporation violated the ban with a $50,000 contribution, and held that the company's remedial measures, "including obtaining a refund of the illegal contribution from the IEOPC, do not excuse the violation."

What is and isn't alleged here

Be precise about this, because it matters.

The complaint is against MMR Constructors. It does not accuse Julia Letlow of breaking any law, and no part of it says she solicited the money or knew about it. What the Campaign Legal Center argues is the thing the ban exists to prevent: a federal contractor bankrolling the Senate campaign of the member of Congress who represents the district it operates in — which the complaint calls a bid "to secure access, influence, and future federal contracts."

CLC's attorney, Saurav Ghosh, asks the FEC to find reason to believe the law was broken, open an immediate investigation, and impose penalties large enough to deter the next company that tries it.

The part that lands on Letlow is not a legal question. It's that she is the beneficiary. She won the Republican nomination in a June 27, 2026 runoff, after she and John Fleming knocked off sitting Senator Bill Cassidy in the May 16 primary — a campaign on which a super PAC spending exclusively for her has put more than $9.5 million this cycle. Voters in Louisiana are entitled to know whose money that was. A federal contractor's money is not supposed to be any of it.

What the filings show

Campaign Legal Center's FEC complaint alleges that MMR Constructors, Inc. of Baton Rouge gave $100,000 to Hope in Action PAC on March 31, 2026, while holding an active NASA contract that ran from December 15, 2025 to April 17, 2026 — a period federal law says a contractor may not give at all. Hope in Action PAC spent $74,130 directly supporting Julia Letlow and routed $2,863,500 to a second super PAC that has spent $9,522,193 exclusively on her Senate campaign. MMR Constructors is based in the congressional district Letlow represents. The complaint asks the FEC to investigate and impose penalties; it charges the company, not Letlow.

Source

"CLC Alleges Federal Contractor Illegally Contributed $100,000 to Letlow-Supporting Super PAC" and the complaint filed with the FEC, Campaign Legal Center, August 26, 2026. Photo: U.S. House of Representatives, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tom Tiffany Calls Union Leaders 'Kingpins' He Doesn't Worry About. He Was the Only Member of the Entire House Who Skipped the Vote on Workers' Right to Organize.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:27:51 +0000

About 200,000 people in Wisconsin go to work under a union contract. At a voter event in Superior this month, Tom Tiffany was asked whether he cared about their support.

He said he didn't worry about their leaders.

"Those couple people that are kingpins, I don't worry about them."

In the same answer he said "who I'm after is the rank-and-file voter." Audio of the exchange was obtained by the Milwaukee Courier and reported by Civic Media on August 25, 2026.

It's a clean line — the bosses versus the workers, and he's for the workers. There is a way to check it. Congress votes, and the votes are public.

The vote he didn't cast

On March 9, 2021, the U.S. House passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. It's the biggest rewrite of labor law in decades: it would penalize employers who retaliate against workers for organizing, narrow the loophole that lets companies call employees "independent contractors" to strip their rights, and override the state right-to-work laws that let people opt out of paying for the union bargaining they benefit from.

It passed 225 to 206. One member of the House did not vote.

That member was Tom Tiffany.

Not one of a handful. Not part of a bloc making a point. Out of every member of the House, on the single largest labor bill to reach the floor in a generation, exactly one person's name has "Not Voting" beside it, and it is his. The roll call is on the Clerk of the House's own website. Anyone can open it.

Voting no would at least be a position. This is the rank-and-file voter he says he's after, asking where he stood, and the record answering: he wasn't there.

The vote he did cast

Eleven months later he was there, and it was worse.

On February 7, 2022, the House voted on the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Forced arbitration is the clause buried in a lot of employment contracts that says if something happens to you at work, you can't sue — you go to a private arbitrator the company picked, in secret, with no appeal. For years it was the standard way a company made a harassment complaint disappear. The bill said that clause can't be enforced against someone alleging sexual assault or sexual harassment.

It was not a close call, and it was not a partisan one. It passed 335 to 97. Every single Democrat voted yes. So did 113 Republicans — more than half the Republican conference.

Tiffany was one of the 97 who voted no. President Biden signed it into law anyway.

A month after that, on March 17, 2022, the House passed the broader FAIR Act, which would have banned forced arbitration clauses in employment, consumer and civil rights disputes generally. It passed 222 to 209. Tiffany voted no on that one too.

What this adds up to

Put the three next to each other and the pattern isn't about union leadership at all.

The PRO Act protects the worker who wants to organize. He didn't vote.
H.R. 4445 protects the worker who was harassed. He voted no, while 113 Republicans voted yes.
The FAIR Act protects the worker who signed away her right to a courtroom on her first day. He voted no.

Two of the three have nothing to do with unions at all. All three are about what happens to an individual employee when the employer has all the leverage — which is the exact person Tiffany says he's after.

This is not new for him either. He cosponsored a national right-to-work bill in three different terms after voting for Act 10 as a state legislator. Associated Builders and Contractors, the construction lobby that fights union project-labor agreements, is on the list of top donors to his congressional campaign account this cycle, at $2,500 from its PAC. And he voted for Trump's budget bill, which Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski says could cost "potentially 270,000 Wisconsinites" their health coverage — coverage a lot of those 200,000 union members bargained for.

The endorsement gap

Tiffany's Democratic opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, has picked up endorsements from nearly every local labor union. Asked about his own, Tiffany said: "As of now, I don't know that we have any labor union endorsements."

Crowley's response to the "kingpins" line was that Tiffany is "selling out hard-working Wisconsinites," and pledged to "always protect their right to organize and to fight for fair wages."

You don't have to take a Democrat's word for it. The roll calls above are on a government website, they take about a minute to read, and none of them has a union president's name anywhere in it.

What the record shows

Tom Tiffany told a Superior audience he doesn't worry about the union "kingpins," only the rank-and-file. He was the only member of the entire U.S. House who did not vote on the PRO Act in 2021, the biggest labor bill in decades. He was one of 97 Republicans — against 113 in his own party who voted yes — to oppose ending forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims in 2022, and he voted against the broader FAIR Act a month later. Every one of those bills protects an individual worker, and two of them have nothing to do with unions at all. About 200,000 Wisconsinites work under a union contract, and by his own account he does not know of a single labor union endorsement.

Source

"Tom Tiffany says he doesn't care about labor union support: 'kingpins, I don't worry about them'", Civic Media, August 25, 2026, and "Tom Tiffany's anti-worker record includes votes weakening protections for sexual harassment victims", The Milwaukee Courier, August 25, 2026. Photo: Getty Images via Civic Media.

Five Republicans Took the AI Industry's Money or Bought Its Stock. One of Them Wrote the Bill That Would End Your Town's Say.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:40:22 +0000

All over the country right now, ordinary people are showing up at city council meetings to ask the same three questions about the data center somebody wants to build near them.

How much of our water will it drink? What happens to our electric bill? And who decided this?

In Luther, Oklahoma, so many people came to that meeting it needed armed security and metal detectors. The town voted for a six-month moratorium. So did Oklahoma City, Edmond and Broken Arrow. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law. Oklahoma passed a law making the giant power users pay for their own infrastructure instead of putting it on everyone's rates.

That is democracy working exactly the way it's supposed to. People noticed something, went to a meeting, and got a rule written.

The industry's biggest political spender has decided to make those rules impossible.

Its main political vehicle, a super PAC called Leading the Future, raised $125 million in 2025 and opened 2026 with $70 million on hand, CNBC reported. Its funders are Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and the AI company Perplexity. Its purpose, as CNBC described it, is backing candidates who support national AI regulations rather than state-by-state rules.

Strip the phrasing out and that means: one set of rules, written in Washington, that cancels the ones Luther and Edmond and Sacramento just wrote.

There is a second AI network in this election, and it wants the opposite thing. Public First Action — a nonprofit the AI company Anthropic gave a self-reported $20 million — bankrolls super PACs whose stated priorities include preserving state authority over AI rather than preempting it. It has spent millions of its own on congressional races. Both networks run their money through blandly named vehicles, and both are writing checks to Republicans. The industry is split on what the rules should say and united on paying the people who will write them.

Here are five Republicans on the receiving end of that money — or holding the stock.

Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting

Jay Obernolte of California is the most powerful voice on AI in the House. He chairs the Science Committee's research and technology subcommittee, chaired the House AI Task Force, sits on Energy and Commerce, and is now chair of the House Republican Policy Committee.

On July 23, 2026 he introduced the FRONTIER Act. Section 9 says no state "may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers" in the covered areas — risk transparency, outside auditing, and incident reporting. There is no sunset date. As written, it is permanent.

Two of those three are things California's own SB 53 requires. The congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law his own state just passed.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture fund tapped Obernolte to launch a nonprofit called the AI Coalition, which sells early-stage AI companies — in its own words — "meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations." Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. We laid out that arrangement in full in August.

At the top of his own contributor list: employees of the AI company Anthropic, at $71,862 on OpenSecrets' current count, with Andreessen Horowitz third.

Kevin Hern got $850,000 in a race he had already won

On June 2, 2026, Leading the Future told the Washington Reporter it would spend $850,000 backing Kevin Hern in his Oklahoma Senate race.

The Reporter's own words for that race: Hern "is on a glide path to the Senate." He had Trump's endorsement, in a state where the Republican nominee wins. He did not need the money.

That is what makes it worth looking at. In a close race, money is trying to win. In a race nobody can lose, money is buying something else — and Hern will spend six years voting on exactly the question Leading the Future was formed to settle. He sits on Ways and Means, which writes the tax treatment that decides how profitable a data center is to build.

Meanwhile four Oklahoma cities were pausing data centers and Gov. Kevin Stitt was signing a law to keep the industry's power costs off residential bills. Only 1% of Hern's money comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him #434 out of 440 House members.

Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers

Carlos De La Cruz has never held office. He's an Air Force veteran running in Texas's 35th District, a seat the Legislature redrew in 2025 to make winnable for a Republican.

His campaign has raised about $1.05 million. Outside groups have spent about $2.35 million on his behalf — per the FEC's own independent expenditure records. The two biggest: $1,492,321 from an AI-industry super PAC and $615,885 from a crypto one.

The AI group is called Defending Our Values PAC — a name that tells a voter nothing. That is deliberate. The Texas Tribune found AI-linked super PACs behind at least seven Texas congressional candidates, going by "generic-sounding names" and running ads that don't mention the technology — because polling shows most voters don't want data centers near them.

But this is the industry's other side. FEC records show that almost every dollar Defending Our Values has raised this cycle — about $8.2 million — came from Public First Action, the Anthropic-backed nonprofit that wants state AI authority kept, not cancelled. De La Cruz is not being carried by the preemption campaign. He is being carried by the people fighting it — and if he wins in November, he arrives owing them just the same.

Defending Our Values also put $808,341 behind Kevin Hern, who is already getting Leading the Future's money. Both AI camps, the same Oklahoma Republican. We traced the whole $2.1 million in De La Cruz's race in August.

Julia Letlow signed a gag order with Meta, then bought Meta stock

Julia Letlow of Louisiana signed a nondisclosure agreement on June 29, 2024 with Laidley LLC — a shell company belonging to Meta. It gave her confidential details of a $50 billion data center in her own district.

The agreement barred her from even acknowledging that the agreement existed. A member of Congress signed a contract legally preventing her from telling her constituents she was discussing a $50 billion project on their land.

Then, as WWNO and the Gulf States Newsroom reported, she started buying Meta stock — and Nvidia, whose chips run Meta's data centers. Her broker notified her on August 11, 2025, more than a month after she sold her last Meta shares. She did not disclose the trades until January 13, 2026, in the report that carried 210 late-filed trades from the previous two years — 100 of them, the Meta and Nvidia stock included, more than a year late, worth between $225,000 and $3.19 million. The penalty for that is $200, and it is often waived. Her office says she doesn't direct her own trades. We walked through the full record in August.

She is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Lisa McClain's family bought into xAI a week before the Pentagon wired it into the military

Lisa McClain of Michigan is the No. 4 Republican in the House. On December 15, 2025 her husband bought between $100,001 and $250,000 of private stock in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI.

Seven days later, the Pentagon announced it was integrating xAI's Grok into its platform for military personnel. Three weeks after that it expanded the deal to classified defense networks. Musk later folded xAI into SpaceX, and when SpaceX went public in June, CNBC reported the family could be sitting on a paper gain of as much as $150,000.

There is no evidence she knew what the Pentagon was planning. What there is: a household with 1,443 trades in three years, two separate late-disclosure violations in a single year, and a seat on the Financial Services Committee. The details are here.

What it looks like where you live

None of this stays in Washington.

In southwest Missouri, hundreds of residents packed meetings to oppose a data center on the west side of Joplin, and most of the letters their city council received said no. One letter said yes. It came from their congressman, Eric Burlison, who told a forum in Carthage that "what the business is doing doesn't matter" and suggested the people asking about the water table were afraid of the unknown.

In Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules, while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs.

And this week, Trump's EPA moved to scrap the federal rule requiring states to tell the public when a facility applies for an air pollution permit at all — so you may not learn a data center is coming until the permit is approved or the concrete is poured.

Every one of those is the same move at a different altitude: take the decision away from the people who live there.

What the money shows

An AI super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president and Palantir's co-founder raised $125 million to elect candidates who will replace state and local AI rules with a single federal one. It committed $850,000 to Kevin Hern in a race he had already won. The industry's rival network — the one that wants states to keep their AI authority — put $1.5 million of the $2.35 million behind first-time candidate Carlos De La Cruz, more than twice what his own campaign raised, and another $808,341 behind Hern. Jay Obernolte, who wrote the bill that would permanently preempt state AI laws, helped launch a nonprofit charging AI startups up to $3,500 a month for "influence over the regulations." Julia Letlow signed a secrecy agreement with Meta and then bought Meta and Nvidia stock she disclosed over a year late, and Lisa McClain's family bought a private stake in xAI a week before the Pentagon wired its product into military systems.

Michael Whatley Spent $1.5 Million on an Ad About His Truck. His Campaign Committees Spent $136,000 on Private Jets.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:55:38 +0000

The ad opens with a truck.

Michael Whatley, in a flannel shirt, turns the key on a GMC pickup. "Whatley's driven thousands of miles across North Carolina trying to fix our country and help working families," the narrator says. Then the ad cuts to his Democratic opponent, former Governor Roy Cooper, in a tuxedo, accused of "siding with national liberals."

The message is not subtle. One of these men drives a truck. The other one wears a tuxedo.

Whatley has spent more than $1.5 million airing that ad across North Carolina, according to estimates by AdImpact.

Here is what the flannel shirt is covering up. Since last September, Whatley's campaign committees have spent over $136,000 on private jet travel — including more than $104,000 flying a $1.9 million Cessna that a reporter traced, through a shell company and a P.O. Box, to a construction executive who went to federal prison for defrauding the government and was pardoned by Donald Trump.

That reporting comes from Judd Legum at Popular Information, who went through thousands of pages of campaign finance filings to find it.

$104,749.73 to a shell company in Wyoming

Start with the paper trail, because Whatley's campaign clearly did not want anyone to follow it.

In 2025, the Whatley for Senate campaign reported five payments for "airfare" to something called N5YD LLC. They ranged from $8,243.10 to $21,615.24.

In 2026, two more payments — $8,426.28 and $9,575.87 — went to N5YD LLC from the Whatley Buckhout Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that benefits Whatley and Laurie Buckhout, a Republican running for Congress in North Carolina. The most recent payment, $19,701.42 on June 23, came from the Whatley Victory Committee. You can find it on page 4,946 of that committee's quarterly filing.

Add it up: $104,749.73.

N5YD LLC was registered anonymously in Wyoming in 2022. Wyoming is where you go when you don't want your name on a company. But the filings gave it away anyway.

The first payment listed N5YD LLC's address as 1613 W Roosevelt Blvd in Monroe, North Carolina. That is the address of the Boggs Group, a large construction company that rebranded itself as TrueRock in 2023. Later payments switched to a P.O. Box in Monroe — the same P.O. Box the Boggs Group uses, and the same one Drew Boggs used in 2021 to make a $10,490.58 in-kind contribution to the North Carolina Republican Party.

Whatley was the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party in 2021.

Union County's own public tax records finish the job. They show that N5YD LLC is a shell for a 2001 Cessna 525A valued at $1,931,487. N5YD is the jet's tail number. The company that "owns" the plane is named after the plane.

One more detail worth sitting with: N5YD LLC was formally dissolved by the state of Wyoming in 2023 for tax delinquency. Whatley's committees have been writing checks to a company that legally stopped existing three years ago.

The man behind the jet went to prison for cheating the government

In 2015, Carl Andrew "Drew" Boggs was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Department of Transportation and money laundering conspiracy.

The scheme ran for ten years. Boggs and his co-defendants won federally and state-funded construction contracts by falsely certifying that a "disadvantaged business enterprise" would do part of the work and get paid for it. That program exists to give small, disadvantaged contractors a real shot at public work. Boggs used it as a password.

In reality, Boggs's own companies did the work. The disadvantaged business — a trucking company called Styx Cuthbertson Trucking — got a kickback for going along with it.

The cover-up is the part people remember. Prosecutors described payments routed through Styx's bank accounts, and magnetic decals with the "Styx" logo stuck over the "Boggs" logo on company trucks. Peel off the sticker and the real name is underneath.

Over those ten years, Boggs took in 37 federal contracts worth $87.6 million.

Another North Carolina Republican wanted nothing to do with that money. In 2014, Governor Pat McCrory gave away more than $10,000 in contributions tied to Boggs and his family, donating it to the Durham Rescue Mission and the Joe Martin ALS Foundation. "Taking advantage of a program designed to help disadvantaged businesses is wrong and our campaign will not be associated with these actions," a McCrory spokesperson said at the time.

Whatley's committees kept paying to fly the plane. Boggs also donated $6,612 directly to the Whatley Victory Committee in May and June of this year.

Trump pardoned him on the last day of his first term

Drew Boggs was pardoned by President Trump on January 20, 2021 — the final day of Trump's first term. "Since his release, Mr. Boggs has rebuilt his company, has employed hundreds of people, and has dedicated countless hours and financial resources to his community," the White House said.

Whatley has defended Trump's pardons before. He has publicly defended the January 6 pardons, calling the prosecutions a "ridiculous persecution" and backing payments to rioters — including men who were later convicted of child sex crimes.

Now a jet that traces back to a Trump pardon recipient is how he gets around North Carolina.

And a second jet, from a second donor

The Cessna linked to Boggs isn't the whole bill.

On June 16, the Whatley Victory Committee paid $31,247.46 to Old Well Aviation LLC for more private jet travel. FAA records show Old Well Aviation owns a Cessna 525 CitationJet. The company is managed by Charlotte-area developers — one of them, Eric Wood, donated $2,500 to the Whatley Victory Committee in May 2026.

So the pattern is the same twice over. A donor is tied to a jet company. The donor gives Whatley money. Whatley's committees pay that company for flights.

Total private jet spending: about $136,000 since last September.

This is not the first time his story hasn't matched his record

Whatley's whole pitch is that he's the regular guy in the race. The trouble is how often the receipts say otherwise.

He spent a decade lobbying for oil and gas — his firm took $3.5 million, including $1.2 million from energy clients — and his campaign bio doesn't mention the career at all.

He and his wife hold between $163,000 and $445,000 in Duke Energy stock, while Duke has spent the last year asking North Carolina regulators to raise residential power bills.

And when reporters have shown up with questions, organizers at his events have called the police on them rather than let them in.

Popular Information asked his campaign about the jet flights. The Whatley campaign did not respond.

Is any of this illegal? No.

Nothing described here is against the law. The flights are ordinary campaign expenditures, disclosed in Whatley's own filings — which is how a reporter found them. Nobody has alleged a deal, and this post is not alleging one.

What is left is a question of judgment, and it is a fair one to ask of a Senate candidate. Whatley is running for a seat that helps decide how federal contracting works. The man the plane traces back to won $87.6 million in federal contracts by faking his way through a program built for disadvantaged businesses. Another North Carolina Republican, Pat McCrory, looked at money connected to that same man and gave it away. Whatley took the flights, and took $6,612 from him on top of them.

What the filings show

Whatley spent $1.5 million telling North Carolina he drives a truck, while his campaign committees paid about $136,000 to fly on private jets tied to two of his donors — one of them a construction executive who went to prison for defrauding the federal government and was pardoned by Trump. Asked about it, his campaign said nothing.

Source

Judd Legum, "GOP Senate candidate, campaigning as truck-driving everyman, travels by private jet", Popular Information, August 24, 2026.

Mike Rogers Says He's 'Proud' to Have AIPAC's Support. His Own Team Asked Them to Take Their Name Off the Ads.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:04:21 +0000

Here is what Mike Rogers (MI) told Axios on the record this week:

"I welcome any and all support from the pro-Israel community and I'm proud to have their involvement."

And here is what his allies had been doing off the record, according to Axios' Alex Isenstadt: asking AIPAC not to run ads on his behalf at all.

Rogers spoke with AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin in Los Angeles. The next day, the group shelved a video ad it had already cut attacking his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed. AIPAC officials were, per Axios, angry. Direct talks between the two camps have since gone cold, and Republican donors with ties to both sides are trying to broker peace.

He didn't ask them to stop spending. He asked them to stop appearing.

This is the part that matters, and it's easy to miss.

Rogers' team did not tell AIPAC to keep its money. According to Axios, they urged the group "to get involved without putting the group's name front and center." The specific options they floated:

Direct AIPAC's donors to a pro-Rogers super PAC instead, so the checks arrive without the AIPAC label on the ad.
Route it through the joint fundraising group the Rogers campaign set up with the national Republican Party.
Hire AIPAC's political strategists to help guide Rogers' own effort.

Same money. Same strategists. Same message. Different name at the bottom of the screen.

That is not a candidate distancing himself from a donor over principle. That's a candidate who wants the spending and has concluded the disclosure is the liability. AIPAC's own answer was that this wouldn't work anyway — Rogers is strongly pro-Israel, they told his team, so El-Sayed would tie him to the group regardless.

Why now

AIPAC's super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million trying to stop El-Sayed in Michigan's Democratic primary. He won anyway — and he won partly by running against that spending, using it to paint his opponent as bought. "AIPAC, if you're listening, come back and burn it again," he said before the primary.

We wrote about that $32 million bet when it looked like the group would simply roll its money into the general election on Rogers' behalf. AIPAC's super PAC ended July with nearly $60 million in the bank, and the group rarely spends at that scale in general elections at all.

Michigan has one of the largest Arab American populations in the country. A recent Fox News poll found 55% of Michigan voters oppose continued U.S. aid to Israel.

So Rogers' team ran the numbers and reached the obvious conclusion: in this state, in this race, having AIPAC's name on your ads costs more votes than the ads buy. Their proposed fix was not to turn down the help. It was to make the help harder for voters to see.

What voters are supposed to do with that

Campaign disclosure exists for exactly one reason: so that when an ad runs, you can find out who paid for it and decide how much that changes your reading of it.

Rogers' team looked at a group whose involvement they believed voters would hold against them, and went looking for a way to keep the involvement and lose the visibility. Whatever you think of AIPAC, that instinct should worry you, because it doesn't stop at one donor. Any interest a candidate thinks voters would punish him for taking money from is a candidate for the same treatment.

It also fits a pattern with this candidate. Rogers is the same man who called Trump's 2020 election lies the behavior of "Third World dictatorships" in a 2021 op-ed and now claims a van in Detroit stole his own election, without producing evidence. The public statement and the private position keep pointing in different directions.

Michigan votes November 3.

Source

Scoop: Mike Rogers-AIPAC rupture roils Michigan Senate race — Alex Isenstadt, Axios, August 22, 2026. Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios; photo: Sarah Rice/Getty Images.

Rick Jackson Ran Ads Promising Immigrants Who Break the Law Would Be 'Deported or Departed.' His Own Company Was Accused of Threatening to Call ICE on Nurses Who Tried to Quit.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:29:47 +0000

This spring, Georgians could not turn on a television without seeing the same commercial. Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor, looks straight into the camera and promises that immigrants who break the law on his watch will be "deported or departed." The ad ran nearly 9,000 times on Georgia stations.

At the exact same time, a company Jackson owns was fighting a lawsuit from immigrant nurses who said it had trapped them in contracts they could not get out of — and threatened to call immigration authorities on them when they tried.

On June 22, 2026 — days after Jackson became the Republican nominee for governor — that company agreed to pay $3 million to settle. CNN reported the story on August 20. Until now it had gotten almost no attention in the governor's race.

What the nurses said happened

The company is Avant Healthcare Professionals. Its business is recruiting nurses from other countries and placing them in American hospitals. Jackson Healthcare — the conglomerate Jackson founded in 2000 — bought Avant in 2018. Business records filed in Florida list Rick Jackson as Avant's manager.

Two nurses sued in 2023. Latoya Lewis came from Jamaica in 2021. Lucinda Byron came from St. Vincent and the Grenadines and started at a South Dakota hospital in 2022. Both signed multi-year contracts with Avant.

According to their complaint, what they found was this:

They were paid less than nurses the hospitals hired directly.
They could take almost no time off, and had little chance to move up.
They struggled to pay their bills on what Avant paid them.
When they tried to leave, Avant told them they owed money to cover the cost of bringing them here. Avant wanted $41,832 from Byron, due in 30 days.
Staff allegedly threatened to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and led them to believe that quitting could put their immigration status at risk.

That last part is the one to sit with. These nurses came in on EB-3 visas, which come with a green card. A green card does not generally require you to stay with the company that brought you here. The threat, their lawyers argued, was leverage — not law.

Here is how the nurses themselves put it in their complaint:

"Avant's 'employment' is essentially indentured servitude."

Their lawyers argued the contracts violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and federal wage law. Avant asked a federal judge to throw the trafficking claims out. The judge refused. The case moved to state court in Florida and grew into a class action.

The settlement: 5,219 workers, about $500 each

By November, both sides had identified 5,219 current and former Avant workers who qualified. A judge approved the deal in July 2026.

The payout is $3 million spread across all of them. A spokeswoman for Jackson Healthcare noted that of the workers getting money, "most will receive approximately $500 or less." Others get fees waived and nothing more.

Avant denied doing anything wrong, and the court never ruled that its practices were illegal. The company says it settled "to avoid the cost and distraction of continued litigation."

That is a normal thing for a company to say. It is a stranger thing for a company owned by a man running for governor on the promise that he will be the toughest person in Georgia on immigration.

This is not the first time

Avant's hiring practices drew federal scrutiny five years before Jackson bought it.

In February 2013, the U.S. Justice Department settled with Avant over hundreds of internet job postings that federal investigators said showed an illegal preference for foreign-trained workers over American ones. Avant paid a $27,750 penalty and agreed to change its policies.

So the record on this company reads: penalized by the federal government for favoring foreign workers over Americans, then sued by those same foreign workers for how it treated them once they got here.

Avant is not alone in the second part. Bloomberg Law counted at least 10 class actions by nurses over these contracts in 2024. And in 2025, New York Attorney General Letitia James recovered more than $660,000 for 71 foreign-recruited nurses from a different staffing agency that charged them up to $20,000 to quit. Her office called it labor trafficking. Some labor attorneys call these deals "stay-or-pay" contracts. California and New York have banned them.

Georgia has not.

Two Rick Jacksons

The gap between the campaign and the company is not subtle.

In a campaign ad that CNN says helped fuel his political rise this spring, Jackson says: "I don't care if you're a Muslim or a Mongolian. You don't have the right to force your culture on our country."

In Avant's own guide for the foreign workers it recruits, the company tells them: "You don't have to choose between the culture you came from and the one you're adapting to. Finding harmony between the two creates a well-rounded, multicultural identity."

It goes further than tone. Jackson is campaigning to help President Trump tighten the immigration system. Avant has been fighting that same administration over it. In 2020 the company sued the Trump administration over visa delays for nurses it was trying to bring in from the Philippines; the case was withdrawn after the visas came through. Earlier this year, Avant's senior vice president of global operations, Lesley Hamilton, said in a March video that a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas would cost the company more than she could calculate on the spot:

"That is a lot of money if we were to bring in the volume of nurses this year under the H1B that we brought in last year."

CNN asked Jackson's campaign how he plans to partner with Trump on immigration when his own company is in a fight with the administration over visa policy. The campaign did not respond.

CNN also asked whether Jackson supports more visas for foreign workers. No answer there either.

His spokesman, Garrison Douglas, said Jackson's focus is on "criminal illegal immigration and following the law," and that Avant's nurses "come to America legally, waiting several years, learn English, pay taxes and save lives."

Both things can be true. That is exactly the point: Jackson wants credit for a company that depends on legal immigration while running ads that treat immigration itself as the threat.

Who actually gets hurt

There are two sets of losers here, and they are not who the ads say they are.

The first is the nurses. People who sold everything to come here, took a job that paid less than the person working beside them, and were told leaving would cost them $41,832 and maybe their status.

The second is American nurses. Rachel Dempsey, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and associate director of the worker-rights firm Towards Justice, told CNN that hospitals like recruiting through staffing companies because those workers are typically paid less — which means American-trained nurses are competing against cheaper labor.

"It brings down wages for everybody," Dempsey said.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there will be about 190,000 openings for registered nurses every year over the next decade. Somebody is going to fill them. The question is whether they get paid fairly — and Jackson's company has spent years on the wrong side of that question while he ran ads about the border.

The pattern

This is the third time in a month Rick Jackson has said one thing on the campaign trail while his businesses did another.

He said he would never do business with the state of Georgia — 21 days after one of his companies renewed a state contract.

He says being a billionaire makes him incorruptible — while spending close to $200 million of his own money to win the office. Through April, every other donor in Georgia combined had given his campaign about $280,000.

And now: he promises immigrants who break the law will be "deported or departed," while a company he owns was accused of using the threat of ICE to keep immigrant nurses from quitting.

Jackson is not the only Republican running on a hard line while depending on the workers he campaigns against. Texas Governor Greg Abbott wants "exactly zero" foreign-visa teachers in a state that employs more of them than any other. The rhetoric is for us. The workforce is for them.

Georgians vote on this in November. It is worth knowing which Rick Jackson would be governor.

Source

Georgia GOP candidate Rick Jackson faces an immigration scandal at his company — CNN, August 20, 2026. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images.

A Republican Pollster Says Greg Abbott's Data Center Pause 'Found the Sweet Spot.' The Rural Texans It Was Aimed At Call It 'Smoke and Mirrors.'

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:45:44 +0000

Rural voters probably can't stop data centers from spreading across Texas. But they might be able to stop Greg Abbott.

That's the finding of POLITICO's reporting on the Texas governor's race, published August 19, 2026, and it should worry him more than any Democratic attack ad. Abbott is seeking a fourth term. He is bleeding support in the small towns that have carried him for eleven years. And the reason is data centers — an industry he courted, on a tax break that ballooned under him for all eleven of those years.

The same week, yellow was all around the Texas Capitol grounds — bandanas, pins, shirts, the signal of a grassroots movement against the 765-kV buildout. They rallied on the steps, then sat through a nine-hour hearing on data centers and the giant power lines being built to feed them.

These are not activists Abbott can dismiss. They are his voters.

He Courted Them, and the Tax Break Ballooned Under Him

There is no version of this story where Abbott is a bystander.

He branded Texas the "epicenter" of AI development. He stood next to Google's CEO to announce a $40 billion buildout. He presided over a data center sales tax break that has ballooned so far past its original estimate that the Comptroller's office now puts the state's forgone revenue at $1.3 billion in a single year, against an estimated $5.4 million in the break's first year in 2014. We laid out that whole record two weeks ago.

The result is a queue. About 90% of everything waiting to plug into the Texas power grid is a data center.

Then, in an Election Year, He Announced a Pause

In June, Abbott proposed guardrails — make data centers use water-efficient cooling, repeal their sales tax break, make them pay their own power infrastructure costs. In early August he went further and directed state electricity regulators to pause approvals for new data centers to connect to the grid until the state audits the hundreds of projects lined up.

His campaign press secretary, Eduardo Leal, says this proves the Governor "has taken decisive action to ensure data centers pay their own way, bring their own power, reuse their own water, be good neighbors, and never force Texas families to subsidize their infrastructure."

Read that sentence again and notice what it concedes. Every problem it promises to fix is a problem that already exists — because of the eleven years that came before it.

And note the calendar. The grid operator's CEO told lawmakers the audit should be finished around December. The Legislature doesn't return until 2027. The election is in November.

The Pollster and the Voters

Here is the part that gives the game away.

A memo from Cygnal, a Republican pollster, said Abbott's pause "found the sweet spot to make data centers deliver for Texas."

The sweet spot. That is a Republican consultant assessing a governor's policy decision the way you'd assess an ad buy — not as a fix, as a position.

Abbott's own voters reached the same conclusion, and they didn't need a memo.

Shawn Nanny, a Republican county commissioner in Tom Green County, told POLITICO his neighbors were briefly encouraged by the pause and then soured on it. They decided it was a ploy to get rural voters to drop their guard. "They think it was all smoke and mirrors," Nanny said.

Mary Jo Bloomquist, a Republican in Hood County: "Personally, I think it's just covering his butt. It makes him look like he's doing something, but he's really not." She says she can't recall ever voting for a Democrat. She won't vote for Abbott: "He sold Texans out to big business, and I just don't trust him anymore."

Greg Torres, the McCulloch County attorney and a Republican, is still voting for Abbott — and still said this: "There will be no enthusiasm for Governor Abbott this time in rural areas."

Nanny says some neighbors are talking about doing the unthinkable. In his words, what he hears is: "Yeah, we'll have a Democrat in there and grit our teeth and bear it, but hopefully we'll come out of it the following election."

The Numbers Behind the Anger

This isn't a handful of cranks. POLITICO reports that Texas Politics Project polling shows Abbott's approval among rural voters fell from 63% in 2018 to 48% this year — a 15-point collapse in his own base.

Recent Texas A&M and Fox News polls put Abbott just one point ahead of Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa. No Democrat has won the Texas governorship in more than 35 years. Abbott cannot lose much of rural Texas and survive that math.

The POLITICO Poll also found that 51% of rural U.S. adults oppose data centers, against 32% of urban residents. Rural Americans are more skeptical of big infrastructure generally — power plants, warehouses, airports — but their dislike of data centers runs higher than any of those.

Hinojosa is running straight at it, with an ad in rural markets targeting what she calls "Abbott Intelligence." Her line: "I'll fight to put the people of Texas first, not the billionaire class."

The Money Kept Coming

While rural Texans were being told the Governor was on their side, the checks kept clearing.

POLITICO reports that groups supporting Abbott have taken campaign contributions from data center developers and from a transmission company building some of the new 765-kilovolt power lines. C-suite officials at Oncor Electric — a co-applicant on one of those 765-kV segments — have given a pro-Abbott political action committee $265,000. Elon Musk gave the same PAC $500,000.

Abbott's pause covers data center hookups. It does not cover the $33 billion power line build-out that rural landowners are fighting just as hard — three first-of-their-kind lines that would cut across tens of thousands of acres of private property.

On that, Abbott has stayed publicly quiet, telling people to send their feedback to the Public Utility Commission. The commission is run by five commissioners, all appointed by the Governor. Abbott appointed every one of them.

His own Lieutenant Governor didn't stay quiet. After a July Senate hearing, Dan Patrick and Sen. Charles Schwertner, the Republican who chairs the Business and Commerce Committee, called on the commission to deny the pending 765-kV applications until the companies address what landowners have raised.

So Abbott moved on the half of the story that polls, and said nothing about the half his donors are building. That is what "the sweet spot" looks like from underneath.

It also isn't new. Earlier this summer he moved to break up San Antonio's city-owned utility — the one that says it has the lowest combined residential rates in Texas — in favor of retail providers, while utility PACs gave his campaign at least $230,000.

And Locally, There's Nothing They Can Do

The cruelest part is that rural Texans can't fix this at home either, because Abbott's party spent years making sure they couldn't.

In most unincorporated areas — where the majority of the state's planned data centers are going — counties can regulate drainage plans, floodway construction, septic tanks and driveway permits. That's the list. Then in 2025 the Legislature passed HB 2559, limiting how long a city can pause development. Counties weren't in the bill, and Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt took that to the Attorney General's office as proof they never had the power at all.

The threat worked without anyone winning a case. Hood County voted a moratorium down. Hill County passed one and rescinded it after a developer sued for $100 million. Tom Green County dropped the idea too.

"Right now it's just the Wild West," Navarro County Commissioner Jason Grant told POLITICO. Officials say they routinely learn about a data center only after the land is bought.

Rural Texas had legislators who might have fought this. Abbott removed a lot of them. When a bloc of 21 House Republicans, mostly from rural districts, blocked his school voucher plan in 2023, he spent more than $8 million of his own campaign funds backing primary challengers against his own party. Fifteen Republican incumbents lost across the 2024 primaries, a record. Suzanne Bellsnyder — a field director on Abbott's 2014 campaign, now running the Texas Rural Reporter — told POLITICO that when those members went, so did the Legislature's expertise on water rights and agriculture.

He Could Fix the Timing Tomorrow

Activists, landowners and state Rep. Rafael Anchía have all asked Abbott for one thing: call a special session so the Legislature can write data center rules now instead of in 2027. At the August rally, protesters shouted it as their group-photo caption — "one, two, three: special session!"

He hasn't called one. He calls them when he wants something. He called four in a single year — more than in any year with a regular session in the Legislature's 176-year history — with the last two of them aimed at forcing through vouchers, and another in 2025 to redraw the congressional map for Donald Trump.

Even the Republican who created the data center tax break is further along than Abbott. Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth told the August hearing he expects to carry the repeal himself: "I passed the bill to get it done. I'm going to probably carry the one to repeal it."

And Abbott isn't the only Texas Republican who sees the wreck coming. Two weeks ago, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said Republicans will lose elections over data centers, that Abbott has never returned his call in twelve years, and that other statewide Republicans stay quiet because they fear Abbott's $105 million war chest.

What It Costs

Strip out the politics and what's left is the water, the land and the electric bill.

Texans already know what it looks like when the people in charge treat the grid as somebody else's problem. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out the power and 246 Texans died. Four years later a state audit found the winterization inspections meant to prevent a repeat produced two violations out of 8,732 inspections.

Now the largest new industrial power demand in state history is being bolted onto that same grid, on a tax break the Legislature is scrambling to repeal, with an audit that reports back after the election.

Rural Texans asked their Governor for a pause with teeth. What they got was a pause a Republican pollster graded as good positioning. They noticed.

We deserve better.

Source

'We are not a bunch of woke Marxist liberals here': Rural voters scramble Texas election — Shelby Webb, POLITICO, August 19, 2026. Photo: Justin Sullivan/AFP via Getty Images.

Vivek Ramaswamy Spent $690,000 on Private Jets to Campaign in Ohio. Most of It Went to a Company Listed at a House He Owns.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:49:09 +0000

Ohio is about 220 miles across. You can drive from one border to the other in a few hours.

Vivek Ramaswamy has spent nearly $690,000 leasing private jets to campaign in it.

That number comes from his own campaign finance reports, reviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal. And the biggest piece of it is the part that should worry Ohio voters most.

Most of the Money Went to a Company at His Own Address

Of that $690,000, nearly $560,000 went to a company called V Leasing LLC.

The address listed for V Leasing LLC is a house Ramaswamy owns.

The remaining $130,000 or so went to TVPX Aircraft Solutions, a company in North Salt Lake, Utah.

Ramaswamy has also loaned his own campaign more than $25 million. Candidates are allowed to pay themselves back for loans like that out of money donors give them.

Put those two facts together and you get why a watchdog group is paying attention.

"If he is basically fronting money to rent a plane from himself, and then if he does not forgive the loans but reimburses himself, he'll essentially be using donor funds to pay himself," said Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Money comes in from supporters, goes out to a company at his house, and can come back to him again.

Ramaswamy's campaign did not answer the Ohio Capital Journal's questions. The paper says it sent them multiple times.

Thirty-Minute Flights

Federal flight records show where the plane actually went. In April and May alone, Ramaswamy flew to at least six campaign events. Several of the Ohio flights lasted about 30 minutes.

April 7 — Columbus to Port Clinton, for an event in Lakeside.
April 8 — Columbus to Cleveland, for an event with the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association.
April 15 — Columbus to Youngstown, to meet the Fraternal Order of Police at the Mahoning County Sheriff's Office.
May 13 — Columbus to Washington, D.C., for a campaign event with Medicare and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz.
May 21 — Columbus to Cleveland, for an event in Brecksville.
May 22–25 — Columbus to Salt Lake City, and back to Cleveland, for a data center energy conference.

David Cohen, who directs the Applied Politics Program at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute, said he can't think of another candidate for Ohio office who has used a private jet as their main way of getting to campaign events.

"He's flying between Columbus and Akron for crying out loud, and Columbus and Cleveland," Cohen said. "That's a two hour drive. Get in the car."

"The fact that Ramaswamy has spent two years flying around on his own private jet is really a bad look," he added. "I mean, let's face it: Ohio is not California or Texas."

What He Told Ohioans in May

Here is Ramaswamy talking to a Youngstown television station in May — during the same stretch of weeks as those flights.

"I love long drives."

"You think about the time we spend in Trumbull County, and you think about the time we even spend just going for a nice jog. You think about Cuyahoga National Park, not far from where we are. I'm a nature guy."

He was flying Columbus to Cleveland.

The Same Pattern, Again

This is not the first time Ramaswamy's campaign spending has been hard to see through.

The Ohio Capital Journal previously found that his campaign put more than half a million dollars on credit cards — a practice that hides what the money was actually spent on, because only the card company shows up in the filing. And the outside group buying his ads is funded overwhelmingly by five men who don't live in Ohio, through Ohio records that leave the purpose of the spending blank.

A jet leased from himself, a credit card that doesn't itemize, and out-of-state donors whose spending records are blank. Together they describe a campaign whose money is very difficult for an Ohio voter to follow.

Who This Is For

Ramaswamy is running to govern a state where people are struggling with what things cost. His answer to that has been a property tax plan that a progressive Ohio group estimates would cut about $4 billion a year from schools, police and fire departments.

His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, talks about driving a Jeep.

"As life becomes even more expensive for Ohio families, Vivek Ramaswamy is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars flying around the world to luxury destinations on his private jet, treating Ohio like a flyover state," said Addie Bullock, a spokeswoman for Acton's campaign. "Ohioans know they can't trust a billionaire who looks down at us from 30,000 feet to understand the challenges we're facing or to fight for us."

That's a campaign talking. But the underlying facts aren't a talking point — they're in the filings Ramaswamy submitted himself.

He spent $690,000 on jets to cross a state you can drive across in an afternoon. He sent most of it to a company listed at a house he owns. He has $25 million in loans out to his own campaign that donors' money can be used to repay. And when a reporter asked about it, his campaign said nothing at all.

Source

Megan Henry, "Ohio Governor Race: Vivek Ramaswamy spent nearly $700,000 leasing private jets for campaign events", Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026. Photo by WEWS.

Rick Jackson Signed a New State Contract on July 22. Three Weeks Later He Said He'd Never Do Business With Georgia.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:35:56 +0000

Rick Jackson, the billionaire Republican running for governor of Georgia, has a line he uses when reporters ask about the roughly $1 billion his companies have collected from Georgia state agencies.

He says he'll unwind it.

On Wednesday, August 12, he said it again:

"I don't want even the appearance that there's ethics impropriety and all that. … I never will do business with the state of Georgia."

11Alive reports the second sentence was about what he would do as governor.

Twenty-one days earlier, his company had signed a new one.

The contract

On July 22, 2026, a subsidiary of Jackson Healthcare called Locum Tenens renewed its contract with the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health, 11Alive's Doug Richards reported. Locum Tenens supplies temporary healthcare workers to the agency.

State records show the agency has paid the company $17,903,044 since 2022.

One of the renewal documents carries Rick Jackson's own signature.

And here is the detail that turns an awkward coincidence into something worth paying attention to: the renewed contract runs to June 30, 2027. Georgia's next governor is sworn in that January. The contract was written to last a full six months into the term of the person Jackson is running to become.

If he wins, he takes office as the head of the executive branch — and his own company holds a live contract with an agency he now oversees.

"A continuation," says the campaign

Jackson's campaign didn't dispute any of it. A spokesman told 11Alive:

"This is a continuation of a service provided to the state since 2021. As Rick has said before: after he is elected he will unwind any business with the state and not seek any new contracts."

Read that carefully, because it's doing a lot of work.

"A continuation" — a renewal signed three weeks ago is a new signature on a new agreement with a new end date. It is not the same thing as an old contract running out on its own.
"After he is elected" — the unwinding happens later. Between now and then, the money keeps coming.
"Not seek any new contracts" — a renewal, apparently, is not a new contract.

Asked directly whether Jackson would keep providing the service under the new agreement, the spokesman would only repeat that he'd "unwind any contracts he has with the state as governor."

That's a promise about the future being used to answer a question about what he did last month.

To be clear: this is legal

There is no law stopping a candidate for governor from doing business with the state. Jackson hasn't broken a rule.

That's exactly why it matters. He isn't being accused of doing something illegal. He's being measured against his own standard — the one he set himself, on a stage, in front of Georgia voters, three weeks after the signature.

His Democratic opponent, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, put it plainly at an event in Cobb County:

"He says he's going to dial back his business with the state, but my understanding is that just last week, he got another contract from the state. So don't just say it. Do it."

The pattern

This isn't the first time Jackson's public position and his private ledger have pointed in opposite directions.

His companies have been paid nearly $1 billion by Georgia state agencies since fiscal 2020, including about $709 million in federal pandemic money under a contract Georgia Health News described as sole-source, and whose bidding opportunity does not appear in the state's public database of contracting opportunities.
He owns part of a data center — and then told Georgia's business leaders that data centers should pay no property taxes.
He says he can't be bought, while spending $187 million of his own money to buy the governor's office.
He lent a bankrupt hospital $35 million at 14% interest and called it "venture philanthropy".

The through-line is not that Jackson is dishonest about money. It's that he keeps describing arrangements that benefit him as something other than what they are — a no-bid contract as normal business, a high-interest loan as charity, a renewal signed in July as a continuation of something from 2021.

What Georgians should ask

Georgia's Department of Behavioral Health serves people in mental health crisis and people fighting addiction. It is chronically stretched. The temporary staffing it buys is not a luxury — it's how understaffed facilities keep the lights on.

The question isn't whether Locum Tenens should provide those workers. It's whether the man who owns Locum Tenens should also be the man who appoints the commissioner of the agency buying them, sets that agency's budget, and signs off on the next contract.

Jackson says he'll fix that after the election. He had a chance to fix it on July 22, and instead he signed.

Georgia deserves a governor whose promises are kept before the votes are counted, not after.

Source

Despite pledge to 'unwind' his business, Rick Jackson extends a state contract — Doug Richards, 11Alive, August 18, 2026.

Mike Rogers Took $95,000 From Phone Companies. Then He Wrote the Bill to Let Them Hand Your Data to the Government.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:25:33 +0000

There is a version of this story where a congressman writes a surveillance bill because he honestly believes it keeps us safe. Then there is the version where you look at who was paying him.

Mike Rogers (MI), the Republican running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, collected nearly $95,000 from the phone and wireless industry while he was in Congress and while he has been running for the Senate, according to federal campaign finance records reviewed by the Michigan Advance. The money came from AT&T, Verizon, and CTIA — the trade group for the wireless companies.

During the same years, Rogers wrote and pushed a bill that would have let those exact companies hand your private information to the federal government without a warrant. After he left Congress, one of them hired him.

The money

The Advance went through two decades of Federal Election Commission filings, covering 2006 through 2025. It found at least 21 separate contributions to Rogers for Congress, Rogers for Senate, and his own leadership PAC, Securing America's Future.

AT&T — $56,000
Verizon — $28,500, across 17 contributions between 2007 and 2014
CTIA, the wireless trade association — $10,000, starting in 2008

That's the industry. Now here's what he did for it.

The bill

As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act in November 2011. Everyone called it CISPA.

The bill would have let phone companies and internet providers legally hand over large amounts of private customer data — including information that identifies you personally — to federal agencies like the National Security Agency. No judge had to sign off. And the companies got broad protection from being sued for doing it.

Civil liberties groups hated it. So did consumer groups. So did a number of conservative and libertarian organizations, who argued the bill's language was so vague that the government could vacuum up enormous amounts of personal information without a warrant.

The phone companies loved it. AT&T publicly backed the bill in a November 2011 statement posted by Rogers' committee, saying it looked forward to "continuing to work with Chairman Rogers." By that November, AT&T had already given Rogers $27,000. Verizon, which lobbied for the bill alongside AT&T, had given him $23,000 by the time he reintroduced it in 2013.

CISPA passed the House and died in the Senate. Rogers brought it back in 2013. It cleared the House a second time that April and stalled again. When he reintroduced it, CTIA and US Telecom supplied supportive quotes for his own press releases. CTIA had given him $6,000 by then.

Rogers also cosponsored two resolutions, in 2010 and 2011, to stop the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband — the rules that keep internet providers from deciding which websites load fast and which load slow.

What he said while he was doing it

Rogers didn't just wave off the privacy objections. He made an argument that is genuinely hard to read twice.

"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated."

That was Rogers in 2013, defending warrantless government surveillance of Americans.

The same year, pushing for CISPA, he told the public the NSA wasn't watching Americans online at all:

"Our NSA is not monitoring the Internet here in the United States. I can guarantee you that."

He could not guarantee that. Two years later, The New York Times and ProPublica reported, using documents from Edward Snowden, that the NSA's ability to monitor internet traffic rested on a decades-long partnership with a single company — AT&T. The agency's files gave the program the codename "Fairview," dated it to 1985, and described AT&T's "extreme willingness to help." AT&T had installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its internet hubs on U.S. soil, far more than Verizon.

The company Rogers was legislating for, and taking money from, was the company doing the thing he guaranteed wasn't happening.

Then he went to work for them

Rogers left Congress in 2015. In 2016 — one year later — AT&T hired him as its chief security adviser, a job the Detroit News confirmed in 2024 while reporting on his industry ties. He advised the company on the same issues that had come before his committee.

That was one of several industry jobs. From 2018 to 2024 he sat on the advisory board of Telefónica, a giant international phone company. One of its subsidiaries operates in Venezuela — and Telefónica's own 2022 transparency report disclosed that it had intercepted the private communications of large numbers of its Venezuelan customers at the request of the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro.

Business Insider reported in 2024 that Rogers' post-Congress work in telecom and cybersecurity earned him $2 million in income, and that his assets had grown to $17.5 million.

The revolving door didn't stop the checks, either. When Rogers ran for Senate in 2024 and lost, AT&T's PAC gave him $10,000. In his current race, AT&T's corporate PAC has given him another $5,000.

This is the pattern, not the exception

If this were the only industry that had paid Rogers and then gotten what it wanted, you could call it a coincidence. It isn't.

We've already documented that Rogers voted against a bill to stop gas price gouging after taking nearly $700,000 from oil and gas. We've documented that he promises to root out "every waste, every fraud" while taking $234,000 from donors with fraud cases of their own. His own report card lays out three decades of banking money and a stated desire to sit on the committee that regulates banks.

His campaign's answer to all of this is that the money follows the man, not the other way around. Spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet told the Advance that Rogers "has protected the national security interests of the United States his entire career, and nothing is going to change that."

His opponent's campaign puts the career total at $5.2 million in corporate PAC money.

What it means for Michigan

A U.S. senator votes on who gets to see your text messages, your emails, and your browsing history. They vote on whether the companies that carry those messages can be sued when they hand them over. They vote on whether your internet provider gets to throttle the websites it doesn't like.

Rogers has a record on every one of those questions. He wrote the bill to make the handover legal. He cosponsored the resolutions to strip the FCC of its authority. He told the public the surveillance wasn't happening while the company paying him was helping run it. And when he left office, that company put him on the payroll.

Michigan deserves a senator who works for the people whose data is being handed over — not for the companies handing it over.

Source

Telecom industry gave Mike Rogers nearly $100K while he pushed to deepen government data sharing — Ben Solis, Michigan Advance, August 19, 2026. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Europe Told Giant Companies to Check Whether Their Products Were Made by Children. Eight Republicans Want America to Fight Back.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:28:33 +0000

Europe passed a law a couple of years ago that says something simple.

If you are one of the biggest companies in the world, you have to look at who makes your products. If the answer involves forced labor or child labor, you have to do something about it. And you have to tell people what you found.

That's the law. Eight Republicans we track just filed a bill to fight it.

What the Bill Does

Craig Goldman filed it on July 23. He calls it the Stop EU Overreach Act.

It orders the U.S. government to open a formal trade investigation against Europe — the first step toward tariffs. When the government last ran one of these against China, it ended with four rounds of tariffs from 7.5% to 25% on around $370 billion worth of Chinese imports. Six more Section 301 investigations have been opened since 2025.

So this is not a letter of complaint. It is the opening move of a trade fight.

Over What, Exactly

The bill goes after four European rules. Stripped of the official names, here is what they ask companies to do:

Check your supply chain for forced labor and child labor, and fix what you find.
Tell the public how much pollution you produce.
Don't sell products made by cutting down forests.
Pay a charge on imports based on the carbon that went into making them.

The first one is the big one, and it is worth being precise about what it covers. The list of abuses companies have to look for is built on the international agreements against forced labor, against putting children to work below a minimum age, and against the worst forms of child labor. The list of worst forms it names starts with the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and forced labor.

That is the thing eight members of Congress want investigated as an unfair trade practice.

"American Businesses" Means Something Very Specific Here

Goldman's reason:

"This important legislation will protect American businesses from the EU's woke regulations and extreme green energy mandates."

Greg Steube's:

"American businesses should answer to American law, not to regulators in Brussels."

Here is what neither of them mentions.

That European law does not apply to small or medium businesses. Europe wrote them out of it on purpose. To be covered, a company has to have:

at least 5,000 employees, and
1.5 billion euros in yearly sales

A foreign company like an American one only gets covered if it sells more than a billion and a half euros' worth of product inside Europe.

Five thousand employees. A billion and a half euros in sales. That is not the machine shop in Fort Worth or the citrus packer in Florida. Those businesses are already exempt. This rule reaches a small club of the largest corporations on earth.

So when the press release says this protects "American businesses," it means a handful of enormous ones. Nobody's family company is being asked to do anything here.

Where the $1 Trillion Number Comes From

The press release says these European rules could cost American businesses more than $1 trillion to comply with.

Greg Steube's office credits it to the Hudson Institute — a conservative think tank, not a neutral scorekeeper like the Congressional Budget Office — and puts the study's finding at between $637 billion and $1.093 trillion, for the supply-chain rule on its own. It is an advocacy group's estimate, taken at the top of its own range, being used to sell an advocacy bill.

It's also worth holding that trillion-dollar number next to the fact above: the rule only reaches companies with 5,000 employees and billions in sales.

The Eight Who Signed On

Goldman filed the bill. Nine members cosponsored it. Eight of the ten are Republicans we track:

Craig Goldman (TX-12)
Greg Steube (FL-17)
Gus Bilirakis (FL-12)
Randy Weber (TX-14)
August Pfluger (TX-11)
Warren Davidson (OH-8)
Pete Sessions (TX-17)
Roger Williams (TX-25)

For Warren Davidson, voting against protections for children in other countries is not new. He was the only Ohioan who wouldn't vote to condemn Russia for stealing Ukrainian children — a resolution that passed 390 to 9.

You Would Pay for the Fight

There's a second cost here, and it lands on you.

A trade investigation is how tariff fights start, and tariffs are a tax Americans pay at the register. The Tax Foundation puts the cost of Trump's tariffs at $1,000 for the average household in 2025 and $840 in 2026. We've written before about how Trump keeps raising prices this way, and how nearly every Republican senator voted to keep the tariffs.

Europe is one of our biggest trading partners. Picking a fight with it is not free, and the people who pay are not the eight men who filed the bill.

Say It Plainly

Nobody here is in favor of child labor. That's not the claim, and it would be dishonest to make it.

The claim is narrower and easier to prove. Eight Republicans decided that asking the world's largest companies to go look for forced labor — and write down what they find — is "woke," is Brussels bossing us around, and is worth risking a trade war over.

Someone weighed the paperwork against what the paperwork is for, and the paperwork lost.

Sources

H.R. 9892, the Stop EU Overreach Act, filed July 23, 2026, and its official cosponsor list
Reps. Goldman, Arrington, Steube Introduce Bill to Counter the EU's Corporate Sustainability Directives — Texas GOP Vote, August 17, 2026
Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence — European Commission
The EU corporate sustainability due diligence directive — UNICEF Child Rights and Business