MAGA Report Cards — Corruption & Ethics

Jim Pillen Sent Nebraska's State Patrol to Work With ICE. His Own Hog Farms Employed Undocumented Workers for More Than a Decade.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:49:30 +0000

Nebraska's governor has spent this year putting the machinery of his state behind President Trump's deportation drive. He directed the Nebraska State Patrol to partner with ICE. He turned a former state prison into an ICE detention center. In December he posted that "the criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed."

On September 9, the Flatwater Free Press and the New York Times published what they found when they looked at the hog company that made him rich.

Jim Pillen built Pillen Family Farms from 60 sows on a dirt lot into one of the largest hog producers in the country. Reporters reviewed state and federal court records and interviewed more than 40 current and former employees, prosecutors, immigration lawyers and community organizers. What they documented:

At least 20 Pillen hog farms employed undocumented immigrants.
Six former workers acknowledged that they had no legal status while working for the company.
At least 12 Pillen workers were charged between 2015 and 2024 with using fake or stolen identification to get hired. Nine were convicted. Three did not appear in court.
At least 10 more used false identities, according to them or their relatives, and were never charged.

The reporting describes undocumented labor as an open secret at some Pillen operations. David Armendariz, who overstayed a tourist visa in 2008 and worked at two Pillen farms through 2023, said a farm manager accepted the fake driver's license he had bought when he was hired — the same ID that got rejected when he tried to use it somewhere else years later.

His description of how it worked is one sentence long:

"Everyone knows that it's not your name, but they don't ask you what your name is."

The E-Verify defense, and when it started

Pillen and his company deny knowing. His spokeswoman, Laura Strimple, said Pillen "never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant and went above and beyond the legal requirements to verify the immigration status of his employees." Sarah Pillen, the company's co-CEO, said "We have never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant," and pointed to the company's voluntary participation in E-Verify, the federal system for checking whether a new hire is authorized to work.

Here is the part of that defense worth sitting with. According to the investigation, Pillen Family Farms opted into E-Verify on the day Pillen launched his campaign for governor.

The company describes that participation as voluntary — which means it was free to opt in during all the years before that day, and did not.

So the timeline is: build the business, employ the workers, run a governor's campaign, join the check on the day the campaign starts, then spend this year putting the state behind the federal crackdown on other people's undocumented workers.

What he did with the office

The immigration enforcement Pillen has delivered as governor is not rhetorical. He put the Nebraska State Patrol into a partnership with ICE, and he approved converting a state prison in McCook into an ICE detention facility — the one Pillen and federal officials dubbed the "Cornhusker Clink."

We have already looked at how that has gone. Pillen projected $2.45 million a month in revenue from the McCook ICE jail; a year in, Nebraska had collected $14.6 million in total and was building solitary confinement cells.

He has also tried to hold two positions at once. In December he posted that "the criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed." After an ICE raid on an Omaha meatpacking plant in June 2025, he said "Anybody that is here working hard and being a good neighbor, they're A-OK," and that he was "100 percent opposed" to mass deportation.

Local officials and immigration lawyers told the reporters that the line Pillen draws between hardworking people and criminals ignores legal reality: a worker who buys a fake ID to get hired has committed a crime. The people doing the hard work and being good neighbors, in the version of the story where they are A-OK, include the ones who staffed his barns — and nine of them were convicted.

Who actually pays for this

The workers charged with using fake IDs to get a job at Pillen's farms went through the courts. Nine of them were convicted. Pillen Family Farms was not accused of any wrongdoing in those cases.

That is the ordinary shape of immigration enforcement in agriculture, and it is the reason the story matters beyond one governor's hypocrisy. The employer gets the labor. The worker gets the record. And when the employer becomes governor, he gets to run on the crackdown.

Pillen himself did not respond to interview requests and declined to answer the reporters' written questions. His campaign manager called the investigation "nothing more than a political hit piece from the New York Times targeting the Pillen family, their business and Nebraska agriculture."

Hours after it landed, his campaign put out "The Pillen Playbook 2.0", an updated policy wishlist for a second term. The Nebraska Examiner counted its references to immigration: one, with no specifics. "Eliminate state taxpayer benefits for illegals."

What the record shows

Jim Pillen directed Nebraska's State Patrol to partner with ICE and converted a state prison into an immigration jail, while posting that "the criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed." A Flatwater Free Press and New York Times investigation found at least 20 farms in his own hog company employed undocumented workers, that at least 12 of his workers were charged between 2015 and 2024 for using fake or stolen IDs, and that nine of them were convicted. His company started using the federal work-authorization check on the day he launched his campaign for governor. It was not accused of wrongdoing in any of those cases.

Source

Flatwater Free Press and the New York Times, Gov. Pillen backs ICE crackdown. His company employs undocumented workers.. Photo by Nikos Frazier/Omaha World-Herald, via Flatwater Free Press.

Young Kim's Campaign Website Called Her a 'Proven America First Fighter' on August 14. Today Trump's Name Is Gone From Her Homepage.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:53:50 +0000

Young Kim is running for reelection in California against another sitting Republican, Ken Calvert, after redistricting put the two of them in the same seat. Something about her pitch to voters has changed since the summer, and you can watch it happen.

Politico's California Playbook noticed first, and the Daily Beast picked it up on September 8, 2026: Kim has quietly stripped Donald Trump off the front page of her campaign website.

We checked it ourselves, against the Internet Archive's saved copies of her own site.

What the site said in August, and what it says now

On August 14, 2026, the browser tab on youngkimforcongress.com read "Young Kim for Congress - Proven America First Fighter." The first line on the homepage was:

Young Kim is a Proven Fighter who will Stand with President Trump to deliver a bold America First Agenda.

Underneath it: "America First Leadership to Defend the American Dream."

Today the same page reads:

Young Kim is taking on Career Politicians to Restore the American Dream.

Underneath it: "Fighting for the American Dream." The tab now reads "Young Kim for Congress - Fighting for the American Dream." The word "Trump" does not appear on the homepage at all. It survives in one place: her Meet Young Kim page, but only on a phone. The site keeps separate desktop and mobile copies of her biography, and only the desktop one was rewritten. Open that page on a computer and the Trump language is gone. Open it on a phone and the old paragraph is still there: "with President Trump leading the charge, I'm looking forward to continuing to push through the bold, conservative, America First agenda." The page heading still reads "A Proven America First Fighter."

In a separate change her Issues page disappeared. The August 19 capture still lists Issues in the homepage menu. Two days later the menu item is gone.

Her spokesman says this is absurd

Kim's spokesman, Chris Pack, told Politico that the idea she is putting distance between herself and Trump is "completely absurd." He pointed to social media posts in which Kim wished Trump a happy birthday and mentioned a Trump-branded savings program.

A birthday post is not a campaign platform. Twenty-six days ago her website's headline promise was that she would stand with the President. Now it promises she will take on career politicians. Whatever the reason, the change is not in dispute — it is in the archive, and it is on the live page right now.

What she actually did while the Trump language was still up

The website is the part Kim controls completely. The record is the part she does not.

She wrote the House's official response to the Los Angeles immigration raids. After federal immigration sweeps there in June 2025, Kim introduced H.Res. 516, a resolution condemning the protests that followed. It calls the sweeps "lawful Federal immigration enforcement," says "California's leadership has prioritized protecting illegal immigrants and violent individuals over United States citizens," and closes by expressing gratitude to law enforcement, ICE included by name. The House passed it 215 to 195 on June 27, 2025.

She promised in writing that she would not vote for a budget that cut Medicaid, and then voted for it four times. About 1,000 people rallied outside her Anaheim office in April 2025 to hold her to that promise. The Joint Economic Committee estimates that 27,115 people in her district lose coverage by 2034 — 17,315 off Medicaid, and 9,800 more as the Affordable Care Act subsidies go.

She voted against writing protection for same-sex and interracial marriage into federal law — once in July 2022 and again in December 2022 — while five other California Republicans — Ken Calvert, Mike Garcia, Darrell Issa, Jay Obernolte and David Valadao — voted for it both times.

None of that has been deleted. It cannot be.

Why the words changed and the votes didn't

Kim has never held a single in-person town hall since taking office. Her constituents have not had a room in which to ask her about any of this. What they have had is her website, and her website has now been rewritten to say something different from what it said in August.

The votes are still on the House clerk's roll calls. The resolution condemning the protests against the Los Angeles sweeps is still in the Congressional Record with her name on it as sponsor. A campaign can change its slogan in an afternoon. It cannot change what it did in 2022 and 2025.

What the record shows

On August 14, 2026, Young Kim's campaign homepage described her as a "Proven America First Fighter" who would "Stand with President Trump." Twenty-six days later, that language is gone from the homepage, the page title has been rewritten, and her Issues page has been deleted. Her spokesman calls the suggestion she is distancing herself from Trump "completely absurd." In the period when the Trump language was still up, Kim sponsored the House resolution condemning the protests against the Los Angeles immigration sweeps and thanking law enforcement including ICE, voted four times for a budget bill the Joint Economic Committee estimates will cost 27,115 people in her district their health coverage, and voted twice against protecting same-sex marriage in federal law.

Source

"Republican Young Kim Busted Quietly Scrubbing Trump From Site," The Daily Beast, September 8, 2026, following reporting by Politico's California Playbook. Website comparisons verified independently against the Internet Archive and the live site on September 9, 2026. Photo: official U.S. House portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Dan Sullivan Used Official Senate Letterhead to Tell 19 Alaska Communities What He's Delivered for Them. Senate Rules Bar That Letterhead From Campaign Correspondence.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:41:00 +0000

In the week before Labor Day 2026, thousands of Alaskans opened an email from their senior senator. The subject line said "Delivering for" — and then the name of their own town. Inside, on official United States Senate letterhead, was a list of everything he says he has won for that town.

Dan Sullivan is running for a third six-year term this November. Alaska reporter Dermot Cole, who published the emails, said readers sent him copies addressed to at least 19 different places: Fairbanks, Anchorage, Bethel, Nome, the Mat-Su Valley, Kenai, Juneau, Haines, Wrangell, Ketchikan, Kodiak, Homer, Prince of Wales Island, Sitka, Soldotna, North Pole, Utqiagvik, Delta Junction and Petersburg.

Every one of them opened the same way: "I am contacting you to share an update on some of the important work I've been doing on behalf of" — and then the town's name. Every one closed with a version of the same sentence: "The [town] community is so important to Alaska." Every one ended with his signature.

Nobody asked for these. Cole called them what they look like: unsolicited campaign material, sent at government expense, two months before an election.

What the Senate's own rules say

The Senate Select Committee on Ethics publishes a plain list of what official Senate letterhead may and may not be used for. It is not buried, and it is not ambiguous. Under Improper Use of Senate Letterhead, the very first items are:

Solicitation of a financial contribution or other form of assistance for any campaign or election.

...

Any campaign or campaign-related correspondence.

Personal correspondence.

Political or partisan correspondence, including political endorsements.

The reason the rule exists is money. Senate letterhead is bought and printed with public funds, and the Ethics Committee's guidance on campaign activity explains why that matters: under federal law, "official funds may only be used for the purposes for which they were appropriated. Accordingly, Senate resources may only be used for official purposes, and official resources may not be used to conduct campaign activity."

Sullivan has a campaign. It reported $7,295,069 in the bank at the end of July. It could have paid for these emails.

The timing is the tell

Congress wrote itself a rule about exactly this problem. Under the franking statute and Senate Rule 40, a senator may not send mass mailings in the 60 days before a general election. This year's election is November 3, which put the start of that blackout on September 4.

Sullivan's emails went out right before it.

The rule has a gap he can drive through, and he did. The Ethics Committee states flatly that "the Franking Regulations do not apply to electronic communications," and that the committee "does not generally review mass emails, as they are not sent under the frank."

So the mailbox rule and the inbox rule are not the same rule. But the letterhead rule does not care what the envelope is made of, and it is the letterhead rule that says campaign correspondence does not go on Senate stationery.

Congress noticed the blackout was coming and pushed material out ahead of it. That is not a Sullivan invention. Indiana's Mark Messmer bought a taxpayer-funded TV ad touting his votes that stopped running on September 2, exactly 62 days before Election Day — right at the line.

He will email your town. He will not stand in front of it.

Here is what makes the "Delivering for" emails hard to read as constituent service.

In March 2025, Alaskans in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau organized their own town halls and Sullivan did not come to any of them. In Fairbanks, about 175 people packed the Noel Wien Public Library auditorium and set a life-size cardboard cutout of him in the middle of the room to stand in for him. One constituent told the room, "You should probably know my address by now; I leave you voicemails every single day." In Juneau, on March 20, nearly 170 people did the same thing at the Mendenhall Valley Public Library. Anchorage's, the same night, drew a crowd the organizers put at more than 600 and was well attended aside from the elected officials.

Asked about it in Juneau on March 20, 2025, Sullivan told reporters he had already held what he called "the ultimate town hall" — his own address to the Alaska Legislature, which he gave in Juneau that day. "There were 60 elected officials who could ask me any question they wanted," he said. As for the constituents in the library auditoriums: "If it's all about screaming and yelling and viral moments that they want to send out to their colleagues? You know, it's not necessarily the most constructive way to do what I just did in there."

Eighteen months later, with an election two months out, he emailed those same communities to say each one "is so important to Alaska," and that he is "honored to have the privilege of serving as your United States Senator."

The people in Haines and Bethel and Utqiagvik could not ask him a question in March 2025. They can receive his email now.

The same trick, over and over

Every member of Congress gets an allowance of public money to communicate with the people they represent. It exists so you can find out what your representative is doing. It is not a campaign budget, and the line between the two is the single most reliably abused line in Congress.

Minnesota's Michelle Fischbach spent $51,000 of public money in three months on mass communications while not holding an in-person town hall in her district.
Georgia's Mike Collins spent more than $400,000 in office money on TV ads built around Trump praising him, ads that look nearly identical to his campaign spots.
Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan had a taxpayer-funded video surface in Google's political ad library under his campaign account, and a constituent filed an ethics complaint.
Colorado's Gabe Evans spent more than $320,000 of public money advertising himself and routed $225,000 of it to the same firm his campaign pays.

None of them ran out of campaign money first. Neither did Sullivan.

Who is actually paying for his campaign

Sullivan's emails are addressed to Alaskans. His donors are not.

Individuals have given his campaign committee and his leadership PAC $10.15 million this cycle. Only $991,911 of it came from Alaska — more than 90% came from outside the state, and Florida, at $1,001,881, edged out the state he represents. Counting everything raised for him since 2020, campaign money and outside spending together, 7% has come from small grassroots donors and 73% from PACs, super PACs and large donors.

That is the campaign that had the money to send these emails. Instead they went out on the Senate's stationery.

What the record shows

Dan Sullivan sent at least 19 versions of a town-by-town list of his own accomplishments to thousands of Alaskans on official Senate letterhead, days before the September 4 start of the 60-day pre-election blackout on mass mailings. The Senate Ethics Committee's published rules say that letterhead may not be used for "any campaign or campaign-related correspondence," and federal law says Senate resources may only be used for official purposes. His campaign had $7.3 million in the bank, and more than 90% of the individual money behind him this cycle came from outside Alaska. The communities he emailed had already held town halls without him, in front of an empty chair.

Source

Dermot Cole, Sullivan misuses Senate letterhead for unsolicited campaign emails, Reporting From Alaska, September 6, 2026. Photo: official U.S. Senate portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

John McGuire Told a TV Station 'I Don't Even Do Trades.' His Own Filings Report Ten — Including Nvidia, Bought Nine Days Earlier, Before Anyone Knew About Its $12.9 Billion AI Deal.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:49:04 +0000

On August 27, 2026, John McGuire sat down with ABC13 in Lynchburg. His Democratic opponent, Tom Perriello, had accused him of insider trading. McGuire wanted an apology before he would agree to a debate.

Here is what he said:

"I don't even do trades."

Nine days earlier, on August 18, between $1,001 and $15,000 of Nvidia stock had been bought in the retirement account McGuire discloses for his spouse.

He disclosed that purchase in early September, in a filing with the Clerk of the House. The next day, Nvidia confirmed it was buying the AI company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — the second-largest acquisition in the company's history, after the $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets.

The timeline

The order matters, so let's lay it out plainly.

August 18, 2026 — Nvidia stock is bought in the account McGuire discloses.
The weekend before August 26 — Business Insider reports that Hugging Face is drawing takeover interest. This is the first the public hears of it.
August 26 — The Information reports Nvidia has agreed to the deal. TechCrunch picks it up that night.
August 27 — McGuire tells ABC13, "I don't even do trades."
September 2 — Nvidia signs the definitive agreement, per its own filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
September 3 — Nvidia announces the $12.9 billion purchase publicly.

The purchase came before any of it was public. Not by a day. By four days — and by eight before Nvidia was named as the buyer.

We are not saying he broke the law

We said this the last time we wrote about McGuire's trades, and it is still true. There is no evidence he traded on information the public didn't have. The purchase was disclosed. Buying Nvidia in August 2026 was, frankly, what half the country was doing.

The problem is not the trade. The problem is the sentence.

"I don't even do trades" is not a defense, a spin, or a difference of opinion. It is a claim about a documented fact, and the documents are filed under his own name with the House of Representatives.

Ten trades, eight companies

The Augusta Free Press has been going through McGuire's disclosures all summer, and Nvidia is not an isolated entry. The filings he has signed since June show:

Dell — sold on June 4, 2026.
Meta — bought on June 4, 2026.
SpaceX — bought on June 15, 2026, three days after the company went public.
BlackRock — sold on July 7, July 10 and July 14, 2026.
Applied Materials — bought on July 15, 2026.
Palo Alto Networks — sold on July 31, 2026.
Apple — sold on August 18, 2026, the same day as the Nvidia purchase.

That is seven different companies in under three months, and Nvidia makes eight. Every one of them is marked "SP" on the form — the spouse — in a Merrill Lynch retirement or brokerage account that McGuire is required by law to report and does report, over his own signature. According to Quiver Quantitative, his net worth has risen by roughly $390,000 since he announced his run for Virginia's 5th District in 2024.

A person who does not do trades does not file ten of them.

The committees make it worse

McGuire sits on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, including its subcommittees dealing with cybersecurity, information technology and military affairs. He also sits on House Armed Services.

Those are the panels that write and review the federal technology and defense policy that Nvidia, SpaceX and Palo Alto Networks all live inside. Nvidia's chips are the subject of export-control fights, federal AI procurement, and national-security reviews that run straight through the committees he serves on.

Nobody outside the room can tell what he knew or when. That is exactly the point. It is why ethics groups keep saying members should not own individual stocks in industries they oversee, and why we have now counted 45 Republicans on this site who couldn't even file their trades on time.

McGuire filed his on time. He just told a television audience they didn't exist.

The debate he won't have

The whole exchange happened because McGuire is refusing to debate Tom Perriello until Perriello apologizes for raising the trades.

"Like I said, if he wants to publicly apologize for telling the people of the Fifth that I did insider trading, we'll have that discussion."

So the condition McGuire has set for debating his opponent is an apology for describing his stock trading — which he then denied doing, while his own filings said otherwise.

Voters in Virginia's 5th District are not getting a debate. They are getting a demand for an apology, built on a statement that isn't true.

What the filings show

Nvidia stock was bought in the account McGuire discloses on August 18, 2026, about a week before the public learned Nvidia was buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Nine days after that purchase, he told a Lynchburg television station "I don't even do trades," while his own House filings recorded ten trades across eight companies since June — including stock in firms regulated by the committees he sits on. He is refusing to debate his opponent until his opponent apologizes for bringing it up.

Source

Chris Graham, John McGuire bought NVIDIA stock before NVIDIA made a $12.9 billion AI deal, Augusta Free Press (September 5, 2026). Photo: Payllik/Adobe Stock and The Old Major/Shutterstock.
Chris Graham, John McGuire fights back at insider trading jab: 'I don't even do trades', Augusta Free Press (August 28, 2026).

Roger Marshall Said the Epstein Files Should Be Public. Then He Cast One of the 51 Votes That Killed the Amendment to Release Them, and Called It a 'Political Stunt.'

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:03:33 +0000

Roger Marshall is one of the Republicans who said publicly that the Justice Department's Jeffrey Epstein files should be released.

On September 10, 2025, he got a chance to force it, and voted the other way.

The Senate voted on a motion to kill an amendment to the defense bill that would have required the attorney general to release all unclassified records related to Epstein: the flight logs, the vehicle manifests, the names connected to his crimes, the entities tied to him, and the material about his death.

The motion to kill it passed 51-49. Marshall voted with the 51. Only two Republicans, Rand Paul and Josh Hawley, voted to let the amendment live.

Marshall called the amendment a "political stunt" that held servicemembers "hostage."

The objection, and what it was worth

Marshall's stated reason was procedural. The amendment was attached to the annual defense policy bill — the one that authorizes the yearly troop pay raise — and that, both Kansas senators said, was why they voted to kill it.

That is a real bill and a real pay raise. It is also the standard objection to any amendment anyone does not want to vote for, and it disappears the moment you notice what he did next.

Two months later, in November 2025, the House passed a standalone bill compelling the release. No defense bill, no troops, no hostages. The Senate passed the same bill by unanimous consent, and Marshall did not object.

So the version he could kill quietly, he killed. The version that was going to pass anyway, he let through without a word. Three weeks after the September vote, a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll found about three-quarters of Americans wanted all the Epstein files released.

The money

Two Blackstone executives whose names appear in the Epstein files gave money to Marshall's campaign committee, Kansans for Marshall, in the spring of 2025 — months before that September vote. Federal Election Commission records show:

Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone's chief executive: $7,000 on March 27, 2025.
Joseph Baratta, a Blackstone executive: $6,000 on April 4, 2025.

That is $13,000 in eight days of filings, five months before Marshall voted to bury the files.

Schwarzman is not new to Marshall's donor list. FEC records show he also gave $2,800 in 2020 and $2,700 in 2016.

Our earlier reporting on the Epstein-file billionaires funding Ashley Hinson established the detail on Schwarzman himself: his name appears in the files 23 times, including an email in which Epstein called him "terrific." He never emailed Epstein directly and faces no accusations of wrongdoing. A name in the files is not an accusation.

Marshall also took $500 in September 2020 from lawyer Greg Ezring, whose name appears in the files 35 times, and $11,400 in October 2019 from Bryant Park Capital chief executive Joel Magerman, whose name appears three times — though FEC records show $5,600 of the Magerman money was reattributed to his wife and $200 refunded, leaving $5,800 credited to him.

Schwarzman's money has followed this pattern elsewhere. A super PAC backing Susan Collins took his money too.

The rest of the record

Marshall's handling of the Epstein files is not an isolated data point. It sits on top of a voting record on sexual violence that runs the same direction.

In April 2019, as a House member, Marshall voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. It passed anyway, 263-158.

He voted to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom faced sexual assault allegations. He voted to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general after Epstein survivors asked senators to vote no.

We have written about other parts of his record: 500 days without a town hall, a Stock Act violation, and telling Kansas doctors there are no Medicaid cuts in the bill he voted for.

Why it matters now

Marshall is running for a second term, and it is closer than anyone expected. A poll taken days after the August primary put him a single point ahead of Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton, 46 to 45.

He does not have to explain the September vote to anyone but Kansas voters, and there is no roll call left to change it.

What the record shows

Roger Marshall was among the Republicans who said the Epstein files should be public. On September 10, 2025, he cast one of the 51 votes that killed the amendment forcing their release, calling it a political stunt that held servicemembers hostage — then raised no objection two months later when a standalone bill with no troops attached passed the Senate. Five months before that vote, two Blackstone executives named in the files gave his campaign $13,000. In 2019 he voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

Source

Roger Marshall has an Epstein files problem, by Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, September 4, 2026. The roll call, the Kansas quotes and the donation figures above were verified independently against the Senate's own vote records, KSNT's reporting and the Federal Election Commission's contribution database. Photo: Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call via AP Images.

Ken Paxton Told the Senate He Owns Seven Homes and Earns Nothing From Any of Them. Six of the Seven Were Listed for Rent.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:56:16 +0000

Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Texas. In August he filed the financial disclosure that federal law requires of Senate candidates. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune checked it against public records.

What they found, published September 4, is that the form appears to break federal ethics law in at least three separate ways.

"It reflects either pure sloppiness on Paxton's part or a deliberate effort to conceal some of his investments and property holdings," said Craig Holman of the nonpartisan watchdog group Public Citizen.

Seven houses, no rent

Paxton reported owning seven homes. For each one, on a form that requires real estate income to be listed, he checked the box that says "None (or less than $201)."

All but one of those homes was listed for rent during the periods the form covers. Reporters found recent rental listings for six of them: two houses in Ocala, Florida; a house and a condo in Austin; a house in College Station; and a five-bedroom vacation lodge in Broken Bow, Oklahoma.

Then they went and looked.

A tenant confirmed she lives in one of the Florida houses. A next-door neighbor at the Austin condo complex said Paxton's unit has a renter. The Oklahoma lodge is advertised online as a short-term rental at up to $1,200 a night, with fall bookings filling up.

Three ethics experts told the newsrooms that receiving income and not reporting it violates federal disclosure law.

Four condos at a golf resort, and $1.3 million in loans he did not list

Federal law requires a Senate candidate who is not already in Congress to report every loan over $10,000, except loans on a personal residence.

Paxton bought three condos at the Black Desert Resort in southwest Utah in February. He did not report the mortgages on them, which total $1.3 million. Reporters found the loan documents in county land records.

Each of those mortgages carries an addendum used for rental properties. A New Jersey real estate lawyer, Daniel M. Shlufman, explained what the addendum does: it removes the requirement that the owner live in the unit, and it lets the lender collect rent straight from tenants if the borrower defaults.

Paxton bought a fourth condo at the same resort in 2025 and did disclose that one, along with its $640,000 mortgage.

"It's kind of mind-boggling to think about having four homes at one resort property and imagining those are for personal use," said Cynthia Brown, a senior lawyer at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

A plot of land he valued at $50,000 that his partner says is worth $1 million

Paxton owns a 20 percent stake in 42 acres of undeveloped land in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth. Last year he told the Senate it was worth between $15,001 and $50,000.

Rob Orr, who manages the investment and served with Paxton in the Texas House, told reporters that Paxton's share is worth about $1 million and has been for years.

"It would have been around a million for quite a while, probably the last four or five years," Orr said. "It has increased in value because of zoning and because of time."

The county assesses the land as farmland worth $20,008. Its estimated market value is $2.9 million. Federal disclosure law requires property to be listed at fair market value. The Senate Ethics Committee lets a filer start from a county assessment, but he has to adjust it up to market when the assessment comes in below.

Paxton did the same thing with the Oklahoma lodge. Last year he valued it at between $100,001 and $250,000, the county's assessment being $176,000. Real estate sites put its market value above $1.5 million.

This year both figures jumped. The lodge and the Johnson County land are each now reported at between $1 million and $5 million.

Nothing was bought. The numbers simply changed.

Revaluation, not acquisition, is why Paxton's reported net worth swung from a range of negative $1.9 million to $11.1 million a year ago, to a range of $1 million to $27 million now.

Margaret Dylus-Yukins of the Campaign Legal Center, who spent six years reviewing executive branch officials' disclosures at the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, called the change "very strange," and said her old agency would have asked for a written explanation.

"When you have public officials that appear to be fudging the numbers on their disclosure forms, and the Senate Ethics Committee is letting that slide, then you're not only eroding trust in the committee but the candidate himself."

How a government lawyer bought more than a dozen properties

Paxton's state disclosure for 2001, before he entered the Legislature, listed assets of no more than $170,000. By 2015 his household net worth was $5.4 million, according to records that lawmakers subpoenaed when they impeached him in 2023 on charges he took bribes from an Austin real estate investor. The Senate acquitted him.

Those records show a portfolio built out of a cellphone tower, an HVAC company, a cement supplier and a police body camera manufacturer. When Motorola bought the body camera company in 2019, Paxton netted $2.2 million on his 2019 tax return.

Then he bought six properties in Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Hawaii.

His salary as attorney general through most of this was $153,750.

Some of that portfolio has surfaced here before. We wrote about the cell tower on the campus of a hospital whose board he sat on — his own company got the tower, and it became one of his largest sources of income.

He also began putting many of these properties on his state disclosures only after the Texas Ethics Commission closed a loophole in 2024 that he had been citing to leave them off.

What happens next

Almost certainly nothing.

A candidate or senator who knowingly falsifies a financial disclosure can be fined up to $50,000 or prosecuted for a felony false statement. The Senate Ethics Committee rarely investigates senators and has not formally sanctioned one in 19 years. It did not respond to the newsrooms' requests for comment.

Paxton declined an interview. His campaign spokesperson said he "has had a long and successful career outside of public service" and called the reporting "a bad attempt to manufacture controversy where none exists."

And Paxton does not have to file another federal disclosure before Election Day.

Texas voters get one chance to judge him on the version he already filed. A University of Texas / Texas Politics Project poll released last week found a third of respondents consider him honest and trustworthy. His opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, went into September with a narrow polling lead in a state where Republicans have not lost a statewide race in 32 years. Talarico's own disclosure puts his net worth between $67,000 and $305,000.

What the filings show

Ken Paxton reported seven homes to the Senate and no income from any of them, while six of the seven were listed for rent and tenants were living in at least two. He left $1.3 million in mortgages off the form entirely, and valued a stake in Texas land at up to $50,000 that his own business partner says has been worth about $1 million for years. Three ethics experts say collecting rent and not reporting it is a violation of federal law. He bought more than a dozen properties in five states on a government salary of $153,750, and no federal disclosure of his is due again before voters decide.

Source

Ken Paxton's financial disclosures appear to violate ethics law, by Zach Despart, Kayla Guo and Alexandra Glorioso, The Texas Tribune, co-published with ProPublica, September 4, 2026. Photo collage by ProPublica, source imagery by The Texas Tribune.

Tommy Tuberville Says Alabamians Worried About Data Centers Are Repeating Chinese Propaganda. As a Senator He Bought and Sold Alibaba — and Was Late Disclosing About 130 Trades.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:53:20 +0000

Tommy Tuberville has one explanation for why so many Alabama towns keep voting down data centers, and it is not their water bills.

In July he told the Alabama Sheriffs Association that his neighbors in Cullman, Bessemer, Fort Payne and elsewhere were repeating talking points from China. "They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow," he said, and called their concerns "bull crap."

On September 2, 2026, Doug Jones — the Democrat running against him for governor — pointed at Tuberville's own Senate financial disclosures and asked a question about that.

"Scare tactics about China don't acknowledge the fact that on 14 different occasions, while a United States senator, Tommy Tuberville, bought and sold stock and options in Alibaba."

Alibaba is a Chinese company. It is also one of the largest builders of AI and data centers in China.

The disclosures are not in dispute

Jones is an opponent, and opponents make claims. This one has been reported for years by outlets with no stake in an Alabama governor's race.

CNBC reported in January 2022 that Tuberville — described in the piece as a China critic — had, with his wife, bought Alibaba shares across three purchases between December 14 and December 21. Business Insider, reading the same filing, put the couple's total at between $115,000 and $250,000, and noted that his disclosures the previous June showed he held Alibaba put options as well. On January 14, 2022, three more options trades ended the Alibaba position.

Six months earlier, CNBC had reported that Tuberville violated the STOCK Act — the federal law requiring members of Congress to disclose their trades within 45 days. He was late on roughly 130 stock and options trades made between January and May of 2021, worth somewhere between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million. One of the trades he was late reporting was a sale of Alibaba put options.

His office said at the time that he had been unaware of the trades and that financial advisers made them.

That explanation is worth holding onto, because it is the same shape as the argument he is making now. When the trades look bad, he did not know about them. When Alabamians raise concerns, they are the ones being manipulated.

What Jones is actually asking

Jones raised a broader figure too: more than 250 trades disclosed in Senate financial filings, in the range of $5 million to $14 million, involving companies tied to artificial intelligence and data centers.

His ask follows from it. Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Alabama while the state writes rules, and a package of ethics changes to go with it: full transparency, a ban on nondisclosure agreements between developers and legislators, a prohibition on destroying records, and a ban on state officeholders trading stocks while in office. He asked Tuberville directly to divest from AI and data center companies.

"Alabama can build data centers, but we can do it right with appropriate guardrails," Jones said. "And Alabama can do it without a governor who trades the stock of these companies."

What Tuberville said back

His campaign declined to answer Jones directly. It pointed instead to an opinion piece Tuberville published the day before, in which he laid out a data center plan: local communities get the final say, developers cover the full cost of the energy and water they use, they replace what they consume, and they are taxed at the highest property tax rate.

That is a more accommodating position than "bull crap," and the shift is itself the story. Two months ago the people asking for exactly those guardrails were dupes of the Chinese government. Now the guardrails are his platform.

What he has not done is answer the money question. He was also asked, in August, to debate Jones, and declined: "There's so much difference between us. I mean, there's no reason to get up there and argue about differences of opinion."

The money keeps arriving

Whether Tuberville personally profits is only half of it. Last month we wrote about the other half: twenty-five days after he called Alabamians' data center worries "bull crap," a data center developer gave his campaign $25,000.

Data centers are becoming a defining Alabama issue, and Jones says it is not breaking along the usual lines. "It crosses party lines. It crosses racial lines. It crosses economic lines," he said.

Alabama towns are being asked to host facilities that draw enormous amounts of power and water, in a state where residents will pay the utility bills either way. The man who wants to run that state has told them their worries are foreign propaganda, has taken money from the industry, and spent his Senate years trading the stock of the companies building it — including a Chinese one.

What the filings show

Tommy Tuberville told Alabamians that opposition to data centers in their own towns is Chinese propaganda. His Senate financial disclosures record that he and his wife bought between $115,000 and $250,000 of stock in Alibaba, a Chinese AI and data center giant, that he held put options in it, and that the position was closed out in January 2022 — and that he was late disclosing about 130 trades worth between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million, one of them an Alibaba options sale, in violation of the STOCK Act. Doug Jones puts the wider total at more than 250 disclosed trades in AI and data center companies and has asked him to divest. Tuberville's campaign declined to respond and he has declined to debate.

Source

Doug Jones questions Tommy Tuberville's stock trades and data center stance — Kayla Davis, WVTM 13, September 2, 2026.

Bobby Charles Says Lobbyists Give Money Because 'You're Going to Buy a Favor.' He Ran a Lobbying Firm That Took $512,000 From Companies Caught Doing Exactly That.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:47:53 +0000

Bobby Charles, the Republican nominee for governor of Maine, has built his campaign on a promise to clean up government. Fraud, waste, no-bid contracts — that is the pitch. He told WGAN recently what he thinks is going on when a lobbyist writes a check: "you're essentially believing that you're going to buy a favor."

He would know. He has been a lobbyist for most of this century.

The firm he still runs

Maine Beacon reported on August 31 that Charles spent 16 of the 17 years between 2000 and 2016 as a registered lobbyist. He founded The Charles Group, and he still leads it. Its website listed him as "president and managing member" in April of this year — about a year after he announced his run for governor. The firm reported lobbying activity as recently as the first three months of 2026.

That is not a former career he left behind before entering public life. It is a business he is running while asking Mainers to put him in charge of state contracting.

Maine Beacon's review of his firm's disclosures found it collected at least $512,000 from clients that overcharged taxpayers, held lucrative no-bid federal contracts, or ended up in federal fraud and bribery cases. Federal lobbying registrations are public, filed with Congress and searchable in the Senate's lobbying disclosure database.

The client whose CEO went to prison for bribing a congressman

The clearest example is MZM Inc., which paid The Charles Group to lobby in 2005.

At the time, MZM was holding a no-bid Defense Department contract worth up to $250 million, and had already collected more than $150 million under it. A no-bid federal contract is precisely the thing Charles now tells Maine voters he will stamp out.

A year later, MZM's founder and chief executive, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty to bribing then-Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham in exchange for government business. The Justice Department's account of the plea is blunt: Wade admitted bribing Cunningham, providing improper benefits to Pentagon officials and employees, and funding political contributions made in someone else's name. Cunningham took more than $1 million. Wade also admitted routing nearly $80,000 in illegal campaign money to two other House members.

MZM and Wade agreed to pay a $1 million penalty over the straw contributions — money given in other people's names to get around the limits.

Charles' firm was not accused of any of that. It was paid to open doors for the company while the company was doing it.

The other one

Maine Beacon also found that The Charles Group took at least $276,000 lobbying for Bell Helicopter and its parent company Textron between 2000 and 2007. Bell later paid more than $16.5 million to settle claims that it had overbilled the Defense Department.

Overbilling the federal government is the second half of Charles' stump speech. He has spent this campaign telling Mainers that people are getting rich off public money and that he is the man to stop it.

He has done this before

The gap between what Charles says his record proves and what his record actually shows is the recurring feature of this campaign, not a one-off:

He says his federal experience qualifies him to fix Maine's finances. More than a dozen audits found the State Department bureau he ran couldn't account for billions of dollars.
He cut an ad promising to cut your property taxes. He doesn't use the property tax break Maine already offers.
Maine's Ethics Commission opened an investigation into an anonymous site attacking his primary rival. His campaign admitted building two others.

Each time, the claim is about integrity, and each time the documents underneath say something else.

What the filings show

Bobby Charles is running for governor of Maine on a promise to end fraud, waste, and no-bid contracts, and he has said publicly that lobbyists give money expecting to buy favors. His own lobbying firm — which he still leads, and which reported activity as recently as this year — collected at least $512,000 from clients that defrauded or overbilled the federal government or ended up in bribery cases. One of them, MZM Inc., was holding a no-bid Pentagon contract worth up to $250 million when it hired him, and its chief executive later pleaded guilty to bribing a member of Congress.

Source

Channa Steinmetz, "Longtime lobbyist Bobby Charles rails against lobbyists, pledges to fight practices his clients engaged in", Maine Beacon, August 31, 2026. Photo: Charles campaign official photo, via Maine Beacon.

Gabe Evans Spent More Than $320,000 of Your Money Advertising Himself. He Sent $225,000 of It to His Own Campaign Consultant.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:38:35 +0000

Every member of Congress gets a pot of taxpayer money to communicate with the people they represent. It pays for newsletters, town hall notices, and mailers explaining how to get help with a passport or a Social Security check. It is not a campaign budget. The rules say so in writing.

Axios Denver reported on September 2 that Gabe Evans spent more than $320,000 of that money on advertising in his first term in Congress — radio spots, mailers, web ads, and text messages. Out of all House members, Axios found he ranked sixth through late July. His total nearly topped what Colorado's whole congressional delegation spent put together.

And more than $225,000 of it went to a political consulting firm called Breakpoint Media.

The same firm his campaign pays

Breakpoint Media is not a neutral vendor Evans found in a phone book. Over the past two years, the same firm collected roughly $170,000 from Evans' reelection campaign.

So the operation that builds his campaign ads also built the ads his congressional office paid for with public money. That is the whole reason the rules exist. The House's own Communications Standards Manual bars official communications from containing campaign content, from using "content developed using campaign resources," and from carrying "content laudatory of a Member on a personal or political basis." It does permit biographical information related to a member's official duties.

Evans' office cleared the process. Staff at the bipartisan House Communication Standards Commission signed off on all of the messages as official. That is not the same thing as the messages being about official business.

What the ads actually said

Judge them yourself. Axios reviewed the messages. Among them:

A Spanish-language radio ad in which Evans says, "I am Gabe Evans and I work hard in Congress to help families like yours."
Text messages attacking Democratic senators over the 2025 government shutdown.
Another text message calling Colorado "the second most dangerous state in the country" — a swipe at the state's Democratic leaders.
Social media posts crediting his own vote on the Working Families Tax Cuts with "putting real money back into household budgets."

Read those four as a stranger. Not one of them is about how to reach his casework staff or where the next town hall is. Axios reports that some of Evans' other ads did list the services his office can provide, and that his messages typically carried a pitch to sign up for his congressional newsletter. These four are the lines a candidate uses on the stump, mailed and broadcast on the public's tab.

The Spanish-language push is the tell. Evans' district north of Denver is 40% Latino, and he won it in 2024 by fewer than 2,500 votes. A first-term member with a razor-thin margin needs name recognition with exactly those voters. His office bought it for him.

His spokesperson, Alexandria Cullen, told Axios that "Congressman Evans is proud of the proactive outreach he conducts to serve constituents across Northern Colorado."

He advertised the vote that cost his district

The most expensive part of this is not the money. It is what the money was used to sell.

The ads touted his vote for H.R. 1 — Trump's 2025 budget bill — and the tax provisions inside it. Evans has been telling his district that bill was good for them. He told constituents it protected "the people who need it most" and called the warnings about Medicaid cuts "fear mongering." Nurses have since named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk because of it, including hospitals in his own district.

The same law rewrote the rules for food assistance. About 90,000 people in Evans' district get food stamps, and asked twice how many of them would lose benefits under the rules he voted for, he changed the subject.

So the sequence runs like this. He voted for a bill that took health coverage and food help away from people in his district. Then he used their tax money to advertise the vote to them.

He is not the only one doing it

This has become a pattern among House Republicans, and we have documented it repeatedly:

Mike Collins, running for Senate in Georgia, spent more than $400,000 in official funds on TV ads built around Trump praising him by name — then reused the exact same Trump quote and footage in his campaign ad.
Michelle Fischbach spent $51,000 in three months mailing her Minnesota constituents while refusing to hold a town hall or answer a reporter.
Mark Messmer raised $1.4 million in political money and paid for his ad with public funds instead.
Rob Bresnahan's taxpayer-funded video turned up in Google's political ad library filed under "Rob for PA," and a constituent filed an ethics complaint over it.
Blake Moore's office sent mass mailers in batches of 499 to stay under the threshold that triggers pre-election restrictions.

The dollar amounts differ. The move is identical: a member facing voters uses the account meant for constituent service to raise his own profile, and the bill goes to the constituents.

What the record shows

Gabe Evans spent more than $320,000 in taxpayer money on advertising in a single term, the sixth-highest total in the House through late July, and nearly as much as Colorado's whole congressional delegation combined. More than $225,000 of it went to Breakpoint Media, the same firm his campaign paid about $170,000. The ads promoted his vote for a budget bill that put 12 Colorado hospitals at risk and rewrote food assistance for 90,000 people in his own district.

Source

John Frank, "Colorado's Gabe Evans spent big on taxpayer-funded 'franking'", Axios Denver, September 2, 2026. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images.

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.

Mike Johnson Says Max Miller Has Been a 'Great Member of Congress.' Miller Is Under an Ethics Investigation for Domestic Violence, and the Accuser's Father Is a Republican Senator.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:47:21 +0000

The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation in August into whether Rep. Max Miller of Ohio "may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use," in violation of the House's own conduct rules.

On Monday, August 31, 2026, CNN's Manu Raju asked the Speaker of the House whether he supports Miller's reelection campaign.

Mike Johnson said yes.

"He has been a great member of Congress," Johnson said. "He has some issues in his personal life he's working through. The House Ethics Committee is looking into that and any implications it may have." He added that he would "let due process play out."

What "some issues in his personal life" refers to

Max Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of hurling scalding hot water at her, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their 2-year-old daughter's collarbone. The two divorced last year and have been in a custody fight over the child.

Miller denies all of it. He sued his ex-wife for defamation in May, and says he filed his own paperwork to open an ethics investigation to clear his name.

Emily Moreno's father is Bernie Moreno, the Republican senator from Ohio. He is one of several Republicans who have called on Miller to resign. Last month he described what his family has been through:

"My daughter lives in constant fear of this man, not like something that's existential, but deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable of. You can't fathom what that makes me feel like when the dad's number one job is to protect your kids."

Moreno said his family had gone through "the seventh level of hell," and asked Miller to "seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake."

That is the record the Speaker of the House looked at before calling Miller a great member of Congress.

"Due process" is doing work it cannot do

Johnson's answer has a defensible-sounding structure. There is an investigation. Let it finish. Do not prejudge.

Except that is not what he did. He was not asked whether Miller should be expelled or punished. He was asked whether he supports Miller's campaign — a political endorsement, entirely within his discretion, requiring no finding of fact from anyone.

He could have said the honest version of "due process": I'm not going to weigh in on his race while the Ethics Committee is working. Instead he volunteered a character reference.

And the timing is not neutral, either. The Ethics Committee observes a 60-day blackout before an election, which begins September 4. The committee is not expected to report anything before November. "Let due process play out" means, in practice, that voters go to the polls with nothing.

The rest of the party is not united behind this

The striking thing about Johnson's answer is how much company Miller has lost.

Republican senators called on him to resign. A conservative group called him unfit to serve. A poll had him down 14. Miller's response to all of it was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay on the ballot. Cook Political Report has since moved Ohio's 7th District from "likely Republican" to "toss up."

His own former father-in-law, a sitting Republican senator, wants him gone.

Against that, Johnson is not "letting the process play out." He is picking a side in a fight where much of his own party has already picked the other one.

He is the third Republican leader to take this position, and the pattern is the point

Johnson is not alone, and that is what makes this worth writing down rather than filing as one bad answer on a rope line.

Rep. Jim Jordan, asked on CNN whether Miller should resign, called it "a family matter" and said he hopes Miller wins — weeks after going hard at a Democrat facing similar accusations.

Ohio's Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, was caught on leaked audio backing Miller "up and down the ticket," explaining that Republican control of the House comes first: "If we compromise that, we're done."

Three Republican leaders, three versions of the same answer. Ramaswamy's is the only one that says the quiet part: the seat matters more.

The party that spent years telling America it stands for family values has settled on a rule for its own members. When the accused is one of ours and the seat is a toss-up, the allegations become a personal matter and the process becomes a reason to wait.

What the record shows

On August 31, 2026, House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly endorsed the reelection of Max Miller, a member under House Ethics Committee investigation for possible domestic violence and abuse, calling him a "great member of Congress" with "some issues in his personal life." The accusations — scalding water, a gun to the head, a 2-year-old's fractured collarbone — come from Miller's ex-wife, whose father is a sitting Republican senator who says she lives in constant fear of him and has asked Miller to resign. The Ethics Committee's pre-election blackout begins September 4, so its findings are not expected to reach voters before they vote.

Source

Sarah Davis, "Johnson says he supports Max Miller's reelection bid: 'Great member of Congress'", The Hill, September 1, 2026. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Joe Mitchell Calls Housing Tax Credits 'A Disaster.' His Own Companies Collected $2,559,880 From the One He Voted to Expand.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:42:40 +0000

Joe Mitchell, the Republican nominee in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District, has a position on government housing subsidies. He does not like them.

He has called the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit — the main program that builds affordable apartments in this country — "a disaster" that needs to be "totally reformed." His complaint, in his own words on a business podcast this year: "It's too much paperwork. It's too much compliance. Too much cost."

There is a housing subsidy he leaves out of that speech. It is the one his companies took $2,559,880 from.

The vote, then the credits

Iowa Starting Line went through the record. Here is the sequence.

In May 2021, Mitchell was a state representative. He voted for Senate File 619, a bill that expanded Iowa's Workforce Housing Tax Credit. That program hands out $35 million a year through the Iowa Economic Development Authority.

Afterward, Mitchell became a developer. His House financial disclosure lists him as a partner in BAM Development, Monroe Street Landing, Emerald Cove LLC, Bousselot & Mitchell Company, and J Mitchell Real Estate LLC.

Two of those firms — BAM Development LLC and Bousselot & Mitchell Company — built housing projects that applied for and received Workforce Housing Tax Credits:

A 16-unit development in Grinnell
A 30-unit development in Clear Lake
A 20-unit development in Dyersville

The three projects took a combined $2,559,880 in credits from the program he had voted to grow.

What this is and isn't

It is worth being precise, because the facts are damning enough without stretching them.

The credits are awarded through a competitive application run by state economic development staff, not handed out by legislators. And Mitchell was not yet a partner in either company when he cast the 2021 vote. Nobody has shown that he voted knowing his own future firms would collect.

What the record does show is a lawmaker who voted to make a housing subsidy bigger, then spent the following years building a real estate portfolio that leaned on that exact subsidy — and who is now running for Congress telling Iowans that housing subsidies are the problem.

The federal program he wants "totally reformed" is the one that builds housing for people who cannot afford market rent. The state program he voted to expand is the one that paid his companies. His criticism, as Iowa Starting Line put it, is rooted in the perspective of a developer.

This is the third time the pattern has run

Mitchell's campaign sells him as an outsider taking on a system that "works for insiders and lobbyists." We have now documented that claim colliding with his own record three separate times.

He founded and presides over a real estate trade group that spent nearly $75,000 lobbying the Iowa Legislature — while running against lobbyists.

His entire published housing plan is deregulation, which Iowa already tried: a law capping what cities can require of developers for stormwater runoff, passed in a state with worsening floods.

And now the housing subsidies he attacks in public are the kind his companies banked $2.5 million from.

There is one more name on the paperwork. BAM Development was co-founded in 2021 by Mitchell, fellow Iowa Rep. Michael Bousselot, and Matthew Arenholz — the husband of Rep. Ashley Hinson, who voted in the Iowa House to double the very credit BAM went on to collect. Mitchell was not in the legislature for that 2017 vote, but he joined Hinson in voting for the 2019 bill that doubled the small-city set-aside again.

Who this is actually about

Iowans in the 2nd District are not looking for a debate about tax credit compliance costs. They are looking at rent and a mortgage rate.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that Mitchell wants "totally reformed" is the program that produces the units at the bottom of the market — the ones a family priced out of buying actually needs. His argument against it is that it involves too much paperwork for developers.

He is a developer. His companies have taken $2.5 million from the state credit whose paperwork he was willing to do.

What the record shows

Joe Mitchell voted in May 2021 to expand Iowa's Workforce Housing Tax Credit. Two development companies he later partnered in collected $2,559,880 from that program across three Iowa towns. He is now campaigning against the federal housing credit as "a disaster" with "too much paperwork" — the program that builds housing for Iowans who cannot afford to buy from developers like him.

Source

"Joe Mitchell cashed in on housing tax credit he voted to grow", Iowa Starting Line, August 31, 2026. Photo: Iowa Starting Line.

Joe Lombardo Declared His Support for Data Centers Three Days After an AI Investor and His Wife Gave the PAC Backing Him $1 Million. A Week Later Another Data Center Family Gave $1 Million More.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:41:24 +0000

On May 14, 2026, Joe Lombardo, the Republican governor of Nevada, posted a video on X: "I support data centers because they bring jobs, investments, and economic growth to Nevada."

Three days before he posted it, a prominent artificial intelligence investor and his wife had given $1 million to the political action committee working to re-elect him.

Nevada has roughly 70 data centers running, being built, or planned. In the driest state in the country, they need the two things it has least of: water and electricity.

The eleven days

The Lever went through the campaign finance filings for Better Nevada PAC, the committee backing Lombardo's re-election. Three dates sit close together in May:

May 11 — Ben Horowitz and his wife Felicia Horowitz gave $500,000 each, for $1 million. Ben Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm better known as a16z, which has money in a long list of AI and data center companies.
May 14 — Lombardo posted his video endorsing data centers.
May 21 — Jessica Roy gave another $1 million. She is married to Rob Roy, who founded Switch, a data center company currently building facilities in Nevada. Switch has taken millions of dollars in tax abatements from the state, and Andreessen Horowitz is one of its major investors.

Two million dollars from two families invested in data centers, inside eleven days, with the governor's public endorsement wedged in the middle of it. The two donations are not even independent of each other: Horowitz's firm has money in the company Roy's husband founded.

Horowitz is a practiced political donor. He and his business partner Marc Andreessen each gave $2.5 million to Trump's 2024 campaign, and Horowitz later gave $2.5 million to Kamala Harris's.

Lombardo's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The $5 million that followed

A month later, on June 25, the same PAC received $5 million from the Republican Governors Association.

That is normally the least interesting line in a governor's finance report. Not this time. Since January 2025, the RGA has taken at least $8.5 million from people and companies invested in AI and data centers — including $3 million from Citadel founder Ken Griffin and $2.5 million from Paul Singer of Elliott Investment Management. Both firms are heavily invested in the industry.

So the money reached Lombardo through two doors. Two million came straight from the industry's families. Five million came through the party committee that the industry had also been filling.

He knows what data centers do. He says it does not happen here.

The most damning thing in the record is not a donation. It is Lombardo's own op-ed.

In June, writing in the Reno Gazette Journal, he called data centers "an opportunity to diversify Nevada's economy, strengthen our workforce and position our state as a national leader in technology and innovation for decades to come."

In the same piece he acknowledged that data centers are "known to use massive amounts of water… and raise electricity costs for surrounding communities."

Then he claimed "it isn't happening in Nevada."

Here is what was already on the record when he wrote that.

A January report from the Desert Research Institute, a science nonprofit, found data centers consumed 22 percent of all the electricity Nevada generated in 2024, and projected that could reach 35 percent by 2030. Working from the same report, The Lever calculated that Nevada's current development plans could have data centers drinking up to 16 billion gallons of water a year — about what 150,000 households use.

The report's authors put the water demand in terms a Nevadan can picture:

"Assuming the highest level of efficiency, the water needed annually for data center cooling under the projected load growth from NV Energy is more than 14,940 times the water needed for a single household, close to 17 times the water needed for an 18-hole golf course, and approximately six times the water needed for an alfalfa farm."

In May, NV Energy — the state's largest utility — issued its own report saying Nevada's future energy demand will nearly triple because of data centers.

This August, NV Energy sued Tract, a developer building two enormous facilities near Reno, alleging it is trying to push infrastructure and energy costs onto consumers, and to move the fight into a private court to avoid public scrutiny.

The utility is suing a data center developer over exactly the cost-shifting Lombardo says is not happening. Nevada has also handed the industry $340 million in state tax abatements since 2021.

"Those billionaire friends provide jobs"

Lombardo has not been subtle about who this is for.

In August he told the Latin Chamber of Commerce that data centers could be a "new gold rush," given the right guardrails. At a separate event, standing next to President Trump, he defended Trump's "billionaire friends" directly: "those billionaire friends provide jobs. And unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent."

That is the argument, said plainly. Take care of the billionaires or the state gets nothing.

Nevada's own cities are not so sure. Local governments across the state have begun issuing moratoriums on new data center construction while they work out how much power and water the things would take. That is what a government does when it does not know. Lombardo posted a video.

His Democratic opponent, Attorney General Aaron Ford, was pointed about the donations:

"Now we know why Joe Lombardo says he's 'wholeheartedly in support of data centers: He's bought and paid for by them. Taking care of his and Trump's 'billionaire friends' at Nevadans' expense is standard operating procedure from Lombardo. I'm running for Governor to pause and audit data centers' tax breaks and block them from raising our costs, because I fight for working Nevadans – not data center billionaires, like Joe Lombardo."

Ford has also sued the federal government over cuts to Nevada's already strained Colorado River allocation. Lombardo supports that lawsuit — while backing the industry that would drink 16 billion gallons a year of what is left.

This is the second time water and Lombardo's PACs have crossed paths

The committees backing Lombardo have been here before, and the subject was water then too.

We documented what happened after Nevada Gold Mines complained about the state engineer who wanted to cut its groundwater pumping: that regulator was fired a month later — the first state engineer removed since 1981 — and three months after that the company wrote a $500,000 check to Nevada Way PAC, the other committee backing Lombardo. Nevada Gold Mines has now given that PAC $1 million, more than it has given any other politician in the state — and Nevada Way PAC has passed $8.25 million of its own money into Better Nevada PAC.

The pattern is not subtle. An industry that needs Nevada's water writes very large checks to the committees backing the governor, and the governor's position lands where the industry wants it.

Lombardo is also not the only Republican whose data center enthusiasm arrived alongside the industry's money. We have tracked eight of them who spent the last year helping the build-out or taking its cash while three out of four Americans told pollsters they do not want one of these things near their home.

What the filings show

Ben and Felicia Horowitz gave $1 million to the PAC backing Joe Lombardo's re-election on May 11, 2026. Three days later Lombardo posted a video declaring his support for Nevada's data center build-out. A week after that, the wife of Switch's founder gave the same PAC another $1 million, and in June the Republican Governors Association — itself holding at least $8.5 million from AI and data center investors — gave that PAC $5 million. In an op-ed that same month Lombardo conceded data centers use massive amounts of water and raise power bills, then wrote that "it isn't happening in Nevada," while the state's own research institute had already measured them taking 22 percent of Nevada's electricity and projected 16 billion gallons of water a year. His campaign would not comment.

Source

Freddy Brewster, "Nevada Governor Backed Data Centers Days After $1 Million Donation", The Lever, August 25, 2026 (archived copy). Also covered by The Cool Down and republished by Truthout. Photo: Getty Images via Truthout.

Rob Bresnahan Traded Stock Hundreds of Times in His First Year. His Own Constituents Put an Insider Trading Ban on Their Ballot.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:08:35 +0000

On November 3, 2026, voters in Lackawanna and Luzerne counties in northeastern Pennsylvania will find a question on their ballot that residents put there themselves. It asks whether officials should be barred from trading stocks or placing prediction-market bets using nonpublic information they picked up on the job — and whether the county should publish an annual report of ethics complaints and stock trades.

And they were not close to the line.

In Lackawanna County, Action Together NEPA submitted 16,297 signatures against a requirement of 8,894; the county Board of Elections voted 3–0 to put the question on the ballot. In Luzerne County, the group turned in roughly 21,000 signatures against a requirement of 11,615 — the first time in that county's history that citizens have placed a proposed home rule charter amendment on the ballot themselves.

Lackawanna County sits entirely inside Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, and so does most of Luzerne — the rest of Luzerne is in the 9th. The congressman for the 8th is Rob Bresnahan.

The record that prompted it

The Keystone reported on August 31, 2026 that Bresnahan's congressional stock trading record is what "inspired" the drive.

We have written that record out in detail before. Within five months of taking office, Business Insider had counted more than 530 trades. Over 2025 he made almost 650 individual stock trades — enough that in November, NBC News reported, he "still ranks as the seventh-biggest trader in Congress by number of trades." The disclosure tracker CapitolTrades logs 653 trades across 320 issuers, worth $8.51 million, across his whole time in office — the issuers including municipal bonds and Treasury notes alongside the stocks. And in one of those trades, he sold stock in Medicaid providers shortly before voting for the bill that cut Medicaid.

He has said his trades are made by a financial advisor without his involvement. His constituents apparently do not find the distinction reassuring.

The ban wouldn't cover him. The disclosure would.

This is a county home rule charter amendment, so the prohibition binds elected county officials and county employees, along with the members and employees of county authorities, boards and commissions. It does not make anything illegal for a member of the United States House.

But the second half of the measure reaches further. It would require the county to publish an annual report of stock trades by county, state and federal officials representing the county. Lackawanna's elections board solicitor, Anthony Lomma, counted 135 elected officials the reporting provision could cover — up to and including, in his reading, the president and vice president along with state and federal representatives and senators.

So the practical effect on Bresnahan is not a ban. It is a hometown scoreboard: his trades, listed once a year, in a document produced by the counties he represents, because voters there decided they wanted to see them.

They wrote it themselves because Congress won't

Congress has not passed a stock-trading ban on itself. Bills get introduced, get cosponsors, and go nowhere.

So residents of two former coal counties went and amended the only charter they could actually amend, and gathered nearly twice the signatures needed to do it.

He introduced a ban himself

Bresnahan is not opposed to a congressional stock trading ban — in public.

He introduced one. In the same month he introduced it, he disclosed roughly 100 stock trades. That is about three a day, in the month he was asking his colleagues to outlaw the practice. His explanation, written as an addendum to his own disclosure filing, was that every investment decision is delegated to professional advisors and that he has "no role in, nor am informed of, specific investment decisions prior to their execution" — a claim that sat awkwardly beside his own earlier description, on Wilkes-Barre radio, of meeting his financial advisor to talk about "what different positions are coming up."

His campaign spokesman later told POLITICO that he had been "referring to 30,000-foot investment strategy and not about stock trades," and compared it to "a routine annual 401(k) meeting."

What the record shows

Voters in the two counties at the core of Rob Bresnahan's district gathered 16,297 signatures in Lackawanna and about 21,000 in Luzerne — nearly double the roughly 20,500 required between them — to put an insider trading ban on their November 3 ballots, in a drive the local newsroom reports was inspired by their own congressman's trading. Bresnahan made almost 650 individual stock trades in 2025 alone, sold Medicaid provider stock before voting to cut Medicaid, and introduced a congressional stock-trading ban in a month he made about 100 trades. The ban itself would only bind county officials. Its reporting provision would put his trades in an annual county report.

Source

Rob Bresnahan's stock trading under scrutiny as thousands of constituents push for insider trading ban — The Keystone, August 31, 2026. Photo: Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images.

Susan Collins' Super PAC Took $2 Million From a Billionaire Named in the Epstein Files. Two and a Half Months Later She Voted to Kill the Amendment Forcing Their Release.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:04:20 +0000

On June 27, 2025, Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman wrote a check for $2 million to Pine Tree Results PAC — the super PAC formed to reelect Susan Collins. The contribution is in the Federal Election Commission's own records of his giving.

Two and a half months later, on September 10, 2025, Collins voted to defeat an amendment that would have forced the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein case files.

Schwarzman's name appears in the Epstein files 23 times, The Daily Beast has reported, including one email in which Epstein called him "terrific." The story that surfaced his giving to Collins describes him as "associated with Epstein through New York's exclusive Core Club." He has not been accused of wrongdoing by any of Epstein's victims, and there is no allegation that he did anything illegal. What is true is narrow and documented: his name is in the material Collins voted not to force into the open, and his money is in the committee spending millions to keep her in the Senate.

The vote

The Senate voted 51–49 to dismiss the language, the Portland Press Herald reported. Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rand Paul of Kentucky were the only two who crossed over to join every Democrat. Collins voted with her party.

Schumer offered the language as an amendment to the annual defense bill, and Republicans voted to table it — a procedural motion that killed it without a vote on the merits. Collins' written explanation, issued through her office, was about process:

"In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee, which I chair, approved unanimously on a bipartisan basis a similar provision to compile and report the Epstein files as part of the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) funding bill... If Democrats hadn't blocked it from going to the floor, this amendment could have already been passed by the Senate as part of a bill that funds the Department of Justice."

She is not wrong that there was another vehicle. Two months later the Senate passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by unanimous consent — no recorded vote — and it became law; the Daily Beast notes that Collins voted against the 2025 procedural efforts "before later supporting legislation requiring their release." But the vote in front of her in September was the one that would have forced disclosure that day, and she voted it down. Two Republicans in the chamber decided the vehicle mattered less than the disclosure.

The money kept coming after the vote

Schwarzman did not stop. On June 26, 2026 — nine and a half months after the vote — he gave Pine Tree Results another $1 million, bringing his total to $3 million for this cycle.

Pine Tree Results is not a mystery committee. The Press Herald calls it, plainly, the "pro-Collins super PAC", and it has spent the cycle running attack ads against her Democratic opponents. FEC filings show it raised $20.6 million in the 2026 cycle and had spent $12.4 million by the most recent report. Its largest single independent expenditures are all ads opposing Maine Democrats Graham Platner and Troy Jackson — nearly $2 million and $2.2 million a shot.

Schwarzman is not the only billionaire in it. Bloomberg Government reported that billionaire Paul Singer helped the pro-Collins super PAC bank $10 million, and the Maine Monitor counted nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses donating to reelect her.

We have written this exact story before, about a different Republican

Susan Collins is not the only Republican on a 2026 Senate ballot whose Epstein-files position and Epstein-files donors point in the same direction.

Ashley Hinson, running for Senate in Iowa, refused to sign the House discharge petition that would have forced the files out — while taking nearly $90,000 from billionaires named in those files, including $30,500 during the window she was refusing to sign.

Two states, two Senate races, the same shape.

What Mainers wanted

Maine Democratic Party spokesman Tommy Garcia cited a recent poll that suggested an overwhelming majority of Mainers believed all the documents should be released.

"Yesterday, Susan Collins chose to protect Donald Trump and the rich and powerful instead of standing up for victims and the American people."

That is a partisan opponent talking, and it should be read as one. The FEC filings are not partisan, and they say the same thing about who is funding the campaign.

What the filings show

Stephen Schwarzman, whose name appears in the Jeffrey Epstein files, has given $3 million to the super PAC working to reelect Susan Collins — $2 million of it two and a half months before she voted, 51–49, to kill the amendment that would have forced the Justice Department to release those files, and another $1 million nine and a half months after. That super PAC has raised $20.6 million this cycle and spent it attacking her opponents. Two Senate Republicans voted the other way on the amendment. Collins was not one of them.

Source

Embattled Republican Senator Susan Collins Blasted Over 'Epstein Donors' — The Daily Beast, August 31, 2026. Contribution amounts and dates verified independently against Federal Election Commission filings.

Three Houses, Three Mortgages Each Calling Itself His Primary Home. Ken Paxton Blames a Texas Rule Scrapped in 2015.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:47:05 +0000

On Sunday, August 30, 2026, Fox News anchor Jacqui Heinrich asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton about something that has followed him through his Senate campaign: the fifteen homes he owns, worth roughly $9 million, on an attorney general's salary of $153,000 a year — and specifically about the three of them whose mortgages each say the house is his primary residence.

Heinrich did not soften the question. She pointed out that the Trump administration went after New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook over "exactly the same substance," and asked Paxton whether the reporting on him was wrong.

Paxton had an answer ready. It was the state constitution's fault.

"So in Texas, the constitution used to require that you — if you're a statewide office holder — you have to move to the capital. So I used to live in Collin County. When I became attorney general, I bought a condo in Austin so that I could live in the capital pursuant to what the constitution required."

He went on: his wife became a state senator, they bought a house, "that became my primary residence because it was required by the constitution." Then the constitution was changed, and he moved back to Collin County. "So, this idea that somehow that's fraudulent, they, of course, aren't following Texas law."

"Thank you for clearing that up," Heinrich said.

The rule he is blaming was repealed in his first year as attorney general

Texas did once require certain statewide officeholders to live in the capital. That requirement, on the books since 1876, was wiped out by Proposition 3, which Texas voters approved on November 3, 2015. The attorney general was one of the offices freed by it.

Ken Paxton was sworn in as attorney general in January 2015. The rule he says forced him into an Austin condo and then an Austin house was gone before his first year in office was over — nearly eleven years ago.

And when it went away, his office said he wasn't going anywhere. Three weeks after the vote, the Texas Tribune asked every affected officeholder whether they would leave Austin. Paxton's spokeswoman answered: "The attorney general has no plans to move." She said he kept residences in both Austin and McKinney, and that Travis County — Austin — was his "home county."

So the sequence Paxton described on Fox News, in which the constitution pushed him into Austin and its repeal pulled him back to Collin County, does not match what his own office said at the time.

His answer skips the two houses that are actually rented out

Even taken at face value, Paxton's explanation covers only the Austin properties. The Associated Press investigation that produced this story — published in July 2025 by Brian Slodysko — found two more problems that the Texas Constitution has never had an opinion about.

The mortgage on the Paxtons' house in College Station states that the property is for their exclusive use and cannot be rented out, and that renting it would be grounds for terminating the loan. The AP found it has been listed for rent on real estate websites on and off since at least 2022.

Paxton also holds a $1.2 million mortgage on a "5 bedroom luxury cabin" in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. That mortgage also says the property cannot be rented. It is listed on Airbnb and other short-term rental sites.

Broken Bow is in Oklahoma. No reading of the Texas Constitution required Ken Paxton to buy a cabin there, and none of it explains why two mortgages that forbid renting are attached to houses that get rented.

The AP also found that in 2018 the Paxtons simultaneously collected homestead property tax breaks — a benefit a homeowner may claim on only one home — on both the suburban Dallas house and a $1.1 million home in Austin. Travis County appraisal officials said that particular break had transferred to the Paxtons from the home's previous owner for the duration of that year.

Why the primary-residence label is worth money

This is not paperwork pedantry. Lenders charge noticeably lower interest on a mortgage for a house you actually live in than on a second home or an investment property. Legal experts told the AP that the three primary-residence designations will save the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the loans.

Knowingly making a false statement on a mortgage document is a federal and a state crime. Arif Lawji, a veteran Texas real estate attorney, told the AP: "If he filled out lender documents knowing that they were false, then that is a false statement to obtain a mortgage on favorable terms. That would be actionable. He's the chief enforcement officer. You have to be accountable for stuff you do that's wrong."

The chief enforcement officer part matters. Paxton's office is one of the primary agencies in Texas tasked with investigating mortgage fraud. He would be the person a referral went to.

He asked for exactly this scrutiny — of someone else

Heinrich's comparison to Letitia James was not a gotcha; it was the obvious question. The Trump administration has pursued James and Schiff over mortgage paperwork. In June 2025, Paxton weighed in on the James investigation, telling supporters: "I hope that if she's done something wrong, I hope that she's actually held accountable."

The AP noted one difference between them that cuts against Paxton. In 2020, Schiff formally re-designated his Maryland property as a second home. That is the step available to anyone who realizes a mortgage says something no longer true. It is a step, the AP wrote, that Paxton has not taken.

This is also not the first time Paxton's answer to "where do you actually live?" has landed him in trouble. A Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation found he appears to have voted six times from a home he no longer lives in — and state law directs the secretary of state to refer a complaint like the one filed against him to his own office if there is reasonable cause to suspect a crime. This is a man who has built a career on prosecuting other people over voting paperwork.

The bottom line

Asked on Fox News why three of his fifteen homes each carry a mortgage saying it is his primary residence, Ken Paxton said the Texas Constitution required a statewide officeholder to live in Austin. Texas voters repealed that requirement on November 3, 2015 — his first year as attorney general — and three weeks later his own spokeswoman said he had no plans to move and called Travis County his home county. His explanation also says nothing about the College Station house or the $1.2 million Oklahoma cabin, both carrying mortgages that forbid renting, both of which the Associated Press found listed for rent. The office that investigates mortgage fraud in Texas is his.

Source

Ken Paxton Tells Fox News Anchor He Was 'Just Following Texas Law' When He Claimed 3 Primary Residences — Jennifer Bowers Bahney, Mediaite, August 30, 2026. The underlying investigation is by Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Ashley Hinson Missed Five Epstein Votes in One Week. On One of Those Days, a Billionaire Named in the Files Gave Her $14,000.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:04:28 +0000

In the first ten days of September 2025, the House Appropriations Committee voted five separate times on forcing the Justice Department to give up what it was holding on Jeffrey Epstein.

Flight logs. Visitor records for his houses and his plane. Bank records. A full accounting of every document the department had on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

All five failed. Ashley Hinson sits on that committee. Her name is not on any of the five roll calls.

It is on something else from those same two days, and that is the part worth sitting with.

Five votes, five absences

You don't have to take anyone's word for this. The House publishes the committee's roll calls, name by name, in the report on each bill.

On September 3, 2025, the committee marked up the Financial Services and General Government bill and took 20 recorded votes. Three were about Epstein:

Roll Call 11 — cut off money for the White House budget office until the Epstein files are released. Failed 26–33.
Roll Call 12 — bar public money from being used to keep back the visitor logs, flight manifests and guest records for Epstein's homes and private plane. Failed 26–34.
Roll Call 14 — bar the Treasury Department from withholding, blacking out or slow-walking financial records on Epstein and Maxwell, including the suspicious-activity reports banks file when money looks dirty. Failed 28–33.

Hinson is listed in neither the yes column nor the no column on any of the three. You can read the full vote tables for that markup and check for yourself.

A week later, on September 10, 2025, the committee marked up the bill that funds the Justice Department itself. Nineteen recorded votes. Two were about Epstein:

Roll Call 12 — require the attorney general to hand the committee a list of everything the Justice Department has that relates to Epstein and Maxwell. Failed 28–33.
Roll Call 17 — bar the department from withholding, redacting or delaying the release of unclassified records in the Epstein-Maxwell case. Failed 28–34.

Same result. Hinson's name is on neither one.

Five chances to be counted. Zero appearances.

One vote each day, and neither was an Epstein vote

Here is what makes this different from an ordinary absence.

At the end of each of those two markups, the committee voted on the thing leadership actually needed: the motion to send the bill to the House floor. September 3, adopted 35–28. September 10, adopted 34–28.

Hinson is recorded on both — and on nothing else. "Mrs. Hinson" appears exactly once in each day's vote tables. She is missing from all 19 other recorded votes on September 3 and all 18 on September 10, the five Epstein amendments among them.

So this is not a member sitting out the awkward votes and staying for the rest. It is a member who cast one vote at each markup: the one her party needed her for.

The amendment nobody had to put their name on

There was a sixth Epstein measure that week, and it tells you something about how this works.

On September 10, Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez offered an amendment to hold back $35.5 million from the Justice Department until the attorney general turned over every document on the decision to move Ghislaine Maxwell out of a federal prison in Tallahassee and into a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas.

That move was real, and it was recent. Maxwell is serving 20 years for helping Epstein abuse girls. She was transferred to the Texas camp on August 1, 2025 — days after Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general and formerly Donald Trump's personal defense lawyer, spent two days interviewing her at a Florida courthouse.

The amendment was killed on a voice vote. No roll call. No names. Nobody on the committee had to be on the record about whether the public should learn how Maxwell got a better prison.

We're noting that because it's the one part of this story where nobody can be pinned down — including Hinson. She didn't dodge that vote. There was nothing to dodge.

Blanche is now the attorney general. The Senate confirmed him 50–49 at 4:17 in the morning on August 8, 2026. Hinson's reaction, to CBS2 in Cedar Rapids: "We need someone to have that position. I don't think leaving it unfilled was a good thing for our country. And so I'm glad the Senate was able to get him confirmed."

What came in on September 10

Federal Election Commission records are public, and they are searchable by date.

On September 10, 2025 — the day of Roll Call 12 and Roll Call 17 — Ashley for Iowa, Hinson's Senate campaign committee, recorded two contributions of $7,000 each: one from Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone, and one from his wife, Christine Schwarzman.

Fourteen thousand dollars, from one household, on that day.

Schwarzman's name appears in the Epstein files more than 20 times. He has never been accused of wrongdoing related to Epstein, and there is no evidence he ever emailed Epstein directly. That is worth saying plainly, because the true version of this is bad enough on its own.

The true version is this: on a day when a member of the Appropriations Committee had two recorded chances to vote for opening a set of files, and took neither, her Senate campaign banked $14,000 from a billionaire household whose name is inside them.

Nobody had to arrange that. That's the point.

We've been here before with her

This is not the first time the calendar has lined up this way.

Last month we wrote about the Daily Beast's finding that Hinson and her committees took nearly $90,000 from billionaires named in the Epstein files — about $30,500 of it during the same fall stretch when she was refusing to sign the discharge petition that would have forced the files onto the House floor. Out of 219 House Republicans, exactly four signed it. She was not one of them.

Her stated objection was not that the files should stay sealed. It was that forcing the vote would hand the floor to Democrats — a procedural complaint about her own party's convenience.

And it is not the first time she has been missing from her own committee. Congressional records show she has missed 163 committee votes and 33 floor votes since taking office in 2021 — including, in that same September 2025 stretch, three votes in one day on funding to fight violence against women.

Committee votes are the ones that almost never show up in a member's published attendance rate. That is exactly why they are worth counting.

What she did when it was free

On November 18, 2025, after Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva's signature finally forced the discharge petition over the line, the Epstein Files Transparency Act came to the House floor and passed 427 to 1. Hinson voted yes. Of the 428 members who voted, only one voted no.

By then the outcome was decided and a no vote would have been a national headline. In her own committee, two months earlier, when five votes were live and her name would have gone on the record, she wasn't there for a single one.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson sits on the House Appropriations Committee. On September 3 and September 10, 2025, that committee held five recorded votes to force the release of Epstein records — flight logs, visitor lists, bank records, and the Justice Department's full inventory. Hinson's name appears on none of them. On both days her name appears on the final vote to send the bill to the House floor — the only vote she is recorded on either day. On September 10, the day of two of those votes, her Senate campaign took $14,000 from Stephen and Christine Schwarzman; Schwarzman's name is in the Epstein files more than 20 times. She then refused to sign the petition that would have forced the files open, and voted for release two months later, when the count was 427 to 1 and her vote changed nothing.

Source

Jesse Valentine, "Hinson missed multiple votes on Epstein investigation", American Journal News, August 27, 2026. Photo: AP. The individual roll calls, vote totals and member lists in this post were independently verified against the House Appropriations Committee's published vote tables for the September 3, 2025 and September 10, 2025 markups, and the contributions against FEC records.

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.

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.

Senate Republicans' Super PAC Runs a Fake North Carolina News Site. It Blamed Roy Cooper for a Murder That Happened in South Carolina.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:40:01 +0000

There is a website called The North Carolinian. Across the top it says "Independent Journalism for North Carolina."

It is not independent journalism, and it is not really a news site. Popular Information reports that it is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC that exists to win Senate seats for the party.

It is not the first one. On August 6, 2026, Judd Legum's Popular Information exposed a whole network of sites like it, and we covered that exposé when it broke: at least six of them in states with competitive Senate races, run by One Nation — the dark money group that has handed the Senate Leadership Fund over $70 million this cycle. Four were built around Republicans we track. North Carolina was not among them.

On August 27, Legum reported what the North Carolina site is now being used for.

The article

On August 21, The North Carolinian published a piece with no byline: "Families Demand Accountability for Repeat Offenders as North Carolina Prison Releases Face New Scrutiny."

It is built around the killing of 22-year-old Logan Federico. It dwells on the record of the man accused of murdering her, Alexander Dickey — "at least 48 crimes across 14 separate occasions, including 31 felony charges," in the article's own words. Then it connects her death to a decision by former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper's administration to release thousands of inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cooper is the Democratic candidate for North Carolina's open U.S. Senate seat. The implication is that a Democrat's policy got a young woman killed.

Here is what the article leaves out.

Logan Federico was killed in South Carolina. Dickey is a South Carolina man. Every one of his prior crimes was committed in South Carolina. He had been incarcerated in South Carolina, and he was released from the Lexington County Detention Center — a South Carolina jail — by a South Carolina judge.

Roy Cooper was never governor of South Carolina. He had no authority over that jail, that judge, or that release. No North Carolina policy, and nothing Cooper did, had anything to do with it.

The article never mentions South Carolina at all.

Why they needed a fake newspaper

This is the part worth sitting with. A political committee can say almost anything in an ad. What it cannot do is make the claim look like it came from somewhere other than a political committee.

That's what The North Carolinian is for. An unbylined article on a site branded as independent local journalism reads like reporting. Popular Information's assessment is blunt: this is a smear published in a form no legitimate outlet would print, dressed up to look like it was.

And it isn't sitting there passively. The Senate Leadership Fund is paying to put the fake article in front of North Carolina residents through ads on Meta's platforms.

The television ad does the same trick

The online push runs alongside an SLF television ad, and the ad uses the same technique in a more precise way.

It shows an image of a news report about the murder from WCNC — a real television station, in Charlotte, North Carolina — carrying a "Charlotte, N.C." dateline. A viewer sees a North Carolina newsroom reporting a North Carolina story.

The ad obscures the part of the WCNC piece that says the crime took place in South Carolina.

That is not a framing choice or an unfortunate omission. Someone looked at a real news report, identified the sentence that would collapse the entire argument, and covered it up before putting it on television.

Where Michael Whatley comes into it

The Senate Leadership Fund is spending this money to elect Michael Whatley, Cooper's Republican opponent. And Logan Federico's father has appeared with Whatley on the campaign trail.

Whatley did not build the website, and there is no reporting that he directed any of this. But he is the sole beneficiary, and he is not a bystander to the story the ads tell — he has campaigned alongside the grieving parent whose daughter's death is being misattributed to his opponent.

He is also uniquely positioned to know how this works. Before running for Senate he was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Asked what he thinks of a super PAC supporting him running a counterfeit North Carolina newspaper to blame Cooper for a South Carolina crime, he could answer at any time.

It fits the pattern around his campaign, which we have documented before: police called on reporters who came to ask him questions, and a "truck ad" biography that his committees' own spending reports contradict.

What we know

The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC of Senate Republicans, secretly controls a website called The North Carolinian that presents itself as "Independent Journalism for North Carolina." On August 21, 2026, that site published an unbylined article blaming former Gov. Roy Cooper's pandemic-era prison releases for the murder of 22-year-old Logan Federico — a killing committed in South Carolina, by a South Carolina man released from a South Carolina jail by a South Carolina judge. The article never mentions South Carolina. SLF is paying to promote it to North Carolina voters on Meta, and its companion TV ad displays a real Charlotte station's report with the line identifying South Carolina obscured. SLF is spending that money to elect Michael Whatley.

Source

Judd Legum, "UPDATE: Senate GOP's fake news website falsely links Democrat to murder", Popular Information, August 27, 2026.

Ashley Moody Authorized the Deal That Took $10 Million From Poor Kids' Health Care. Her Office Objected First, Then Settled for Taking Its Name Off the Paperwork.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:38:45 +0000

For seven months, Florida's Republican leaders refused to even acknowledge that a grand jury report existed. On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, CBS News Miami got a copy of it anyway.

The report is about $10 million that was supposed to pay for health insurance for poor Florida children. It says that money was "misappropriated" and that the transfer was "part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities."

We laid out the money trail a month ago, back when the report was still locked up. The new part is what the grand jury says about the person Florida just sent to the U.S. Senate.

Ashley Moody was Florida's attorney general when this happened. According to the grand jury, she knew about the plan to divert the $10 million, and she personally gave her top deputy the green light to sign.

What the grand jury actually found

Start with the finding itself, because it is blunt.

"Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally."

Nobody was charged. That is not the same as nothing happened. The grand jury explained exactly why it couldn't charge anyone:

"Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida… or had any memory of who made it."

And then it said what it could see anyway:

"While we can't prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again."

Moody was never called to testify. Neither was Governor Ron DeSantis. Neither was James Uthmeier, the governor's chief of staff at the time, who is now Florida's attorney general and whose political committee ended up with most of the money.

The objection — and the fix

Here is the part that has never been public before.

The money came from a settlement with the health care giant Centene, which had been overbilling Florida for prescription drugs in a program that covers children. Florida was owed $67,048,611. In September 2024, state officials rewrote the deal so that only $57 million came back to taxpayers and $10 million went instead to the Hope Florida Foundation — the nonprofit built around First Lady Casey DeSantis' signature initiative.

Centene's own lawyers were uneasy. They wanted the settlement to say plainly that the Florida attorney general was the one directing them to send $10 million to a charity tied to the governor's wife.

Moody's office did not want that.

Her chief deputy, John Guard, told the grand jury he had "reservations" about the deal. He said that "esoterically" he agreed the $10 million was taxpayer money that "belonged to the state of Florida." He said "Florida Statutes require the legislature to decide how money is spent."

He also, according to the report, raised the political risk with his boss:

"[Guard] did have political concerns about the dedication of $10,000,000 to Hope Florida, which he raised with AG Moody, because he knew the deal would be viewed by the legislature as a constraint on their spending authority."

So Moody's chief deputy understood three things: the money belonged to taxpayers, the legislature is the branch that decides how taxpayer money gets spent, and lawmakers would be angry if they found out.

Now read what happened next, in the grand jury's words:

"His political concerns were resolved by the change to the agreement making the settlement AHCA's agreement rather than the AG's settlement agreement, as the problem would now be AHCA's problem rather than the AG's problem."

Nothing about the money changed. The $10 million still left the taxpayers. It still went to Hope Florida. The only thing that changed was whose name was on the paper. Instead of the attorney general directing Centene, it would now be the governor's health agency — the Agency for Health Care Administration — directing Centene.

That satisfied Guard. And then, the report says:

"after consulting AG Moody, she authorized Mr. Guard to sign the settlement agreement in its final form."

The grand jury added that Guard signed it "without conducting his due diligence to ensure the proper appropriation of taxpayer funds."

Why the rush

The grand jury was also unimpressed by the timing.

Florida sat on this case for three years. A draft settlement returning the full $67 million was sent to state officials on July 14, 2021. Ohio and Mississippi settled in 2021. Indiana, Massachusetts and California settled in 2023. Florida did nothing — and ignored Centene's own requests to wrap it up.

Then, in early September 2024, Florida suddenly wanted it done immediately. The grand jury did the arithmetic:

"The Centene settlement itself seems rushed as it materialized rapidly after years of inactivity. Then, once reached, it took a mere 7 days to fund. We believe the rush was due to the impending election which was just 45 days away."

The settlement gave Centene seven days to wire the $10 million to Hope Florida. It gave Centene more than a year to repay the $57 million owed to Florida taxpayers.

The grand jury also noticed what did not happen. There was no press release from the health agency or the governor's office bragging about recovering millions for taxpayers, the way other states did. And there was "no notification to the Legislature of the Centene settlement" at all.

Two of the officials who signed the agreement did so on September 27, 2024 — the day after Hurricane Helene made landfall. Cassandra Pasley, chief of staff at the Florida Department of Health, testified she was working at the state's Emergency Operations Center when she was pulled aside and asked to sign. She had never seen the document and did not know a settlement was in the works. She signed it that evening. She told the grand jury she was not aware any of the money would end up in a political action committee, and that she would not have signed if she had known.

Where the money went

Centene wired the $10 million on October 4, 2024. Within 25 days it was gone.

Two outside groups applied for $5 million grants each. Both got them, one within hours of applying. Both had written in their applications that the money would not be used for political purposes. A forensic accountant who analyzed the bank records for the grand jury traced $8.5 million of it into Uthmeier's political committee, Keep Florida Clean. From there, $7 million went to the Republican Party of Florida and $1.23 million to another committee Uthmeier chaired.

That money went into the campaign against Amendment 3, the marijuana legalization initiative. Amendment 3 got 5,950,589 votes — 55.90%. Florida requires 60%. It failed.

Moody had spent years trying to keep marijuana legalization away from Florida voters. In December 2019 she took an earlier initiative to the Florida Supreme Court, arguing its ballot summary was misleading, and in April 2021 the court kept that one off the 2022 ballot. Her office made the same case against Amendment 3, urging the court to reject it as misleading and not limited to a single subject — and lost, 5-2, in April 2024. Six months later, settlement money was paying for ads against it.

Two months after the amendment failed, DeSantis appointed her to the United States Senate.

Seven months of silence, and counting

The report was filed under seal with the Leon County Clerk's Office on January 28. One source familiar with the investigation told CBS News Miami that multiple people named in it, including Uthmeier, have spent the seven months since blocking its release through closed court proceedings. The Florida Center for Government Accountability asked the court to let it argue for release. That request is still pending.

She is not the only Republican attorney general whose record is sitting behind a seal. In Texas, the only two known occasions when Ken Paxton has had to answer questions about his own conduct under oath are two depositions sealed in a Collin County courthouse, which his Democratic opponent's campaign said it would ask a court to unseal on the same day this report surfaced.

Moody has refused repeated requests to talk about Hope Florida. Not to CBS Miami, which sent written questions to her Senate office and her campaign. And not to state Rep. Alex Andrade, the Republican who uncovered the diversion in the first place and who told CBS Miami in July that she has never responded to him either. Meanwhile the foundation at the center of it has kept moving further out of reach — its financial records now live at the office of a Republican compliance firm in Alabama — the same firm that keeps the books for the super PAC supporting her Senate campaign.

DeSantis was asked about Hope Florida at a news conference on Wednesday. "I wasn't involved in the settlement agreement, but I'm very happy with how everything was done," he said. He called the whole thing a hoax. Uthmeier has called it a "big nothingburger."

The grand jury that heard the testimony disagreed. Its closing line:

"As taxpayer money, it should have been treated as such instead of being allocated for partisan political purposes and without transparency."

What the record shows

A Florida grand jury found that $10 million owed to taxpayers — money that came from a company caught overbilling a health program for poor children — was misappropriated and spent on a political campaign. The report says Ashley Moody's chief deputy told the grand jury the money belonged to the state and that only the legislature decides how state money is spent, that he raised his political concerns about the deal with Moody directly, and that those concerns were resolved not by stopping the transfer but by rewriting the paperwork so another agency would carry the blame. Moody then authorized him to sign. Taxpayers got $57 million instead of $67 million, on a repayment schedule that gave Centene a year — while the $10 million bound for a political committee had to be wired in seven days. Moody is asking Floridians for a full Senate term in November and has not answered a single question about any of it.

Source

Jim DeFede, Grand jury finds DeSantis administration "misappropriated" $10 million in taxpayer money to Hope Florida, CBS News Miami, August 26, 2026. Photo: Getty Images.

Asked If He'd Campaign With Max Miller, Vivek Ramaswamy Said Republican Control Comes First: 'If We Compromise That, We're Done.'

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:35:18 +0000

A man walked up to Ohio's Republican nominee for governor and thanked him for standing behind a congressman his own party has been asking to quit.

"Thank you for supporting Max, Max Miller," the man said.

"Absolutely," Vivek Ramaswamy answered. "Up and down the ticket."

The man pressed: would Ramaswamy actually go out and campaign with him?

"My view is this is the most important election for preserving the Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we're done. So that's the way I look at it."

The exchange was captured on audio published by Headquarters News on X on August 26, 2026, and reported by Raw Story the same day.

Read the answer again, because it is not an evasion. He was asked about a specific man and specific allegations, and he answered with a calculation. Losing the majority is the thing that cannot be compromised. Everything else is downstream of that.

A necessary note up front: none of the allegations against Max Miller has been proven in court. He has never been criminally charged over any of them, and he denies all of them. What follows is what has been filed in court, reported in public records, and said on the record.

What Ramaswamy is choosing to stand behind

Miller is fighting two court cases at once, one with his ex-wife and one with his ex-girlfriend. Both women say he abused them.

Mother Jones obtained more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports through public records requests. We went through what those records contain: his ex-wife Emily Moreno told detectives she couldn't rule out that Miller caused their 2-year-old daughter's broken collarbone, because he had previously thrown hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head. The child protective services investigation into the collarbone was ruled unsubstantiated. The records also include a threat to a sitting U.S. senator.

That senator is Bernie Moreno of Ohio — Emily's father, and the toddler's grandfather.

His own party already answered this question

This is not a case where Republicans have gone quiet and Ramaswamy is simply declining to be the first one out. Three weeks before that audio, they went on the record.

On August 6, 2026, two U.S. senators publicly told Miller to resign — Ohio's Jon Husted and Montana's Tim Sheehy. Four days earlier, Moreno himself had said Miller "should not serve in the House of Representatives." A major conservative group called him unfit to serve. A poll showed him losing a safe Republican district by 14 points. Miller's response was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay on the ballot, past the deadline for the party to swap in anyone else.

So when Ramaswamy says the majority can't be compromised, he is disagreeing with Republican senators who decided it could be — and with the grandfather of the child in the file.

President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have avoided calling for Miller to go. Ramaswamy went further than avoiding it. He said "absolutely," and "up and down the ticket."

What it says about the man asking to run Ohio

Ramaswamy is running to be governor of Ohio. The job is almost entirely about judgment calls made without a roll call to hide behind — who gets appointed, which investigations get funded, who is told their conduct is disqualifying.

He was handed the easiest version of that test anyone could construct. A man asked him a yes-or-no question about one man. Two senators from his own party had already answered it. And his reasoning was that the seat count comes first.

This is of a piece with how he has run. He spent months refusing to tell Ohio what he actually stands for, to the point that a newsroom had to badger him into stating a single position. Here he stated one plainly, and it turned out to be about the majority.

The bottom line

In audio published August 26, 2026, Vivek Ramaswamy — the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio — was asked whether he would campaign with Rep. Max Miller and said "absolutely," "up and down the ticket," explaining that this is "the most important election for preserving the Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we're done." Miller faces two civil cases from two women alleging abuse, all of which he denies; on August 6, two Republican senators — Ohio's Jon Husted and Montana's Tim Sheehy — called on him to resign, four days after his former father-in-law Sen. Bernie Moreno said he should not serve in the House; Miller stayed on the ballot after loaning his campaign $1 million.

Source

"Vivek Ramaswamy caught on audio defending GOP candidate accused of domestic abuse", Raw Story, August 26, 2026. Audio published by Headquarters News. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Raw Story.

Qatar Paid for Claudia Tenney's World Cup Trip. On the Form Where She Had to Name Who Paid, She Wrote the Name of a Law Instead.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:33:45 +0000

In November 2022, eight members of the U.S. House flew to Qatar to watch the World Cup. The government of Qatar paid for all of it.

That is legal. The Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act lets members of Congress accept foreign-government-funded travel — the idea being that lawmakers meeting foreign officials is worth something, as long as everyone can see who paid. The whole arrangement rests on that last part. You take the trip, and then you write down on a public form who bought the ticket.

Claudia Tenney took the trip. On the form, she wrote: "Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (MECEA) Trip."

That is the name of the statute. It is not the name of anybody who paid for anything.

What the other members wrote

The delegation was bipartisan and not small: Tenney, André Carson of Indiana, Lou Correa of California, Darin LaHood of Illinois, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, Eric Swalwell of California, and David Valadao of California.

Most of them filled out the same box with the actual answer. Their disclosures name Qatar directly — "Government of Qatar," "Embassy of Qatar," "State of Qatar (MECEA)." Steil and Valadao, both Republicans on the same plane, named it.

Two members didn't. Tenney listed only the statute. So did LaHood, whose entry reads simply "MECEA."

The House Ethics Committee's instruction is not ambiguous about which answer is correct. Members are told to provide the name of the sponsor or organization that actually paid for or provided the travel — and the Committee spells out that on a MECEA trip, the sponsoring entity is the government of the host country.

Here, the host country was Qatar.

Why naming the country is the whole point of the form

Strip away the acronym and this is simple. A foreign government spent money on eight American lawmakers. The public interest in knowing which foreign government is not a technicality — it is the only reason the disclosure exists.

A member of Congress who accepts a Qatari-funded trip and files a form that never says "Qatar" has satisfied the letter of showing up and defeated the purpose. Anyone searching those filings for the word "Qatar" would find six members. They would not find Tenney or LaHood.

The Daily News reported the discrepancy on August 26, 2026, after Tenney's Democratic opponent in New York's 24th District, Alissa Ellman, raised it.

Tenney's answer

Her spokesperson, Ashlie Walker, did not answer the questions about why the filing named a statute rather than a government. What came back instead was a complaint about the coverage — that the paper was writing about this rather than about what New Yorkers need.

That response is worth reading twice. The question was: why doesn't your disclosure say who paid? The answer was: why are you asking?

Ellman's own framing was that time doesn't erase it. "Does it matter if it was four years ago?" she said. "Four years ago, I think the economic problems were still here in NY-24. There are the same issues…" She said she wouldn't accept that kind of trip if elected, and that she'd rather spend what she earns in Congress in the district — on its hotels, its restaurants, its people.

The pattern this fits

For Tenney, the through-line is who she treats as her audience. She has pushed a bill that would let the Treasury Secretary strip a nonprofit of its tax status without showing evidence, and she proposed making Donald Trump's birthday a federal holiday. Her constituents in NY-24 are not the ones being served by any of it.

For LaHood, the pattern is the same shape in a different key: on the record one way and on the roll call the other. He told Peoria radio in May that the Iran war needed an "off ramp," then voted a month later against the resolution ordering U.S. forces out.

Neither of them broke a law by going to Qatar. What they did was decline to be plainly identifiable, on a public form, as people whose trip a foreign government bought — while six colleagues on the same trip managed it without difficulty.

The bottom line

The government of Qatar paid for eight members of Congress to attend the 2022 World Cup. Six of them named Qatar on the financial disclosure where House rules require members to identify who actually paid for the travel. Claudia Tenney listed only "Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (MECEA) Trip," and Darin LaHood listed only "MECEA" — the statute that permits foreign-funded travel, not the government that funded it. The House Ethics Committee's own guidance says the sponsor on a MECEA trip is the host country's government. Asked why, Tenney's spokesperson criticized the news outlet for asking.

Source

"Ellman criticizes Tenney for Qatar-funded World Cup trip", The Daily News (Batavia), August 26, 2026.

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.

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.