It is the biggest remaining mystery of the January 6 attack.
On the night before that dark day in early 2021, when over a thousand supporters of former President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol after he urged them to march on the building, a hooded and masked figure went on their own lone patrol outside the halls of Congress.
Continue reading “The Biggest Mystery Of January 6 Remains Unsolved”This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
The billboards have popped up along both Interstates 55 and 170 around St. Louis. They’re along I-70 between Columbia and St. Charles, in central Missouri. And there’s one across from a shopping center in Cape Girardeau, along the Mississippi River in the state’s southeast corner.
In fact, as the Nov. 5 election approaches, motorists can see the billboards all over Missouri.
Continue reading “Opponents Of Missouri Abortion Rights Amendment Turn to Anti-Trans Messaging And Misinformation”There’s deeply cynical and then there’s things which might be illegal. In the first category we have an Elon Musk-funded PAC microtargeting Jewish and Arab communities with diametrically opposed ads about Kamala Harris’s support for Israel or Palestine. Amazingly cynical. But then you have what I’m going to describe next, which comes from another Musk-funded dark money operation. They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site. (A lot of potential legal and regulatory questions turns on word like “fake” and “impersonating,” which we’ll return to in a moment.)
Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign”Despite the dependability of election years’ October neurosis for Democrats, this year’s bout has prompted a flurry of stories on the phenomenon (heck, we did a whole podcast episode about it).
Continue reading “Burdened By What Has Been, Dems Enter Election Home Stretch With Typical Anxiety”Reuters has a story out reporting missed targets and internal investigations of inflated or faked doorknocking numbers at America PAC. That’s the Elon Musk PAC which now appears to be running most of the pro-Trump ground operation. Oddly, one of the sources in the Reuters piece is Alysia McMillan, an America PAC canvasser who was profiled in the Post just the day before yesterday. The story doesn’t totally have the goods — internal complaints about not meeting their election target, one Elon deputy investigating inflated numbers. Hard to know precisely what that means in the context of an operation involving tens of millions of dollars across multiple states. But it’s in line with lots of smoke and red flags about the whole operation.
There appears to be a scam text operation targeting ACTBLUE donors in which the text basically tries impersonate or imitate the kind of text you might get from your credit card company if there’s a suspicious transaction. If you’ve gotten one of these please let us know as soon as you can.
I wrote a lot earlier in the month about the questions marks surrounding the Republican and Trump ground operations in this election. To recap, the campaign outsourced most of its efforts to a series of super PACs, which has ended up mainly being Elon Musk’s America PAC. The initial driver of the whole thing was Turning Points Action, which critics rather presciently predicted didn’t have the organizational heft or experience to do something at that scale. The Trump campaign itself has focused on what is at least a pretty unconventional approach, largely ceding conventional ground operations in favor of focusing on Trump-identified non-voters. My read on that whole question is that there are lots of red flags and lots of smoke. But just what it will all mean or the impact it will have I’m not sure. TPM Reader CH wrote in today to ask me what is going on on the Democratic side. Do we assume Harris has a strong ground operation or is that a wobbly assumption?
Here’s what I told him.
Continue reading “Ground Games”Judge Tanya Chutkan for the District of Columbia unsealed nearly 1,900 pages of appendices containing evidence supporting Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump over his 2020 coup attempt on Friday.
Continue reading “Chutkan Unseals Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 Appendices Over Trump Objections”This new piece in The Atlantic captures what the article’s author, Ron Brownstein, portrays as the current air of pessimism, or at least deep sobriety, within Democratic campaign and political operative circles. The general gist is that Harris hasn’t sealed the deal with voters, hasn’t closed the sale, whatever metaphor you choose. And the shortcoming is that in her effort to build up a positive brand, she hasn’t focused voters enough on the horrors of another Trump term. (Of course, one of the earlier lines was that it wasn’t enough to demonize Trump. There had to be a positive agenda. So that seems to have changed. Let’s not worry about that difference of opinion.) I’ve always been of the mind that the other guy being scary and dangerous is among the best reasons to vote. (In medicine, “first, do no harm” is seen as a pretty good general approach.) In any case, that’s the idea, the emerging argument, that Brownstein picked up among Democratic insiders. He fleshes this out by noting a series of recent polls showing voters have a rising perception of retrospective Trump approval — in other words, how they remember their approval of Trump’s presidency, even if their recollection of how they felt is actually substantially more positive than it was at the time. There’s no denying there is a small but measurable movement in the poll averages in Trump’s direction. But it’s less clear whether that tilt is picking up a real change in the situation on the ground. And I think it’s even less clear whether outside observers know why it’s happening, if indeed it is. Mostly people are reading their pre-existing assumptions and fears into bumpy data, the drivers of which are largely inscrutable.
Continue reading “Into The Storm”A couple weeks ago I spoke with TPM’s developers, Matt Wozniak and Jacob Harris, about everything from the evolution of the site’s tech stack to books they’d recommend to living in Florida under the DeSantis regime. You simply cannot tell the story of TPM without Woz, as we call him, who has had the heroic challenge of managing TPM’s tech infrastructure for over 12 years. When Jacob came aboard several years ago, it was a true turning point for the organization. A lot of the work they do isn’t sexy but it’s all extremely important and directly correlates to our ability to be lean and efficient, which ultimately helps us survive and thrive. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
