The year was 2018, and Lawrence Krauss, the prominent physicist and scholar of the cosmos, was facing a Title IX investigation at Arizona State University. BuzzFeed News had just reported on allegations of sexual misconduct against him; he denied them. In March, he contacted a lawyer experienced in higher education cases. Krauss and Justin Dillon, the lawyer, exchanged a few friendly emails before speaking on the phone.
Then, Krauss presented him with an “unusual request” — he wanted Dillon to call a disgraced financier who had, 10 years before, pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution of a minor.
“I have been advised through much of the BuzzFeed experience, both before and after, by a friend, who is also somewhat infamous. His name is Jeffrey Epstein, and you may know who he is already,” Krauss wrote.
“Bottom line is that Jeffrey is not only friends with most of the famous people from finance, to business, to Hollywood, who have either been brought down during #metoo and he also speaks regularly with people ranging from the awful white house people, who he is friends with, to ken starr etc.,” added Krauss. He later walked back his request for Dillon to speak to Epstein. But Epstein appeared none too pleased that Krauss had invoked him and his connections.
“Every email is to do with engagement/money etc. in the future please do not disclose our conversations or who I speak with!!!!!,” Epstein — who would die 16 months later, awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges — wrote to Krauss.
In several cases across the country, judges have rejected or trimmed subpoenas from the Justice Department probing whether gender-affirming care provided to minors violates federal law.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has refused to meet for a voluntary interview with Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host-turned-U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
TPM is resurrecting The Franchise, a weekly newsletter that we used to send out back in the day, starting before and continuing while President Trump began spreading deranged conspiracy theories about his loss in the 2020 election. (You can sign up here!)
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election and MAGA’s various attempts to sow doubt in states’ election administration processes and spread conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud (conveniently, in locales where Democrats won or typically win elections), former TPM reporter Matt Shuham used The Franchise to meticulously track the Big Lie and all its tentacles and permutations.
With Trump’s undying fixation with the 2020 election back in the news this week — and everything else his Justice Department and White House is attempting to do to act on his fever dream to “nationalize” elections, seize voter data from states, force mid-cycle gerrymandering and, potentially, intimidate voters at the polls this fall — we figured it was an apt time to bring The Franchise back to TPM readers’ inboxes.
TPM reporter Khaya Himmelman has taken on this task. Since we first hired Khaya at TPM she has covered elections, voting rights, the conspiracy theories that festered post-2020 (and the people who perpetuated the disinfo), the ways in which election administration had to change in the wake of Trump’s attempt to subvert the vote, attacks on poll workers, the DOJ’s overreach into states’ rights to administer elections, Trump’s gerrymandering pressure campaign and more.
My name is Khaya Himmelman, and I’m a reporter at Talking Points Memo covering voting rights and the assault on election administration. I’m excited to announce that TPM is reviving The Franchise, our weekly newsletter on elections and voting rights in America as the Trump administration continues its assault on election administration, the franchise and democracy overall. You can sign up here.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Minutes after a federal agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in a Chicago suburb last September, a group of police officers stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out the answer to a question of protocol: Who would investigate the shooting?
“Wouldn’t it be state’s, at a minimum?” one Franklin Park officer asked, according to body camera footage.
Chief Mike Witz shook his head. “No, because it’s a federal shooting,” he said. “You’re not going to investigate a federal officer.”
His officers didn’t investigate. In their report, they didn’t even note the names of the two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the scene of Silverio Villegas González’s death. Instead, they deferred to the FBI.
Local law enforcement officials also did not investigate when a Border Patrol agent shot and wounded a U.S. citizen in her car in Chicago less than a month later. Or when an ICE agent in Phoenix shot a Honduran man during a traffic stop later that month.
In fact, local police did not open investigations into six of the 12 shootings by on-duty federal agents that have led to the deaths or injuries of citizens and immigrants since September, a ProPublica analysis found. In three other shooting cases, state or local police said they have opened inquiries, which they called a routine practice in those jurisdictions. And in Minnesota, where ICE and Border Patrol shot and killed two U.S. citizens and injured a Venezuelan man last month, state police have tried to conduct independent investigations only to be thwarted by the Trump administration, which has gone so far as to block officers from a scene, even when they had a judicial warrant.
I think I can say with little fear of contradiction that I know as much as anyone else in modern American journalism about the absolute, no-excuses necessity of operating in the black. In some ways, I know more because with big corporate operations there are lots of creative ways by which you can either hide from the public or hide from yourself that you’re operating at a loss or failing as a business. At least for a while, you can convince yourself that everything is great. You’re not losing money. You’re investing in growth. You’re focusing on quality. For this reason I’ve always seen news organization layoffs at least somewhat differently from many others who believe deeply in journalism. All the merit and great stories and hard work just melts into the background when you face the absolute necessity of making payroll. It’s a brutal taskmaster.
That’s not what’s happening at The Washington Post, and not simply because, of course, Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.
In the roughshod world of the Trump Justice Department, politicized prosecutions are fine, but Ed Martin apparently crossed the line when he allegedly improperly leaked grand jury materials in the bogus mortgage fraud investigation of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), CNN reports.
That finding by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche fueled what I suspect Blanche already wanted to do: sideline Martin further. Martin was removed as director of the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group at the end of 2025.
But what’s notable is what didn’t happen: Sharing grand jury information with unauthorized persons is a criminal offense, but Martin is not facing criminal charges; and, while he’s expected to leave DOJ soon, he remains U.S. pardon attorney.
For his part, Blanche offered a lawyered public statement (note the use of the present tense): “there are no misconduct investigations into Ed Martin. Ed is doing a great job as Pardon Attorney.”
Georgia Ain’t Gabbard’s First Rodeo
A team working for DNI Tulsi Gabbard led an investigation in the spring of 2025 into cockamamie claims that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, Reuters reports: “Her team took an unspecified number of Puerto Rico’s voting machines and additional copies of data from the machines as part of its investigation, a spokesperson for Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.”
Fulton Co. Wants Its Voting Records Back
Georgia’s Fulton County launched a legal effort to get its 2020 ballots and other voting records back after they were seized by the FBI last week in a politicized investigation to prop up President Trump’s baseless claims that he only lost the election because of voting fraud.
The Provocation …
Steve Bannon cranked up the midterm voter intimidation dial to an 11:
BANNON: Here’s the unprecedented cooperation. All of them got to go and President Trump has to nationalize the election. You’ve got to put ICE in, call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne under the Insurrection Act, secure every poll, and make sure only people with IDs, registered… pic.twitter.com/LhK1pdoVSv
Disinformation expert Kate Starbird offers a smart thread on how to respond to Bannon’s provocation without amplifying it and doing his voter suppression for him (click for the full thread):
MUST READ
The transcript of Tuesday’s hearing in Minnesota federal court in which one overwhelmed government attorney begged to be held in contempt so she could finally get some sleep is worth reading as a window into chaos inside the Trump administration.
A few follow-up notes:
The attorney, Julie Le, on loan from ICE, was sent back to ICE after the court hearing. It’s not clear if she still has a job at ICE.
The other government attorney in the hearing, Ana Voss, the chief of the civil division in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, has reportedly tendered her resignation but at least as of Tuesday was still on the job.
Mass Deportation Watch: Minnesota Edition
Declaration of War: A great MPR piece on the work of ICE observers in the suburbs of the Twin Cities includes this Minnesota-style declaration of war by a suburban mom-turned-observer: “I don’t even care if I ruffle feathers.”
‘Softer Touch’: President Trump says he ordered the withdrawal of 700 federal agents from Minnesota as he tries a “softer touch.” That still leaves some 2,000 federal agents in the state, according to White House border czar Tom Homan.
‘Bad Publicity’: President Trump dismisses the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents as “bad publicity”:
I swear this clip is not edited. Trump pivots from downplaying the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti ("two people out of tens of thousands and you get bad publicity") to in the very next breath claiming "we've been very tough on the waters," leaving Tom Llamas baffled ("the waters?")
TEXAS: ICE is now bypassing the El Paso County medical examiner who ruled a death at the Camp East Montana detention center at Fort Bliss a homicide. After the latest detainee death at the tent facility, the autopsy was performed at Fort Bliss’ William Beaumont Army Medical Center, which doesn’t release autopsy reports to the public, the Texas Tribune reports.
VIRGINIA: New Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) ordered state law enforcement agencies to dissolve any partnership agreements with federal immigration enforcement operations.
WEST VIRGINIA: I can’t get enough of the civics lessons that federal judges are now baking into their court orders. The latest I’ve seen comes from U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston in the Southern District of West Virginia, a Bush I appointee, in a habeas cases filed by a Venezuelan national who was illegally detained after a traffic stop on Interstate 77:
The Destruction: Civil Service Edition
A new rule stripping civil service protections for some 50,000 senior government workers (an echo of Trump’s first term proposal for a “Schedule F”) is set to be unveiled today.
For Your Radar …
With the U.S. retreating from NATO, Europe is reassessing the imminence of the Russian threat:
The earlier belief in Berlin and other capitals was that Russia wouldn’t be able to threaten NATO until 2029 or so. There is now a growing consensus that such a crisis could come much sooner—before Europe, which is expanding its own investment in defense, is in a position to fight back.
“Our assessment is that Russia will be able to move large amounts of troops within one year,” the Netherlands Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans said in an interview. “We see that they are already increasing their strategic inventories, and are expanding their presence and assets along the NATO borders.”
RIP CIA World Factbook
The CIA World Factbook, an indispensable pre-internet resource, is no longer.
J. David Bamberger, 1928-2026
He made his fortune with Church’s Fried Chicken, but J. David Bamberger will be most remembered for his conservation work in the Texas Hill Country. Inspired as a boy by Louis Bromfield’s “Pleasant Valley,” Bamberger used his fast-food fortune to buy the crappiest piece of land he could find and spent the next half a century restoring it to some semblance of ecological balance:
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This story is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Donald Trump may not have been the first president to believe in conspiracy theories, but he was definitely the first candidate whose election was fueled by pandering to those who do.
As his popularity soared among those on the fringe during his 2016 campaign, their internet presence became less about “questioning everything” and much more about blindly believing whatever Trump told them. Trump’s following on Reddit grew especially fast, and especially toxic. But while threads like r/TheDonald were unapologetically pro-Trump, the large subreddit r/conspiracy was ostensibly more non-partisan.
It claimed to hold a “question everything” ethos that would presumably include the new president alongside the old ones as part of the evil cabal supposedly ruling the world and funding all wars.
It didn’t actually work out that way. Claiming more than 856,000 active weekly users, r/conspiracy is one of the most important hubs of fringe discussion and research. And for years, the forum’s most popular posts were unabashedly pro-Trump. The forum was openly anti-vaccine and believed COVID-19 was a hoax. Users believed that Democrats were part of a vast occult trafficking ring, to the point of helping popularize the QAnon conspiracy theory. They believed that the media and political establishment were all hell-bent on destroying Trump, the same message Trump’s surrogates and spokespeople espoused every day on cable news and right-wing podcasts.
But in his second term, that blind loyalty has started to crack. Many of the influencers who helped rehabilitate Trump after his failed attempt to subvert the 2020 election are now openly questioning his actions and statements in ways that would have been unthinkable months ago.
The tipping point seems to be the administration’s deeply unconservative stance that people “can’t bring a gun to a protest,” in response to the disarming and shooting of Minnesota protester Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Patrol agents on Jan. 24, 2026.
