Trump DOJ Fires Prosecutor in ICE Shooting Case

Posted on September 4, 2026September 4, 2026 by David Kurtz

Ex-AUSA Now Under Criminal Investigation

The Trump DOJ has fired the federal prosecutor who sought to bring civil rights charges against an ICE agent for the January shooting of a man through the closed door of his home during Operation Metro Surge.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans of Minneapolis was fired — and is now himself reportedly under criminal investigation — after ProPublica published emails he sent to lawyers for the victims apologizing that his efforts to bring more serious civil rights charges against ICE agent Christian Castro were being blocked by Main Justice.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in the email. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”

Evans concluded his email: “It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients.”

News of Evans’ firing came the same day that Castro was indicted on lesser charges of making false statements for allegedly lying to investigators about the shooting. Castro is facing separate state charges in Minnesota, but state prosecutors failed in their efforts to have Castro extradited from Texas after he was arrested there.

In addition to being fired, Evans is now under federal criminal investigation, according to various reports. CBS News says it’s for alleged leaks; the AP says it’s for alleged obstruction of a grand jury probe; the WaPo says it’s for alleged obstruction of justice.

Even the lesser charges are a big reversal for the Trump DOJ, which originally charged Castro’s victims over the incident. But the case came apart as new evidence, including video, emerged that undercut Castro’s account. Within a month, the case was dropped.

Castro, the first federal agent to face federal charges over Operation Metro Surge, turned himself in to federal authorities in Texas on Thursday. Oddly, the Trump DOJ says a decision on the civil rights charges against Castro has still not been made.

Trump DOJ Promotes Aakash Singh

Aasash Singh, who has been the main point of contact between Main Justice and U.S. attorneys around the country and a key figure in some of the Trump II retributive prosecutions, has been promoted to principal associate deputy attorney general, Bloomberg reports:

Attorney General Todd Blanche, in one of his first major personnel changes since being sworn in last month, is now handing Singh a more sprawling portfolio. Past PADAGs, including Trump’s initial pick in this administration, Emil Bove, have wielded significant law enforcement power behind the scenes by applying tough tactics — at times making unpopular decisions affecting the career workforce.

Living in the Worst Timeline

TPM’s Layla A. Jones: How a Baseless, Right-Wing Social Media Panic Led to Dramatic Changes at the Census Bureau

Trump USPS Ballot Scheme Back at SCOTUS

With North Carolina starting to mail out ballots today, the Trump administration raced back to the Supreme Court on Thursday asking it to stay a lower court ruling which blocked its latest effort to use the Postal Service to spearhead a massive federal intervention in the running of the midterm elections.

Two Big Redistricting Wins for Democrats

Missouri: The state Supreme Court has thrown out the new GOP-drawn map used in last month’s primary that eliminated one of the state’s two Democratic congressional districts and restored the old map — setting up the strange prospect of the general election being contested by candidates who were nominated by districts that no longer exist. The court ruled that the new map must be approved by voters before it can go into effect, so the new map will also be a referendum item on the November ballot.
Maryland: The state Supreme Court cleared the way for a proposed amendment to the state constitution to appear on the November ballot that would make it easier for Democrats to gerrymander congressional districts in their favor in time for the 2028 election.

Nigel Farage Targeted in Sting Operation

In the United Kingdom, two of Nigel Farage’s top aides have stepped down after Channel 4 aired a video of an undercover sting operation targeting Farage. In the videos, in which Farage and the two aides appears, journalists posing as a rich American donor and his UK-based son schemed on how to get around UK election law on foreign donations to contribute £500,000 to Farage’s Reform UK party.

Germany Election Watch

A last bit of analysis of German domestic politics ahead of Sunday’s election in which the far-right AfD party is poised to win a historic victory in one state:

Politico: How Germany’s Firewall Against the Far Right Collapsed
NYT: Something Alarming Is About to Happen in Germany

Thread of the Day

How Bad Was the Open AI Breakout?

A clearer, though still imperfect, picture is slowly emerging of the seriousness of the hack of Hugging Face by Open AI agents who broke out of their sandbox. For your long weekend reads, let me suggest:

At the NYT, Kevin Roose has the tl;dr: Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.
Ajeya Cotra, one of the outside investigators allowed in by Open AI to assess some (but not all) of what happened, recounts her takeaways from the investigation: “[T]his incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover …”
In the The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations, Dwarkesh Patel draws particular attention to what happened after the Hugging Face hack: The Open AI agents seem to have hacked Open AI itself, but that later incident hasn’t been subject to outside investigation.

Sad to See the Summer Go

Enjoy the long weekend. See you back here Tuesday.

Check out Morning Memo playlists on Spotify and YouTube.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Don’t Miss

Posted on September 4, 2026September 4, 2026 by John Light

Don’t miss Layla A. Jones’ piece this morning, which details a kind of census corollary to Trump’s 2020 big lie. Republicans and assorted social media influencers are claiming bureaucrats used the 2020 census to hand seats in Congress to Democrats. That is, of course, not true. The conspiracy theory is nonetheless important, because it is now making its way into Census Bureau policy. Layla looks at where it came from, and how it is animating the administration’s war on the census.

Under Trump’s Executive Order, Sending Mail-in Ballots Could Take Weeks or Years

Posted on September 4, 2026September 4, 2026 by John Light

‘Years’ to Send Out Mail-in Ballots

Election experts are examining the new U.S. Postal Service rules for mailed ballots, and finding that under them, getting ballots in the mail could take weeks — or even years — rendering the program unworkable for an actual election.

“If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” wrote Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer of the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections official for Maricopa County, in a declaration as part of one of the legal challenges to the rule.

“If it only took only a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take 30 days,” she continued. “Even if it took only one tenth of a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take a little over 72 hours.”

Maricopa County, Patrick said, will send out 2.6 million ballots on the first day of early voting. Patrick wrote that under the new USPS rules, a single error could lead to the entire batch being rejected.

That squares with what a whistleblower from inside USPS alleged: a single error — which, the whistleblower underscored, could be human or technical — could lead to the entire batch of 10,000 ballots being sent back to election officials to be resubmitted.

Ann Jacobs, a former chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, wrote on X that getting Milwaukee’s 33,567 primary election mailed ballots out could take more than two months. “At a minute each, that’s 559.45 hours or 69.94 work days,” she wrote. “At 30 seconds each, that’s 279.73 hours or 34.97 work days. A month of days of someone standing at a post office, watching a scanner. Heck, at 10 seconds each, it’s 93.25 hrs.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but ballots go out 9/17/26 in Wisconsin – we don’t have 35 work days,” she continued. “This is true across the nation.”

Indeed. In fact, North Carolina — a state with some 7 million registered voters and some important races in November — begins sending out absentee ballots today.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court yesterday to immediately allow it to implement the USPS rule, despite a lower court injunction on it that is still working its way up to the Supreme Court.

Hat tip to NOTUS for flagging some of these former election officials’ comments.

Missouri Secretary of State’s Games Lead to Republican Gerrymander Being Blocked (at Least for Now)

The Missouri Supreme Court blocked an aggressive Republican gerrymander from being used in the November election.

It’s a (late-breaking) loss for Republicans’ efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of political power after the Supreme Court knocked down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act last spring.
This President Donald Trump-backed map redrew a district in the Kansas City area, attempting to flip one of Missouri’s two Democratic congressional districts.
The state Supreme Court held yesterday evening that some procedural hijinks meant November’s elections must be held under the old map, and that voters must be given a chance to vote on the new maps on the November ballot.
The hijinks include a wild maneuver by Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins: Opponents of the new map submitted hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, more than enough to put the maps on the November ballot. Missouri law says that voters can hold a referendum on any act of the state legislature.
But Hoskins waited until voting in the primary election — under the new maps — was underway to reject the petition, concluding that the state constitution did not empower voters to challenge redistricting.
The state Supreme Court rejected that interpretation, and his broader gambit, finding redistricting was indeed an act of the state legislature.
This all will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tabs

Layla A. Jones has a fantastic piece for TPM probing how a baseless, right-wing freakout about an obscure data privacy technique used by the Census Bureau has culminated in claims that bureaucrats used the survey to steal congressional seats for Democrats. This fringe contention is now shaping Census Bureau policy.
The Wall Street Journal paints a rough portrait of John Fetterman, concluding from an investigation that “the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.”

Woman of the Hour

WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 09: Anchor Maria Bartiromo during FOX Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” at Fox Business Studios on June 09, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images)

It’s conspiracy theorizing television host Maria Bartiromo, ousted from her job at Fox Business for mysterious reasons. One report claims that she shared with the White House internal guidance about Fox’s decision to limit coverage of Trump’s July speech that attempted, again, to sow doubt in the 2020 election.

Are We at War?

JD Vance tackled the White House press briefing yesterday. “I wouldn’t call it a war. Right now, there is no active shooting,” the vice president said, before acknowledging “Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping.” The remarks, however, did not openly acknowledge the United States’ retaliation for what Vance described as “flare ups.”

How a Baseless, Right-Wing Social Media Panic Led to Dramatic Changes at the Census Bureau

Posted on September 4, 2026September 8, 2026 by Layla A. Jones

When longtime Indiana politician Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) lobbed a powerful allegation against the Census Bureau last October, what had been a low-profile, fringe GOP conspiracy theory burst to the fore. Banks said he believed the Census Bureau had injected errors in the decennial population count and survey which were so severe, they netted Democrats more representation in Congress at the expense of Republican seats.

“The Biden admin used a shady ‘privacy’ formula,” Banks wrote on X, adding that the 2020 census “scrambled the data and miscounted 14 states. It included illegal immigrants and handed Democrats extra seats.”

Continue reading →

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Cleared the Way for More Data Centers. Dems Are Hoping You Know That.

Posted on September 3, 2026September 3, 2026 by Nicole LaFond

Democrats are taking a convoluted, complex provision that was included in Republicans’ Big Beautiful bill to pin the blame for the national boom in data center construction squarely on Republicans ahead of the midterms.

President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is most widely known for making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and offsetting the cost of those tax cuts by gutting social safety net programs for America’s most vulnerable. But the legislation did a lot of other seemingly anodyne things. For one, the bill expanded and made permanent an IRS tax incentive program that began in 2018 to encourage and support economic growth and job creation in rural areas.

During President Trump’s first term, the IRS designated certain “economically distressed census tracts” as Qualified Opportunity Zones in order to spur economic growth in those areas. Under the program, investors can receive tax breaks for job creation in rural parts of the country, according to this IRS fact sheet (might come as a shock but I do not have any prior knowledge about QOZs, as the IRS refers to them, and had to do some research to write about this particular part of the tax code 🫠).

Anyways, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) was a champion of making these tax credits permanent and expanding incentives for rural development, and oversaw getting provisions about the IRS program worked into the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed into law last summer. Republicans at one point championed the expanded tax benefits included in the bill as an opportunity for more data center construction in rural areas, according to Politico.

But that was a different time when opposition to data centers wasn’t known to be the one issue uniting Americans across the political spectrum, which my colleague Josh Marshall and I have written about a bunch in the past few weeks. Republicans are now struggling to message on the issue as the head of their party, President Trump, makes it impossible for them to hold any nuanced position on the matter — and therefore speak to voters’ outrage about the data center explosion.

Democrats are leaning in to this.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) launched a new rhetorical flex over Republicans on the increasingly bipartisan issue during his news conference on Monday.

“Every single House Republican but one or two voted to unleash data centers on the American people in an unfettered fashion,” he said.

The details of what Republicans actually did to expand the tax incentives are incredibly in the weeds, but the Wall Street Journal has a good rundown from summer 2025 here, and so does the Brookings Institute.

But Democrats’ messaging about the expanded program and Republicans’ interest in expanding it for the purpose of big tech development is catching on, per Politico:

The next day, a senior House Democrat — Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts — made a similar observation on the chamber floor.

“A year ago, Republicans were bragging about giving tax breaks to Big Tech in order to build data centers,” McGovern said. “With November on the horizon, some House Republicans are acting as if they did not turbocharge the data center build-out.”

Comer Claims McConnell Will Be Back for Next Session

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) told CNN that the senior senator from his state will be back to his duties in the Senate at the start of its next session on September 14. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has not performed his work duties in months and was hospitalized in mid-June. It took weeks for his office to share information about the hospitalization.

After conspiracy theories swirled online about McConnell being secretly … not alive anymore, the Democratic governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear began calling on the senator to give Americans some sort of proof of life and update on his health. Reports surfaced that he may have suffered some sort of cardiac episode at his home in June. In July, McConnell announced that he had been hospitalized after a fall and was in a rehabilitation center. He was discharged in early August.

“I have not talked to Leader McConnell. I’ve talked to his staff, many of whom are from my district originally. And they have all said it’s their goal for Senator McConnell to be here when the Senate comes in,” Comer told CNN Thursday.

No One Wants to Go to Trump’s Fake Convention Part 2

ABC News has more reporting today on Republicans who are up for reelection this fall — and even some in solidly red districts — skipping out on the Republican Party’s unconventional midterms convention in Dallas later this month. That’s primarily because they want distance from Trump, who is set to headline the event with an anticipated speech spinning his deeply unpopular record so far this term.

Yesterday’s edition of Where Things Stand had the details on Politico‘s survey of nearly 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress. The majority of them said they’re skipping the affair.

ABC spoke to a handful of the most vulnerable House Republicans, and they all said they didn’t plan to attend or were still undecided. About 100 Republican members of Congress and candidates are expected to make the trek — and shell out the $25,000 to $100,000 that each attendee has been asked to contribute to the House Republican campaign committee in order to attend.

Vance’s Subtle Dig

Vice President JD Vance hosted the White House press briefing Thursday, since no one has been hired to replace Karoline Leavitt since she decided to leave the Trump administration. Reporters asked him about his ongoing friendship with Tucker Carlson, despite the former Fox News host’s stark criticism of major elements of Trump’s second-term agenda. He responded saying he was bothered by people who stopped being friends with his wife when he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, but his response also appears to contain a subtle dig at Trump, who throws literally anyone and everyone under the bus for any perceived double crossing.

“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” Vance said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

Read This From TPM Today

Hunter Walker checks in on Vice President JD Vance’s adventure into filling in a White House press secretary this afternoon. He repeatedly contradicted himself about whether or not the U.S. is, in fact, at war with Iran: White House Iran War Denialism Reaches Absurd New Level in Briefing Where Vance Both Confirms and Denies Bullets Are Flying

Yesterday’s Top Story

Trump Calls on His Most Loyal Henchman to Shut Down Facts He Doesn’t Want Reported

What I’m Reading

Maria Bartiromo Out at Fox News, Fox Business

Schools Giving Aid to Minority Students Could Lose Tax Exemptions Under Trump’s New Rules

ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks

White House Iran War Denialism Reaches Absurd New Level in Briefing Where Vance Both Confirms and Denies Bullets Are Flying

Posted on September 3, 2026September 3, 2026 by Hunter Walker

Through much of the course of the U.S.’s war in Iran, the Trump administration has tried to avoid calling the conflict “a war.” Those efforts led to an odd moment in the White House briefing room Thursday when Vice President JD Vance seemingly tripped over his own efforts to downplay the hostilities.

“I wouldn’t call it a war. Right now, there is no active shooting,” Vance said in response to a question about whether the war would be over before the midterm elections in November.

The comment from the vice president, who was filling the traditional press secretary’s role following the departure of Karoline Leavitt, was particularly striking since, within the very same briefing, Vance acknowledged Iran was “shooting at ships” seven different times prior to saying there was “no active shooting.”

“The fundamental reality is that the reason gas prices are so high right now is because the Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping. Even, by the way, when they signed an agreement that said, ‘We’re going to stop shooting at commercial shipping,’ they almost immediately went back to shooting at commercial shipping,” Vance said a little over twenty minutes before he claimed there was “no active shooting.”

Vance sort of addressed the contradiction moments after making his declaration that this isn’t a shooting war.

“I recognize there is — there have been places where this has flared up,” Vance said.

And the vice president, who was at the briefing room podium for about an hour, returned to discussing Iran “shooting at ships” approximately thirty seconds after claiming there is “no active shooting.”

“When you ask, when will this end, you’re asking me a question, like, ‘When will the Iranians stop shooting at ships?’ I think the reality is, I don’t know the answer to that question,” he said, adding, “You would have to ask the Iranians.”

The White House did not immediately respond to questions from TPM about what they would call the situation in Iran, if it is not a war, or about the blatant contradiction in Vance’s remarks about “shooting.”

Iranian attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, which is a vital waterway for oil shipments, have not been the only shooting in the region. U.S. ships have opened fire on other boats as they enforce a naval blockade on Iran. American and Iranian forces also struck each other’s military assets in the Middle East this week.

On one level, the bizarre Orwellian spectacle of the Trump administration refusing to acknowledge a war that the world is watching play out doesn’t matter. Major media outlets, Wikipedia, and even MAGA members of Congress are all referring to the situation in Iran as a “war.” However, the distinction the White House has been straining to make has real legal consequences since the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to withdraw troops or receive congressional approval for a military conflict within 60 days of its start. The White House has used various rebrands, rhetorical flourishes, and temporary ceasefires to avoid that clock. Acknowledging the war also has clear political fallout since, with the populace weary of foreign conflicts and gas prices climbing, polls show it is extremely unpopular, even among voters who support Trump.

For Vance, the issue hung over his attempt to fill in for the press secretary. As the vice president left the room after taking questions from selected reporters, other journalists shouted their queries at him.

“If it isn’t a war, what is it?” one asked.

Vance did not answer.

Mild-Mannered and Cautious Election Guru Charlie Cook Predicting GOP Armageddon

Posted on September 3, 2026September 3, 2026 by Josh Marshall

Longtime election analyst Charlie Cook has a piece up on his Substack looking at the fast-approaching midterms. It’s an interesting piece, an artifact of the moment, not simply because of what it predicts but because of the nature of the writing in which Cook seems to be grasping for metaphors about just how bad a situation Republicans face — a bit more stream of consciousness and performance art than one is used to in election analysis.

Let’s start with the lede …

With 64 days before Election Day (although the first mail-in ballots will go out in a matter of days), Republicans should brace themselves: The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible.

A few sentences later he describes what he considers the most likely scenario.

Let’s start with the most likely scenario: that this is a “really bad” election for Republicans, losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate.

He then describes a less drastic and merely “bad” scenario in which aggressive gerrymandering on both sides keeps House losses in the 15 to 25 range. But he thinks that this scenario still nets Democrats four to five Senate seats. He calls the GOP’s worst-case scenario the same 26 to 35 House seats lost but “at least six” Senate seats gone too.

Dems Demand Investigations After USPS Whistleblower Report: ‘Unconstitutional Power Grab’

Posted on September 3, 2026September 3, 2026 by Khaya Himmelman

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

Democrats are sounding the alarm and demanding investigations in the wake of a recent whistleblower complaint released by the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) earlier this week. The report warns that the Postal Service’s new mail-in ballot policies that are being implemented to comply with President Trump’s March executive order to restrict mail-in voting, were made hastily and have been through very little testing. The whistleblower’s report, which my colleague John Light unpacks in depth here, warns that the new USPS rules could be disastrous for the midterms.

It goes on to say that the planned changes to the verification process for mailing a ballot are “rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed,” and will pose serious issues if implemented ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. One former election official has even estimated that it could take more than four years in some major counties for each ballot to be verified and sent out under the new USPS rule.

The whistleblower alleged that the new ballot mailing system was, at times, produced in violation of court orders.

“The whistleblower’s allegations make clear that USPS lacks the technical or operational capability needed to effectively implement the EO’s provisions in a way that safeguards every citizen’s right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections,” Blumenthal wrote in a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner on Monday.

Democratic leadership and other congressional Democrats are joining Blumenthal in righteous outrage over the report’s very ominous warnings.

House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-CA) in a statement this week said the “new secret tracking system at the US Postal Service is faulty, untested, and threatens to totally disrupt ballot delivery for millions of American citizens.”

“We are fighting in court to protect the right to vote by mail for all and will continue to investigate. This unconstitutional and dangerous power grab must be permanently and immediately blocked,” he added.

“A whistleblower is warning of a ‘catastrophic failure’ in our mail-ballot system—all because Trump is turning USPS into a voter suppression machine,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) similarly said in a post on X. “Vote-by-mail is safe and secure. Trump himself voted by mail just last month. He knows he’s failing the American people, so he’s doing everything he can to rig the midterms.”

House Democrats sent a letter to USPS Inspector General Tammy Hull this week demanding an investigation into what they described as “the Postal Service’s reckless actions, which undermine the foundation of our nation’s democracy and violate the basic principle that all citizens have the right to have their vote counted.”

“The Postal Service’s current actions are putting clear obstacles in the way of exercising that right,” the letter adds. “Therefore, to protect the sanctity of our elections, and ensure that every American’s vote is counted, you must immediately investigate this whistleblower’s allegations, report any attempt to block your investigation, and disclose whatever wrongdoing you discover.”

As always, there is a lot more to catch up on this week. Let’s dive in.

Another Lawsuit Challenging Trump’s Dystopian Citizenship Lists

The nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a lawsuit this week challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to create a national voter database. In the same March executive order I mentioned above, President Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Social Security Administration to use private data from their agencies to create citizenship lists for each state. The supposed citizenship lists would then be sent to each state and the Trump administration executive order demands that states cross reference their voter rolls with the “State Citizenship Lists” to, presumably, determine who can and can’t vote. The order also seeks to restrict mail-in voting and calls for the USPS to police who is and is not permitted to receive a ballot. The executive order, and the rules being written to implement it, have been challenged repeatedly in court.

Last month, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration temporarily in an unsigned order that allowed the administration to, for now, move forward with implementing new rules to carry out Trump’s executive order. SCOTUS did not rule on the merit of the executive order itself, but may do so before the midterms, once the case makes its way back to the high court.

In a press release on Tuesday, EPIC described the executive order as an “unprecedented and illegal effort to interfere in the 2026 midterms by using unreliable databases for reasons totally unrelated to their intended purpose to create lists of ‘citizens’ in every state for determining who can and cannot vote.”

In its lawsuit this week, EPIC argues that the administration’s attempts to centralize private data from multiple federal agencies in order to create the citizenship lists violates federal privacy laws, and is an attempt to disenfranchise eligible voters.

“No statute authorizes Defendants to share and centralize vast volumes of Americans’ sensitive personal data across government agencies to create and disclose the ‘State Citizenship Lists,” the complaint says. “And in doing so, Defendants are running roughshod over critical safeguards of the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), and the constitutional separation of powers.”

“Building a database containing the identities, social security numbers, addresses, and citizenship information of every U.S. citizen is an extraordinary illegal overreach by the federal government,” John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at EPIC said in a statement this week. “This is precisely the nightmare ‘Big Brother’ scenario that the Privacy Act exists to prevent. We hope the court will block this effort immediately and protect every American’s fundamental right to privacy.”

Another Roadblock for Maryland’s Redistricting Proposal

The Democratic-led Maryland redistricting proposal faces another roadblock as a second judge blocked the measure from appearing on November’s ballot. The proposal, which was introduced as a way to counteract the Trump administration’s ongoing gerrymandering blitz, was approved during a special session earlier this month.

Republicans, however, immediately challenged the ballot proposal, and on Friday, a Dorchester County Circuit Court, S. James Sarbanes, sided with Republicans, ruling that the lawmakers failed to follow proper procedures. The judge specifically noted there were issues with the ballot language and the process, saying voters did not get proper notice and that the language of the proposal is confusing for voters.

“The practical effect of HB 2100 is to remove all Maryland Constitutional standards and protections from congressional districting plans,” Sarbanes said in his ruling. “That is not clear from the ballot question.”

“The Court finds that the ballot language and the General Assembly’s failure to abide by the Election Law Article has resulted in voters not being provided with adequate notice of the purpose and effect of the ballot question so they can make an informed vote,” he added.

Sabanes paused the effect of the ruling until the state Supreme Court rules on the matter on Thursday.

In a statement earlier this month, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore defended the proposal.

“For over a year, I have warned that Donald Trump and Republicans across the country are working to rig the system, weaken voting rights, and make this pain permanent.” he said. “I am proud that today we united and took action. I continue to believe that our country needs national redistricting reform.”

In Other Election News

The New York Times: More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed

CNN: DHS plans to launch voter fraud investigation surge Tuesday

Politico: Florida Republicans worry they won’t capture big redistricting gains

NOTUS: Democrats Cry Foul at Texas County’s Plan to Slash Polling Sites

Breaking: Bartiromo Out at Fox

Posted on September 3, 2026September 3, 2026 by Josh Marshall

Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox News and Fox Business. And apparently with so little advance warning that they barely had a chance to line up guest hosts for her various shows across the Fox ecosystem, let alone permanent replacements. As is so often the case in our current media environment, the news is both pretty significant as well as being fundamentally stupid. Bartiromo was once a big and reasonably well-respected business news anchor/reporter. But in recent years she banked very hard in the direction of hardcore Trumper and fairly big conspiracy theory yakker. I’ve never known the precise logic of her trajectory. But I’m not sure that matters that much.

It’s safe to say these things — this kind of zero-notice, one sentence press release defenestration — don’t happen without brass discovering something very, very bad. “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.” And since being a crazy nutball isn’t bad at Fox News it points in the direction of some hard to ignore rule-breaking or reputational stinkbomb. Of course, we can’t rule out Bartiromo waking up this morning and deciding to spend more time in Connecticut … forever. But I’m leaning against that.

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Supreme Court Justices Are Afraid of Accountability Even After Their Deaths

Posted on September 3, 2026September 3, 2026 by Allegra Kirkland

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Death tends to make people realize things. Unexpected departures from this earthly plane, in particular, can prompt the living to reflect on how to better use the time they have left. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led the Supreme Court since 2005, received such a prompt in February 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died in his guestroom at a luxury ranch resort in Texas.

According to The New York Times, Scalia died without having told anyone what to do with his papers—drafts of opinions, copies of memoranda exchanged between the justices, notes on the Court’s internal meetings, and so on. If those documents were to become public, they could shed light on the Court’s deliberative processes, revealing, for instance, when and why justices changed their minds, or in which cases their minds were already made up.

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