AdImpact is the canonical source that many journalists use to track political ad spending, where ads are running, the ability to see the actual ads and so forth. A few times I’ve considering subscribing for TPM during the peak of the big election cycles. (These are very high-dollar price points.) So I’m on their mailing list for the data overviews that are basically teasers for subscribing. I got one of those today and something immediately jumped out at me. The top political advertiser by spend this cycle is the Department of Homeland Security.

I wanted to elaborate on some points Theda Skocpol addressed in her reader email this weekend about ICE and the supercharged ICE the new Trump budget law envisions. Some of this may be obvious just seeing what we’ve all seen in recent months. But I wanted to describe some of the exact modalities we’re talking about.

First, a general point about ICE. Long before the current moment and even the controversies of the first Trump term, ICE was generally known as a place made up of people who couldn’t get jobs at the more established and reputable federal policing agencies — so, FBI, U.S. Marshals, DEA, ATF, etc. Because of this, it has a high proportion of people who are there because they want to wear a uniform, knock people around and act tough. That’s an aspect of every policing organization. But more professional organizations do their best to weed those people out on the front end and instill discipline that keeps those impulses in check. There’s much less of that at ICE. So it’s never had a good reputation within federal law enforcement.

This is my official new favorite story ever. It’s from the Journal News, which covers three suburban counties just north of New York City, and it’s about local congressman Mike Lawler (R) and a raucous town hall which I actually covered back in May. It turns out that at that town hall, his deputy district director, Erin Crowley, was simultaneously patrolling the boisterous constituents who had showed up to express their opposition while also apparently egging the anti-Lawler crowd on to disrupt the town hall using a fake identity known as “Jake Thomas.”

The Journal News is careful to note that it is impossible to prove definitively that “Jake Thomas” is Erin Crowley — who is also a county legislator in addition to being Lawler’s staffer. But they’ve got hard proof that “Jake Thomas” used Crowley’s cell phone when “he” joined an anti-Lawler Facebook group and the Signal group it uses and used during the May town hall.

As more than a hundred fatalities have been confirmed in Texas flash floods and some 170 remain missing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has both denied that DOGE cuts to the National Weather Service played a role in the tragedy and also focused on the importance of timely and effective communications about extreme weather events, which she says wasn’t up to par. Coverage of the Texas flash flood calamity has made clear that it’s not just the work of forecasters that is critical. You can have a timely and accurate forecast but it does little good if it isn’t effectively communicated to local authorities in the effected areas. That “last mile” communication is critical and it seems like there were breakdowns on that front both with county officials and possibly on the National Weather Service side, where a senior position in charge of liaising with local officials was vacant at the time of the floods. But even as the rescue workers were searching for bodies in Texas on Tuesday, DHS canceled a $3 million grant aimed at ensuring precisely those kinds of “last mile” communications.

We went into this administration with a seemingly durable baseline assumption that, whatever his unpopularity in other areas, President Trump had durable if not overwhelming support for his hardline immigration policies. But something started to show up in polls in the late spring or early summer.

While his numbers on “immigration” were still reasonably robust, we saw a dramatically different picture when pollster’s asked about “deportation” or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Not surprisingly, “immigration” is a very big word and covers a vast range of policy territory. Looked at from a different vantage point, Trump retained a bare majority of public support on “border security” but his “deportation” policy had the support of barely one-third of the population.

Three thoughts on the delicious and deserved Jeff Epstein wildfire currently engulfing MAGA world.

First, a follow up on my post from last week. I stand by what I said about general skepticism about the whole Epstein meta story — the belief that some significant number of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men slept with teenaged girls procured by Jeff Epstein and have used their power to keep the truth of their crimes secret. But some of you said I was either letting Epstein, his purported co-rapists or the MAGA movement off the hook. Not at all. I expressed something very specific which is that there are a lot of things that seem widely accepted about Epstein and his world for which there seems to be pretty thin actual evidence. But that’s totally consistent with wanting to turn over every stone to find out what’s real and what’s not. It is even more consistent with putting MAGA to its task. They created this. They ran on this. They used it to tarnish countless of their enemies based on little or no evidence. So there’s zero way anyone should let them just take a mulligan on the whole thing now. “Hey, so we took a look at all the secret information and it turns out it’s all fine. So we’re moving on.” No way.

Is it a harmonic convergence? Is the Rep. Corey Mills (R-FL) alleged assault case finally coming into focus? Let me try to explain the moving parts here. Remember back in February, D.C. police went to home of Mills responding to reports that he had assaulted a woman who D.C. publications delicately noted was not his wife. Prosecuting something like this in D.C. is in the hands of the U.S. Attorney for D.C., who, at the time, was Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin. Through some mix of Martin doing Mills a solid and the D.C. police spoiling the case because of who Mills was, charges were never brought. So, big win for Mills, as D.C. goes. You can’t be charged with a crime in Washington, D.C. if you’re a Republican these days. I don’t make the rules.

Last night, Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger posted on Twitter that Mills is being evicted from his D.C. apartment on which he owes $85,000. The rent is $20,833 a month.

I must admit to being a bit perplexed at what Donald Trump is doing with the Epstein story. He went on Truth Social, the family’s vanity social network and corruption vehicle, today and again went off about how his own supporters are fools for not moving on from the Epstein story and how they should just — goshdarnit! — forget about it and move the F on! Trump seems to be demanding, for any of us who thought there was no there there in the Epstein material, that we realize there must be — that we believe there must be. He’s not asking my consent or yours. He’s just doing it. And this is what I mean: When Donald Trump is guilty as sin on something he insists that whatever is out there that you might have thought was incriminating is actually the work of Obama, Hillary and James Comey. And that is literally what he is doing. Here’s today update from Truth Social.

Covering MAGA and Trump is a bit like an old-time, hard-boiled detective novel. Everyone’s bad. Or at least shady. The challenge is distinguishing between the merely shady sorta bad and bad bad. And apart from the bad and those who were merely drawn that way, sometimes you have two really bad people and one of them is victimizing the other, making the latter person a victim while also being bad. Which brings us to this quote from an article in the Washington Post about Eric Schnabel, the Chief Operating Officer of the National Institute of Health (NIH) who, as I noted earlier this week, was fired and marched off the premises Monday, allegedly for directing a contract to a company which employed his wife. This is a text he sent to a WaPo reporter after the Post tried numerous times to contact him and his wife.

“I need your help. I didn’t do what they said I did,” he texted. “This was a political hit job. Please call me.” Schnabel didn’t reply to numerous further attempts to contact him. (The quote was added after I originally linked to the piece.)

You’ve no doubt seen the Wall Street Journal story on Trump’s lewd and innuendo-rich 2003 birthday card to Jeff Epstein. That speaks for itself. To me what speaks more loudly is what appears to have been an all-out war from the White House to get the Journal to kill the story. Just after 8:30 p.m. ET the President posted a jangling rant attacking Rupert Murdoch and Journal editor Emma Tucker, insisting he’ll sue, blaming Hillary and Obama. An hour and a half later, he posted a more succinct version of the same post, again claiming the letter was “FAKE”, threatening to sue, yada. In between those two posts he did yet another post clearly intended to appear to be Trump finally losing his patience and insisting that all information be made public. Only it wasn’t that at all. Trump said he was asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetrated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”

There are three problems with this.