Today’s edition of quick hits.

* Evidently, the American president is disgusted by Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, but only after having expressed indifference to Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, which sparked retaliatory measures. I wonder why that is: “U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that Ukraine’s announcement to end the truce on Russian energy facilities was ‘a disgrace,’ following reports that an oil refinery was hit in Russia’s Ryazan region.”

* The latest on the Silver Rail Elementary School shooting: “Three children and one adult were killed Thursday in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon. The suspected shooter, a 16-year-old male, was shot dead by an armed bystander, police said.”

* A provocative and potentially important Reuters report: “The order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine ​for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House, according to two US officials and a Western official briefed on the matter.”

* On a related note, Trump was asked who decided to pause Starlink access temporarily for the Ukrainian military. The president replied, “I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was [Elon Musk].”

* In related news, it’s tough to know whether to believe anyone on Putin’s team, but this bears close scrutiny: “Russia and the US are discussing a ​range of new joint projects including nuclear-powered data centers in the wake of last week’s agreement on ‌diesel, President Vladimir Putin’s investment envoy said on Friday.”

* The questions aren’t going away: “Congressional Democrats on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees are demanding President Donald Trump explain why Ukrainian forces’ access to SpaceX Starshield services was restricted earlier this week.”

* A crisis averted: “Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi was worshipping at a Hindu temple in suburban Chicago over the weekend when a 19-year-old man allegedly attempted to carry out a mass shooting, the Illinois Democrat said Thursday. Illinois State Police said they arrested Alexandros Paporakis of Palatine on Sunday, hours after authorities received a tip that he was planning to attack people of Indian descent at the Sri Venkateswara Swami (Balaji) Temple in Aurora.”

* The suspension shouldn’t be the only step: “An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has been placed on leave after striking a man with his vehicle in Houston on Saturday, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to MS NOW.”

* Do you ever get the impression that FIFA has just given up on its public reputation? “FIFA’s controversial Peace Prize could be scrapped at the end of the year — only 12 months after U.S. President Donald Trump received the inaugural award. At a FIFA Council meeting in Zurich on Thursday, it was decided that the governing body’s football social responsibility committee will now be tasked with assessing the merits of what was supposed to be an annual prize.”

* Remember when former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was tapped to serve as a special envoy to the Shield of the Americas? She’s now out of that role, serving instead as an adviser to a deputy secretary at the State Department. That’s quite a climb down from leading a federal Cabinet agency with hundreds of thousands of employees and a budget of more than $100 billion.

* On the eve of the latest No Kings events: “‘No Kings,’ the coalition known for blanketing the country in protests against President Trump, is setting its sights on a new target as midterm elections approach: voter turnout. On Oct. 17, organizers around the United States will hold ‘No Kings: Vote Early’ events to promote early voting and help people form voting plans like requesting absentee ballots, checking on their voter registrations or finding neighbors to help them drive to the polls.”

Have a safe weekend.

The post Friday’s Mini-Report, 10.16.26 appeared first on MS NOW.

On Tuesday afternoon, after Katie Zacharia’s disastrous first briefing as White House press secretary, a White House official told MS NOW, “She needs to get much better, fast, otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record,” set, of course, by Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Donald Trump’s communications director for 11 days in 2017.

Three days later, she did what few thought possible by breaking that record. As a truly brutal first week neared its end, MS NOW reported:

After a turbulent five days in the role, Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary, two White House officials familiar with her departure told MS NOW on Friday.

The details — whether Zacharia voluntarily left her role or was directly fired — are still unclear. On Friday, President Donald Trump told reporters that he asked Zacharia to “reconsider” her role.

After Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, thus elevating Gerald Ford to the presidency, the Michigan Republican needed a new White House team. Ford tapped Jerald terHorst, a veteran journalist, to be the press secretary, and he seemed like a perfectly sensible choice.

The arrangement, however, did not last. A month into Ford’s tenure, the new president issued a controversial pardon to Nixon, and terHorst, unwilling to defend the decision, resigned. His tenure — just 31 days — was the shortest of any White House press secretary ever.

A half-century later, Zacharia’s time in the office lasted roughly one-sixth the length of terHorst’s tenure.

During a brief Q&A with reporters just outside the White House on Friday afternoon, the president made it sound as if he were doing his newly minted press secretary a favor.

“It’s not an easy job, and I think she was really treated very unfairly,” Trump said, adding, “I told her, ‘I think you’re better off being happy, and I’m not sure you can ever be happy in this job.’”

Asked whether Zacharia would continue to serve in his administration, the Republican said, “Yeah. In some form — but maybe a more pleasant form.”

Q: "Will Katie [Zacharia] continue to be in the administration?"Trump: "Yeah. In some form. But maybe a more pleasant form…I just think the press has been very tough on Katie and I said, 'There's no reason for you to have to do this.'…We'll make a determination."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-10-16T17:25:17.043Z

The development marks a stunning turn of events, including the exposure of Zacharia’s extensive record of peddling unhinged conspiratorial nonsense via social media, her misleading claims about her legal credentials, her work at a business that she described as “sort of a pyramid scheme” and her concession that she tried and failed to pass the California Bar Exam.

The president is already trying to blame this remarkable fiasco on the news organizations that reported accurate information, but as the dust settles, Trump and his team should at least try to consider a few lessons.

First, meritocracies are good, and hiring random people because the president saw them on television is bad.

Second, some routine vetting of prominent White House officials is a standard and responsible move.

And third, picking an unqualified press secretary three weeks before nationwide elections, having her move across the country and then throwing her into a difficult role without any meaningful preparation is a recipe for inevitable failure.

Put another way, there’s a fair amount of blame to go around for this humiliating debacle, which has managed to make the entire White House appear even more incompetent.

The post As Katie Zacharia’s tenure ends after just 5 days, here are some lessons for Team Trump appeared first on MS NOW.

A couple of months ago, Donald Trump appeared on a conservative radio show and said that “a lot of people” wanted to see the president pardon himself in his first term.

“I had the absolute right to do it,” he said. “Instead, I fought it through the courts and won.”

While that wasn’t an entirely accurate summary of recent history — Trump, who was convicted of several felonies in New York, only “won” when the federal criminal cases against him ended upon his return to the White House, not because they were adjudicated in his favor — the president’s rhetoric about his “absolute right” to pardon himself stood out.

This week, he returned to the issue during an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty.

Trump suggests he is going to pardon everyone, including himself: "I'm allowed to do a self-pardon … I don't want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-16T00:20:10.130Z

Asked specifically whether he’s “seriously considering a self-pardon” before he leaves office, the president initially hedged, saying he’s done “nothing wrong,” before adding, “I’m allowed to do a self-pardon. I’m allowed to pardon. … The pardon is very powerful. I know that. They say it’s the most powerful thing a president has, the power of pardon.”

As my MS NOW colleague Jordan Rubin explained in detail just last week, whether presidents can actually pardon themselves is a matter of some controversy. Ahead of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a memo concluding that presidents can’t pardon themselves, though OLC opinions are not binding on the courts, and the matter has never been tested — at least not yet.

But also of interest was the other point Trump made as part of the same exchange.

On the topic of pardons, the Republican went on to say, “I can tell you this, I don’t want to see my people go through — because these people are lunatics on the, on the left — I don’t want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”

This came a few weeks after Trump also told Time magazine that he’s prepared to issue pardons to members of his administration.

Time will tell whether he follows through, and just as notably, just how many members of his team are considered for presidential clemency. But that Trump keeps making comments like these might very have a real impact in the White House and throughout the executive branch: The president is effectively letting a small army of political appointees know that, no matter what they do as part of their duties, he’s inclined to hand them a pardon, whether or not they deserve one.

Systemic government corruption is already a problem in the Trump era. The signal he’s sending to his team is likely to make matters worse.

The post ‘I’m allowed to do a self-pardon’: Trump opens the door to pardons for staff and himself appeared first on MS NOW.

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* According to the latest third-quarter fundraising reports to the Federal Elections Commission, Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico raised $64 million between July and September, which is the best quarter any Senate candidate has ever had in American history. His Texas rival, Republican Ken Paxton, raised $10.2 million over the same period.

That said, the scandal-plagued state attorney general is receiving some extraordinary backup from billionaire GOP megadonor Elon Musk, who is almost single-handedly financing Paxton’s candidacy at this point.

As MS NOW reported, Musk donated $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with the Senate Republican leadership, and one day after Musk opened his wallet, the Senate Leadership Fund “transferred the exact same amount of money to a pro-Ken Paxton super PAC called Texas PAC.”

Whether Texans have any concerns about a billionaire trying to flood the race with cash for Paxton remains to be seen.

* Speaking of fundraising, Punchbowl News took a closer look at third-quarter Federal Election Commission reports and found that in the six states that are likely to determine the Senate majority — Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Maine, Michigan and Iowa — the Democratic nominees “raised between three and six times more than their Republican opponents.”

* In Colorado’s gubernatorial race, Democratic state Attorney General Phil Weiser this week picked up endorsements from several prominent current and former Republicans. As The Denver Post noted, the list included former Rep. Ken Buck, who went so far as to cut a video for Weiser in which he acknowledges it may be “unusual” for a congressman from the longtime GOP stronghold to back a Democrat. In the video, Buck says a shared belief in “integrity in politics” unites the two.

* On a related note, in New Hampshire’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas also picked up some Republican support this week, including an unexpected endorsement from Don Bolduc, the Trump-endorsed Republican Senate nominee from the 2022 election cycle.

* In Kansas’ closely watched U.S. Senate race, incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall didn’t need another controversy, but he managed to get one anyway. The Associated Press reported that the GOP senator worked on a water rights dispute, failing to mention that his solution would benefit a bordering property that he owns.

* And in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race, Donald Trump, on a nearly daily basis, has decided to deliberately call Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed by the wrong name, “Mohammed El-Sayed.” Asked why, the president said, “I don’t know. I feel like it.”

The post Friday’s Campaign Round-Up, 10.16.26: Elon Musk spends massively for Ken Paxton appeared first on MS NOW.

As part of a tough re-election campaign in Maine, incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins has emphasized on countless occasions that she’s willing to defy President Donald Trump and other GOP leaders. But while there’s some truth to that, the senator’s critics have long emphasized the asterisk that comes with that record.

The New York Times took a closer look at her voting record, which shows that Collins has broken with her party more than any other Republican senator. That said, the same record “reveals that her defections … have rarely thwarted the president during his second term.”

In other words, the longtime GOP senator has demonstrated a willingness to break ranks, except when her vote might actually affect the outcome. Or, as the Times’ report put it, “one of the most dominant and long-running lines of attack against her” is that Collins “only defies the president when it doesn’t matter.”

On Thursday night, in her fourth and final debate against Democratic nominee Troy Jackson, the Maine Republican was presented with a clear opportunity to prove her critics wrong. It did not go well.

YIKES#mesen #mepolitics

— danny (@dabbs346.bsky.social) 2026-10-15T23:18:56.838Z

A moderator asked Collins, “Can you name a time when you voted against your party and President Trump where it actually changed the outcome significantly?”

The senator began by saying there were “several examples,” though she specifically pointed to one: Early last year, Collins said, she helped organize an effort to defeat Pete Hegseth’s defense secretary nomination, though her effort ultimately didn’t work and the unqualified former Fox News host was confirmed.

“So that didn’t change the outcome,” the moderator replied.

Remember, Collins has faced one specific criticism throughout her re-election bid, and it was highlighted by The New York Times in a front-page article published this week. The senator and her team had plenty of time to come up with examples (any example!) to prove her critics wrong.

But she couldn’t. Then, presented with the opportunity and platform, Collins flubbed it, effectively proving the underlying point.

Whether Jackson and his party turn the debate exchange into a new campaign ad remains to be seen.

The post Pressed on her work with Trump, Maine’s Collins trips over key part of her record appeared first on MS NOW.

During a town hall event on CNN this week, Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico voiced a sentiment that was well received by attendees: “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.”

The message has become increasingly common as the midterm election cycle has unfolded. Indeed, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, in particular, has built much of his 2026 candidacy on the proposition that corruption isn’t only a major national issue, it’s also the principal cause for the problems plaguing regular Americans in their everyday lives. “You aren’t the problem. Neither are your fellow Americans,” Ossoff routinely tells Georgians. “Corruption is why things don’t work for ordinary people.”

There’s fresh evidence that the argument is resonating with the public.

A Gallup poll released last month found that 89% of American adults believe that government corruption in the United States is widespread — up 10 points from a year ago, and 30 points from a Gallup survey conducted in 2006. Earlier this week, The Associated Press released the results of its latest national poll, which similarly found that most Americans believe that Donald Trump “is profiting off the presidency in unethical or illegal ways and is focused more on his wealth than helping people like them.”

But it was the latest Fox News poll that arguably surprised people most. The editorial board of The Washington Post noted:

President Donald Trump’s ouster of Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece this week reflected a belated recognition by the White House political team that corruption is a galvanizing issue in the midterms.

A Fox News poll released Wednesday indicates that corruption has become voters’ top concern, edging out inflation and gas prices. Six in 10 respondents said they’re “extremely concerned” about corruption. … The Fox News finding isn’t an outlier. An Economist-YouGov poll last month showed that most registered voters think Trump is corrupt. A Reuters poll in August revealed that almost 7 in 10 Americans — including about half of Republicans — believe Trump’s private business interests influence his presidential decisions.

These public attitudes are based on a lot more than just cynical assumptions. On a nearly daily basis, Americans are confronted with a fresh round of allegations surrounding the president and his team. “The cesspit of corruption that is Donald Trump’s presidency is finally getting the attention it deserves,” economist Paul Krugman recently observed. “It’s about time. … The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented — self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before.”

This week, MS NOW host Catherine Rampell wrote a column for The Bulwark in which she added, “Donald Trump is robbing Americans blind.” The headline on her piece read, “Just. So. Much. Corruption.”

Voters’ attitudes on this should send a signal to policymakers about their post-election priorities. We’ll learn in a few weeks whether Democrats can win a majority in either (or both) of Congress’ chambers; but if they do, some will no doubt make the case that the party should focus almost entirely on kitchen-table issues.

And while such a strategy would make sense, the midterms are making clear that there’s a direct link between corruption and affordability — and there’s a real public appetite for accountability and reform.

The post Democrats have made corruption a key midterm issue. Polls show voters agree. appeared first on MS NOW.

In the months leading up to Texas’ Republican U.S. Senate primary, the party was divided into a couple of camps. On one side was incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of most GOP leaders and their aligned super PAC, and who was generally seen as a safe choice who would fare well in a general election.

On the other side was the senator’s intraparty challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who enjoyed support from the party’s MAGA base, despite being the most scandal-plagued candidate of his generation, and who was generally seen as an enormous risk.

There were reports that Donald Trump was tempted to play it safe, before he ultimately endorsed Paxton, who cruised to an easy primary victory. The results haven’t exactly gone the way the president likely hoped.

Over the past several weeks, a variety of high-quality polls have been conducted in the Lone Star State, and not one of them has shown Paxton leading Democratic state Rep. James Talarico. This has generated a fair amount of panic in GOP circles, where the idea of losing a Senate seat in Texas had been largely unthinkable as the year got underway.

With this in mind, Trump is now taking a predictable step: He’s trying to avoid blame for a possible electoral disaster. Indeed, the president published a lengthy tirade to his social media platform on Thursday afternoon in which he tried to pre-blame Republicans he doesn’t like for a defeat that hasn’t happened yet. From the online rant:

Sadly, and very stupidly, John Cornyn, and his Liddle’ Buddy, Super RINO, Karl Rove, are doing everything possible to make it hard for Ken Paxton, the Greatest Attorney General in the History of Texas, and one of the Best in the United States, to win the upcoming Midterm Election. … They are hurting Texas and, more importantly, hurting the United States of America!

If Ken Paxton loses, it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.

As a factual matter, it’s true that Cornyn has done effectively nothing to help Paxton since their primary, but the suggestion that the senator is actively undermining his party’s nominee is difficult to take seriously (leaving aside the obvious contradiction of blaming a Paxton loss on “ineffective” opponents). The state attorney general’s troubles are his own fault, not Cornyn’s.

But these details are less striking than the implication that if Trump genuinely believed Paxton was well positioned to win, the president wouldn’t be looking to shift the blame for this race away from himself.

This is not to say that Talarico definitely will win — we should find out in 19 days — and with far-right megadonors throwing an enormous amount of money at Texas, it’s still possible that Elon Musk and company will successfully buy the seat for Paxton.

But Trump’s angry missive does not speak well of Paxton’s chances.

The post Fearing Ken Paxton’s defeat in Texas, Trump tries pre-blaming John Cornyn appeared first on MS NOW.

For White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, the past week has clearly been something of a whirlwind. It was, after all, just seven days ago when Donald Trump announced that the former conservative commentator would serve as his new chief spokesperson. Quite a bit has happened since.

Monday, Oct. 12: As Zacharia begins her tenure in the West Wing, multiple news organizations report on her extensive record of peddling unhinged conspiratorial nonsense via social media.

Tuesday, Oct. 13: Zacharia holds her first press briefing (with an emphasis on “brief”) and leaves little doubt that she is wholly unprepared for the job. One White House official tells MS NOW, “She needs to get much better, fast, otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record,” referring to Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trump’s communications director for 11 days in 2017.

Tuesday, Oct. 13: After her embarrassing train wreck, Zacharia, who has repeatedly identified herself as an attorney, is asked in which state she had passed the bar exam. The press secretary responds that she had “moved to China,” which didn’t make a lot of sense.

Wednesday, Oct. 14: The Campaign for Accountability files a bar complaint in California against the press secretary (Zacharia’s home is in the Golden State), alleging that she misrepresented her legal credentials.

Wednesday, Oct. 14: When Wired magazine asks Zacharia about her work with Beachbody, a fitness company that ran a multilevel marketing operation, she describes the business as “sort of a pyramid scheme.”

Wednesday, Oct. 14: A partner at the law firm Zacharia worked at in China tells The New York Times that it often hired foreigners for language assistance and to help Chinese staff understand foreign business culture. Though Zacharia claimed in the past to have worked on “international transaction law” at the firm, the partner tells the Times her role at the firm would have likely been similar to a paid internship.

Thursday, Oct. 15: Zacharia sits down with a radical conspiracy theorist for an interview on a conservative media outlet called Real America’s Voice. She concedes that she tried and failed to pass the California bar exam. This would be less of a problem were it not for Trump repeatedly mocking those who have failed bar exams as evidence of being unintelligent.

In the same interview, she blames her embarrassing briefing from earlier in the week on the fact that the briefing was in the morning, the day after a holiday.

Thursday, Oct. 15: Zacharia wraps up the day with an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, in which she continues to struggle.

oh my god this interview was a disaster for Zacharia. I've never seen Hannity do someone who works for Trump like this

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-16T01:25:27.499Z

Friday, Oct. 16: Zacharia returns to Fox News, where she’s asked if there’s anything she’d like to clean up from her troubled interview the night before.

I think it’s fair to say her first week could have gone better.

As speculation swirls about Zacharia’s future, there are a couple of questions hanging overhead for the White House team she recently joined.

First, did anyone on the president’s team make any effort to vet her before she was hired? Or was this a situation in which Trump simply saw someone make comments he liked during some cable news interviews?

Second, who thought it would be a good idea for the president to choose a new press secretary, three weeks before nationwide elections, have her move across the country, and throw her into a difficult role without any meaningful preparation?

Clearly, Zacharia is failing as the new press secretary, but there’s a fair amount of blame to go around for this fiasco.

The post Katie Zacharia’s attempts at damage control aren’t going especially well appeared first on MS NOW.

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* A case worth watching: “The Trump administration sued California election officials Thursday, asking a judge to bar the state from counting mail-in ballots for next month’s midterm elections from people the federal government has identified as ‘likely’ noncitizens until their status can be confirmed.”

* First, Donald Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine. Then, Russia ignored the deal, and now, Ukraine is retaliating in kind: “Ukraine attacked a Russian oil refinery Thursday, abandoning a brief truce involving energy-related targets that it said Moscow did not heed, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he felt betrayed by U.S. President Donald Trump.”

* On Wednesday night, in reference to the war with Iran that the American president launched, he told reporters, “As soon as I want it to end, it’ll end.” But if that’s the case, shouldn’t Trump explain why he doesn’t want it to end?

* Remember when Trump picked this guy to serve as the U.S. attorney general, and JD Vance invested time and effort, shepherding the Florida Republican around Capitol Hill?: “Former Rep. Matt Gaetz is facing allegations of sex trafficking by two women who filed a civil lawsuit against him and two other men in federal court Thursday.”

* I’ll be keeping an eye on this one: “Federal authorities are investigating letters containing ‘suspicious substances’ that were mailed to multiple congressional and election offices nationwide, law enforcement officials said Thursday.”

* This report is emblematic of the Republican senator’s entire career: “Two North Carolina lawyers recently tapped by President Donald Trump for lifetime posts on the federal bench managed to get sign-off from GOP Sen. Thom Tillis — despite their involvement in the high-profile prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey.”

* So many no-bid contracts: “It was early June, and the White House had an ‘urgent and compelling’ job: Four chandeliers needed to be installed in the West Wing. Why the rush? ‘In this particular case, the environment of the 250th anniversary, the birthday, and other events [redacted],’ reads a previously unreported contracting document dated June 5. … President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday fell the following Sunday — June 14 — the same night as the UFC fight on the White House lawn.”

* It’s proving to be quite a month for Kimberly Guilfoyle: “Eric Deters, the Republican donor who accused Kimberly Guilfoyle of asking him to wire her $100,000 to pay her American Express bill in exchange for her help with the Trump administration ahead of her Senate confirmation hearing, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Guilfoyle and her legal team.”

See you tomorrow.

The post Thursday’s Mini-Report, 10.15.26 appeared first on MS NOW.

Before Kash Patel was confirmed as director of the FBI, he assured senators that he had no interest in waging a campaign against agents who worked on cases he disapproved of in the past.

“I have no interest, no desire, and will not, if confirmed, go backwards,” he testified. “There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI, should I be confirmed as the FBI director.”

After Patel took the reins at the bureau, it quickly became clear that the former podcast personality didn’t exactly mean what he said. On the contrary, one of the defining features of Patel’s tenure has been the needlessly aggressive purge of FBI personnel, especially those who worked on investigations opposed by the Trump White House.

One especially striking example emerged in February, when the FBI fired a group of agents and support staff who worked on the investigation into Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. At the time, the FBI Agents Association said in a statement that the terminations were “unlawful” and violated “the due process rights of those who risk their lives to protect our country.”

Evidently, those who were purged came to the same conclusion.

On Thursday, nine former FBI employees filed a lawsuit against Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche, challenging the legality of their dismissals. A statement from their attorneys read in part:

In return for their service, they were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did to follow the facts and law without bias or favor. To this administration, this is an offense. To the rest of us, it is heroic.

This lawsuit will prove their unlawful dismissal and hold the administration accountable for this blatant attack on the rule of law.

The litigation itself also asserted that the firing of the agents and support staff “did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary process within the FBI.”

While administration officials have not yet commented on the litigation, it’s worth noting for context how familiar the circumstances are. A dozen FBI agents who were fired in 2025 for taking a knee during racial justice protests five years earlier have also sued Patel and the bureau, as has a veteran FBI employee who was training to become a special agent before being fired last year for displaying an LGBTQ+ flag at his workspace despite the fact that the same flag had previously flown outside a field office.

Months later, as MS NOW reported, three former FBI agents also sued the Trump administration on behalf of all of the bureau’s recently fired agents, alleging that agency leaders retaliated against them for political reasons.

“The ex-agents who brought the suit — Jamie Garman, Blaire Toleman and Michelle Ball — all worked on former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election,” the report added.

Last summer, Patel and his team also ousted three experienced bureau leaders, including former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, a widely respected figure among rank-and-file agents, who was removed after he helped prevent a mass firing of thousands of FBI officials who worked on Jan. 6 cases. They also filed suit, challenging their firings.

Each of these cases is ongoing. Watch this space.

The post FBI agents fired for working on Trump’s classified documents case file new lawsuit appeared first on MS NOW.

As the midterm elections approach, Donald Trump isn’t just boasting about his policy of military strikes on civilian boats in international waters — the president is also treating the deadly strikes as some kind of punchline to a tragic joke.

But when he’s not kidding about the policy, he’s bragging about its efficacy. “The United States has carried out dozens of strikes on cartel drug boats, destroying 97% of the drugs coming into the ocean and sea,” Trump boasted in an address to the United Nations last month. “You’ve seen it; they disappear very quickly, and we’re down 90%. They’re down 97%.”

More than a year after the policy was first implemented, this remains at the heart of the White House’s defense: The administration has crushed maritime drug trafficking.

Except, it hasn’t. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Deep in the Amazon, smugglers have shifted shipments east, hiding drugs on boats moving through the rain forest’s vast river network. And on Colombia’s long coast, crews evade U.S. military airstrikes by hugging the shoreline in the exact same speedboats the Americans are targeting.

Record supplies of cocaine still arrive in the U.S., Europe and as far away as Australia every day, cheaper and purer than they’ve been in decades, said law-enforcement officials across four continents.

There’s an important argument to be had about the underlying ends-justify-the-means approach to the use of military force, but this latest reporting is consistent with months’ worth of evidence suggesting the administration’s defense is plainly wrong: The administration is killing a lot of people and destroying a lot of boats, but illicit drugs are reaching the U.S. anyway.

“We cannot bomb our way out of a drug crisis,” Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, explained in a recent statement. “We tried that for decades and it failed. What we need now is law enforcement in the lead, honest accounting from the Pentagon, and a Congress willing to do its job.”

By all appearances, the White House doesn’t care much about these relevant details. On the contrary, The New York Times reported in May that deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller chairs bimonthly meetings, apparently called “wins” meetings, at which administration officials are expected to report on various successes.

The Pentagon’s death toll from boat strikes is reportedly “regularly highlighted” as “one of the biggest” such accomplishments.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post More than a year later, Team Trump’s boat strikes continue to fail on multiple fronts appeared first on MS NOW.

A week ago, Donald Trump delivered remarks at the Summit on New Science Initiatives, which was largely unremarkable except for one comment the president made toward the beginning of his speech.

“We have an extremely high-IQ audience for a change,” he said. “For a change. It’s very nice.”

With Trump generally limiting his audiences to his own supporters, this seemed like an odd thing to say aloud. Nevertheless, he kept this going two days later, headlining a campaign rally in Tennessee on Saturday, where he told attendees, “It’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s just like, the love. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.”

For the record: Upon hearing this, some of his supporters did, in fact, clap.

But in case that weren’t quite enough, on Wednesday afternoon in Arizona, the president appeared to insult his followers yet again.

Trump: "It's called a coganative [sic] test. It's a very standard test, but very tough. There are few people in this audience that can — once you get past the first question. They show you a lion, a bear, a giraffe, and a snake and they say, 'Which one is the lion?' Biden was unable to answer that"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T21:40:13.012Z

As part of an unscripted riff on how smart Trump thinks he is, he told attendees about his experiences taking cognitive tests, declaring, “It’s a very standard test, but very tough.”

He quickly added, “There are few people in this audience that can …,” though he interrupted himself before finishing the sentence. The president proceeded to say that to answer the questions toward the end, “you have to be very, very smart.”

Trump went on to boast that doctors were so impressed with his aptitude that they said, “Holy s–––, nobody can do that.” But according to the president, he did it anyway, because he’s “a freaking genius.”

So, two things.

First, Trump has long struggled to understand the point of these tests. They’re not exams used to measure intelligence, despite his incessant claims to the contrary. Rather, these tests are used to identify dementia, mental deterioration and neurodegenerative diseases. Those who do well are clearing a low bar, and are not necessarily “freaking geniuses.”

The fact that he found them “very tough” is itself an unsettling sign, especially amid broader concerns about his mental fitness.

Second, Trump’s supporters should probably take great offense by his suggestion that “few people” in his rally audience could fare as well as he did on this cognitive test.

“If you look at the test, it’s pretty hard to see how you could not score a 30 [out of 30],” a Washington Post analysis explained in 2018, adding, “Yes, Trump passed with flying colors, as any adult with normal cognitive function probably would.”

Taken together, it’s hard not to get the impression that the president doesn’t exactly hold his supporters in high regard.

The post As the midterms approach, Trump starts subtly insulting his own supporters appeared first on MS NOW.

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* In Kansas, the U.S. Senate race is generating a lot of national attention, and for good reason, but the state’s open gubernatorial race is competitive too. And over the weekend, it took an unexpected turn.

While speaking at the Praise Chapel in Wichita, Republican nominee Ty Masterson said, in reference to Democrat Cindy Holscher, “My opponent, she didn’t even hide it. She talked — they had witch — I mean, they’re doing, like, witchcraft spells on TikTok so she can win the governorship. I mean, they’re like … it’s like demonic stuff that they’re doing, right?”

The GOP candidate added that he believes the election is part of “a spiritual battle that I’ve never seen before.”

As The New Republic noted, “The state senator had seemingly drawn his conclusions from a series of playful TikTok videos posted by Holscher’s 20-year-old daughter, Maddie, who had shared clips of her and her mom brushing their teeth set to a song from the ‘Wicked’ soundtrack.”

For the record, Holscher, a state senator, is not Wiccan, and there’s no evidence of her ever engaging in “demonic stuff.”

* In Iowa’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, the latest Marist Poll found Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek ahead of Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, 48% to 45%.

The same survey found Democratic state auditor Rob Sand with a larger advantage over Republican Zach Lahn in Iowa’s gubernatorial race, 52% to 45%.

* While Donald Trump headlined a rally in Arizona on Wednesday afternoon, it was notable who wasn’t on hand for the event: Rep. Juan Ciscomani and congressional candidate Jay Feely — both running Republican campaigns in competitive districts — decided to skip the president’s visit to their home state.

* In Ohio’s closely watched gubernatorial race, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy launched a new ad on property taxes, which accidentally featured a registered sex offender.

* In North Carolina’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, Michael Whatley’s Republican campaign does not currently have any television ads on the air, which is highly unusual in light of the fact that Election Day is less than three weeks away. That said, the GOP campaign continues to say this is a “temporary pause.”

* In Texas’ gubernatorial race, the bad news for Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa is that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is investing in new attack ads that target her by name. The good news for Hinojosa is that the ads help prove that she’s running a campaign that’s so competitive that she’s worth attacking.

* Speaking of Texas, JD Vance started suggesting publicly this week that Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico is gay. He’s not, though the vice president apparently doesn’t care.

* And in Florida’s gubernatorial race, former Rep. David Jolly still hopes to pull off an upset. To that end, former President Bill Clinton will make his first public campaign appearance of the 2026 midterms next week, hoping to give the Democratic nominee a boost.

The post Thursday’s Campaign Round-Up, 10.15.26: Gubernatorial race features odd ‘witchcraft’ claims appeared first on MS NOW.

Ordinarily, when Donald Trump talks about high gas prices, the president tells the public that the struggling war with Iran is worth the higher consumer costs, which he expects to fall once the conflict eventually comes to an end.

But every once in a while, the Republican tries a different tack. Instead of arguing that higher prices are an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of his avoidable war in the Middle East, Trump occasionally tries to convince Americans that higher gas prices are a good thing.

Just two weeks after launching the war, the president used his social media platform to argue, “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

That line proved wildly unpersuasive and was quickly dropped from the White House’s talking points — which made it all the more surprising to see Trump recycle it seven months later during a Wednesday afternoon rally in Arizona.

Trump: "Our country is making more money than it has ever made because of the fact that oil is so high"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T21:06:31.603Z

“Our country is making more money than it’s ever made because of the fact that oil is so high,” he said. “Because of the price of oil, Texas and Oklahoma and North Dakota and all these places, we’re making a fortune.”

In other words, with 20 days remaining before the midterm elections, and with the early-voting window opening in states across the country, the Republican wants Americans consumers to be glad they’re paying more at the pump.

As a substantive matter, the problem with Trump’s claim that “we’re making a fortune” is that the word “we” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s true that the United States is producing a lot of oil, and it’s also true that higher prices help generate oil industry profits. But since the number of Americans who benefit from oil industry profits is very small, few will likely celebrate the ongoing hit to their wallets.

But as a political matter, what strategic genius came up with this idea? How many voters can reasonably expect to see it as a positive that the average price of gas is $4.33 a gallon, up from $3.06 a year ago at this time?

The post On gas prices, Trump recycles a weird argument to pretend bad news is good news appeared first on MS NOW.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth touched off a major controversy when he announced that the Pentagon would livestream the firing squad execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is scheduled to be put to death later this year for a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.

Seven days later, President Donald Trump came to the opposite conclusion. On Thursday morning, the president published an item to his social media platform that read, in part:

Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army Major turned traitor, is a very bad and evil man, who killed 13 people, including a pregnant soldier, who died, along with her unborn son, and injured, very seriously, 32 more innocent people. […]

I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.

In the same online statement, Trump went out of his way to blame Hasan’s massacre, at least in part, on “Barack Hussein Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation” and “the Obama Administration.”

The Republican concluded that immediate family members of the victims will be permitted to view the execution “in person … if they so choose.”

The statement appears to resolve a burgeoning debate and bipartisan backlash over the kind of public display that is ordinarily limited to countries like Iran and the Taliban-led Afghanistan.

Trump’s decision came just hours after a nationwide poll released by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos found that 80% of Americans opposed livestreaming Hasan’s firing squad execution.

While there was a partisan gap in the results, even Republican voters opposed the livestreaming by a nearly 2-to-1 margin — though 57% of men affiliated with MAGA actually supported the idea.

This was the only constituency that endorsed the planned public execution.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

The post Trump scraps plan for livestreamed execution, contradicting Hegseth appeared first on MS NOW.

As a tactical matter, it makes a degree of political sense to see Donald Trump touting individual projects in specific states ahead of the midterm elections. Indeed, the Republican is hardly the first incumbent president to try to boost an ally by delivering some good news to local voters.

The trouble with Trump’s version of this strategy is that it’s inherently dishonest.

Two weeks ago, for example, the president welcomed Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska to the White House, where the two celebrated a $54 billion South Korean investment in a liquid natural gas pipeline project in the senator’s home state. It wasn’t long, however, before South Korea’s government made clear that the deal wasn’t complete, and Korean Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan told reporters that he had “lodged a strong protest” with the administration over Trump’s announcement, which “went far beyond what was agreed.”

The same week, the Republican president hosted a separate event in the Oval Office and announced that the “largest steel plant in American history” would be built in Iowa, where party is facing several competitive races. “This deal is done,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said, standing at Trump’s side.

The deal, however, isn’t even close to being done. The Washington Sun reported:

As of Tuesday, the company behind the project, Mesabi Metallics, and its Indian parent company, the Essar Group, did not own property in Lee County, Iowa — where the plant is supposed to be built — or in the state of Iowa, according to The Washington Sun’s review of property records. […]

The timing of the announcement has raised eyebrows among both Democratic and Republican state lawmakers, who were told months ago that Iowa was in competition with several other states, including Arkansas, for the steel mill. Some said they feared the midterms played an outsized role in the announcement, and the president was getting ahead of actual plans — possibly to the detriment of Iowans.

This week, it happened yet again. On Wednesday afternoon, Trump used his social media platform to announce “the largest Offtake Agreement in History,” which he said would include Taiwan investing tens of billions of dollars’ worth of liquefied natural gas from a proposed Alaska energy pipeline.

“This is the GREATEST Project in Alaska History, and this only happens with me in the White House,” the president added.

As Politico reported, what Trump neglected to mention was that funding for the project is still in dispute, and it’s possible that it will never actually happen.

To the extent that voters are basing their election decisions on the president’s recent announcements, they might want to read the fine print on his wildly misleading boasts.

The post In midterm desperation, Team Trump boasts about ‘done deals’ that aren’t actually done appeared first on MS NOW.

Everything about the Trump administration’s pursuit of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar is bizarre. It’s bizarre that federal investigators are ignoring the 60-day “blackout period” before the election; it’s bizarre that it was Homeland Security Investigations agents who searched the Minnesota congresswoman’s home; and it’s bizarre that President Donald Trump himself is pretending he had nothing to do with this months after publicly demanding the very investigation that’s now underway.

For that matter, it’s also bizarre to see federal agents seize the laptop, cellphone and passport of a sitting member of Congress, despite highly dubious evidence of wrongdoing.

But perhaps most important of all is the endgame the president and his team have in mind. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe.

The multipronged effort is focused at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia decades ago. Investigators are focused both on the congresswoman and actions of her deceased father, some of the people familiar with the probe said. Nur Omar Mohamed brought his daughter and other family members to the U.S. from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995.

Six years ago, in an act of performative racism, Trump used his social platform to call on Omar and some of her progressive colleagues to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” (Of the congresswomen the Republican targeted, only Omar was born outside the United States.)

For many years, “go back to where you came from” was the kind of ugly cliché one might expect to hear from the angry drunk at the end of the bar. In 2019 the overt racism was embraced publicly by the sitting president of the United States.

Six years after he flaunted his obvious and unapologetic bigotry, Trump’s position has taken a literal turn. Almost exactly a year after the Republican started demanding that Omar leave the U.S. altogether, his administration is reportedly now engaged in an actual effort to strip the Minnesotan of her American citizenship so that Trump can literally force her to “go back” to the country “from which she came.”

Throughout history, there have been countless clashes between presidents and members of Congress, but there is no modern precedent for an incumbent chief executive trying to misuse the levers of federal power in the hopes of kicking a sitting elected lawmaker out of the country.

Taking stock of the broader circumstances, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, an MS NOW legal analyst, explained via BlueSky, “This is about Ilhan Omar. But it’s also about control, intimidation and authoritarianism. The message is: we can do this to a member of Congress; no foreign-born American is safe. The administration is using fear as a tactic to discourage people from voicing opposition.”

The post As Team Trump targets Ilhan Omar, a radical endgame comes into focus appeared first on MS NOW.

In recent years, as inflation has risen to the top of Americans’ list of concerns, every new report on the consumer price index has generated attention, but the latest CPI data was of particular interest this week for electoral reasons: This was the final report ahead of the midterm elections.

If it showed good news, Republicans would have a new talking point at a critical moment, offering the GOP an opportunity to argue that conditions are starting to improve. If it showed bad news, Democrats would point to fresh evidence of Republicans failing with less than three weeks to go before Election Day.

Unfortunately for American consumers — and the incumbent majority party — the latter prevailed.

The data, released Wednesday morning, showed consumer prices climbing quickly, largely as a result of the war with Iran, as wages failed to keep up with inflation for the sixth month in a row. This came on the heels of deeply discouraging data on U.S. job creation, creating a brutal one-two punch for the White House at the worst possible time.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric on the economy was a mess before the figures were released — just five days before the data reached the public, the president falsely claimed that consumer prices were “coming down very fast” — and it was hard not to wonder how the Republican would respond to the news that discredited everything he’s been saying for months about the affordability crisis.

As it turns out, his pitch included four main elements:

1. Denial: At a Wednesday-night rally in Montana, the president assured supporters, “We have very little inflation.” That not only positioned Trump against reality, it also put him at odds with the deep frustrations of the American mainstream.

2. Presenting made-up data: At the same Montana event, the president claimed that the inflation rate reached 1.7% in recent months — I have no idea how he arrived at this false number — adding that this was an improvement from 19%. Never in recorded U.S. history has the CPI ever reached 19%.

3. Rewriting recent history: Once again trying to blame Joe Biden for his failures, Trump claimed, “We inherited the worst inflation in history.” That’s not even close to being true, in part because the worst inflation in history happened 46 years ago, and in part because the inflation rate was down to 3% when Trump’s second term began — which was lower than it is now.

4. Literally unbelievable happy talk: “Your prices have come way down,” Trump added, hours after his own administration released data showing that consumer prices had gone up.

In other words, confronted with evidence of his own failure on the nation’s most pressing issue, the president apparently couldn’t think of anything coherent to say at all.

The latest Fox News poll, which was released hours after the CPI data, found that only 22% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of inflation. Given his latest nonsense, there’s no reason to assume that figure won’t sink lower.

The post ‘We have very little inflation’: Trump’s midterms pitch clashes with inconvenient truths appeared first on MS NOW.

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* A radical and dangerous shift: “Ukraine said Elon Musk’s SpaceX has imposed new limits on military-grade Starlink terminals without warning, hobbling Kyiv’s ability to conduct midrange drone attacks and intercept Russia’s new-generation of jet-powered drones.”

* On a related note, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “people will die” as a result of the SpaceX limitations.

* Intelligence sharing matters, too: “Ukraine said it received no warning from its Western partners before a Russian missile attack against Kyiv on Tuesday night, after reporting earlier in the day that it had gotten no intelligence about a round of strikes the night before.”

* A case of great interest: “A federal judge on Tuesday night indefinitely restored access to the White House for three national news organizations that were banned by President Donald Trump in a victory for freedom of the press. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly sided with MS NOW, CNN and Politico for now in ruling that the news organizations cannot be denied access to the White House by the Trump administration. Kelly found Trump’s ban likely violated both the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the First Amendment.”

* In a White House that continues to treat pardons like party favors: “With Republicans’ political fortunes declining, Mr. Trump has stepped up his Oprah-style handouts to voters in an effort to eke out any last votes he might be able to find for endangered Republicans.”

* The available evidence suggests Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare is correct: “Videos collected by local investigators make it ‘pretty obvious’ that an ICE officer intentionally ran over Miguel Parra Hernandez during an immigration stop Saturday, which could lead to assault charges, the district attorney said Tuesday.”

* As recently as late last week, Donald Trump was still pretending that “they” attacked the Reflecting Pool “probably” with “box knives.” Reality, however, is stubborn: “The blue coating applied to the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool this summer failed in at least 85 places because of errors in the renovation, including the premature refilling of the basin before the liner had fully dried, according to an inspection report obtained by The Washington Post.”

* The demise of a foolish appeal: “The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeal to overturn hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal sanctions against lawyers who represented failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and made baseless claims about election fraud in her bid to upend how Arizona conducts elections.”

* I get the feeling he’s trying to make some kind of metaphorical argument, but I have no idea what it is: “The president’s reaction to the deadly tiger attack that occurred in England over the weekend involved subjecting his Truth Social followers to video footage of the horrific encounter — as well as clips of several other big cat maulings.”

See you tomorrow.

The post Wednesday’s Mini-Report, 10.14.26 appeared first on MS NOW.