It may sound like an insensitive statement, but the cold hard truth is that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and their stupidity presents a constant danger to others. Some of these people are in positions of power, and some of them have been elected to run our country. A far greater number of them do not have positions of power, but they still have the power to vote, and the power to spread their ideas. We may have heard of “collective intelligence,” but there is also “collective stupidity,” and it is a force with equal influence on the world. It would not be a stretch to say that at this point in time, stupidity presents an existential threat to America because, in some circles, it is being celebrated.

Although the term "stupidity" may seem derogatory or insulting, it is actually a scientific concept that refers to a specific type of cognitive failure. It is important to realize that stupidity is not simply a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but rather a failure to use one's cognitive abilities effectively. This means that you can be “smart” while having a low IQ, or no expertise in anything. It is often said that “you can’t fix stupid,” but that is not exactly true. By becoming aware of the limitations of our natural intelligence or our ignorance, we can adjust our reasoning, behavior, and decision-making to account for our intellectual shortcomings.

To demonstrate that stupidity does not mean having a low IQ, consider the case of Richard Branson, the billionaire CEO of Virgin Airlines, who is one of the world’s most successful businessmen. Branson has said that he was seen as the dumbest person in school, and has admitted to having dyslexia, a learning disability that affects one’s ability to read and correctly interpret written language. But it wasn’t just reading comprehension that was the problem — “Math just didn’t make sense to me,” Branson has said. “I would certainly have failed an IQ test.”

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So, what is responsible for his enormous success, both financially and in terms of being a prolific innovator? Branson attributes his success to surrounding himself with highly knowledgeable and extremely competent people. Branson’s smarts come from his ability to recognize his own limitations, and to know when to defer to others on topics or tasks where he lacks sufficient knowledge or skill.

This means you don’t have to be traditionally intelligent or particularly knowledgeable to be successful in life, make good decisions, have good judgment, and be a positive influence on the world. Stupidity is a consequence of a failure to be aware of one’s own limitations, and this type of cognitive failure has a scientific name: the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well-known psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency for individuals to overestimate their level of intelligence, knowledge, or competence in a particular area. They may also simultaneously misjudge the intelligence, expertise, or competence of others. In other words, they are ignorant of their own ignorance. The effect has been widely written about, and investigated empirically, with hundreds of studies published in peer-reviewed journals confirming and analyzing the phenomenon, particularly in relation to the dangers it poses in certain contexts.

It is easy to think of examples in which failing to recognize one’s own ignorance can become dangerous. Take for example when people with no medical training try to provide medical advice. It doesn’t take much Internet searching to find some nutritionist from the “alternative medicine” world who is claiming that some herbal ingredient has the power to cure cancer. Some of these people are scam artists, but many of them truly believe that they have a superior understanding of health and physiology. There are many people who trust these self-proclaimed experts, and there is no doubt that some have paid with their lives for it.

What’s particularly disturbing about the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people are attracted to confident leaders, so politicians are incentivized to be overconfident in their beliefs and opinions, and to overstate their expertise. For example, Donald Trump — despite not having any real understanding of what causes cancer — suggested that the noise from wind turbines is causing cancer (a claim that is not supported by any empirical studies). It is well documented that on topics ranging from pandemics to climate change, Trump routinely dismissed the opinions of the professionals who have dedicated their lives to understanding those phenomena, because he thought that he knew better. It’s bad enough that politicians like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t recognize their own ignorance and fail to exercise the appropriate amount of caution when making claims that can affect public health and safety — but what is really disturbing is that they are being celebrated for their overconfidence (i.e., stupidity).

It is less surprising that politicians who regularly exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect are being elected to office when one realizes that they are being voted in by people who also display the Dunning-Kruger effect. A 2008 study by the political scientist Ian Anson surveyed over 2000 Americans in an attempt to see whether or not the effect was playing a role in one’s ability to overestimate their political knowledge. The results clearly showed that the people who scored lowest on political knowledge were the very same people who were the most likely to overestimate their performance. While this is shocking, it also makes perfect sense: the less we know about something, the less of an ability we have to assess how much we don’t know. It is only when we try to become an expert on some complex topic that we truly realize how complicated it is, and how much more there is to learn about it.

This new theory of stupidity I have proposed here — that stupidity is not a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but a lack of awareness of the limits of one’s intelligence or knowledge — is more important right now than ever before, and I’ll tell you why. The same study by Anson mentioned above showed, that when cues were given to make the participants “engage in partisan thought,” the Dunning-Kruger effect became more pronounced. In other words, if someone is reminded of the Republican-Democrat divide, they become even more overconfident in their uninformed positions. This finding suggests, that in today’s unprecedently divided political climate, we are all more likely to have an inflated sense of confidence in our unsupported beliefs. What’s more, those who actually have the greatest ignorance will assume they have the least!

What we are dealing with here is an epidemic of stupidity that will only get worse as divisions continue to increase. This should motivate all of us to do what we can to ease the political division. When we can clearly see the social factors that are causing people to become increasingly stupid, our anger and hatred toward them should dissipate. We do not have much control over our level of intelligence or ignorance, or our ignorance of our ignorance.

But this does not mean that we should accept stupidity as the result of deterministic forces that are beyond our control. After gaining a deeper awareness of our own cognitive limitations and limited knowledge base, we should do what we can to instill this higher awareness in others. We must not just educate the public and our youth; we must teach them to become aware of their own ignorance, and give them the skills they need to search for more knowledge and to detect when they or others are overestimating their knowledge or competency.

We have good reason to be optimistic that this is possible. A 2009 study showed that incompetent students increased their ability to estimate their class rank after being tutored in the skills they lacked. This suggests that we can learn a type of “meta-awareness” that gives us the power to more accurately assess ourselves and our own limitations. Once we can do that, then we can know when we need to do more research on a given topic, or to defer to experts. We can also get better at distinguishing between true experts and those who only claim to be experts (but are really just demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect).

We are all victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. An inability to accurately assess our own competency and wisdom is something we see in both liberals and conservatives. While being more educated typically decreases our Dunning-Kruger tendencies, it does not eliminate them entirely. That takes constant cognitive effort in the form of self-awareness, continual curiosity, and a healthy amount of skepticism. By cultivating this type of awareness in ourselves, and making an effort to spread it to others, we can fight back against the stupidity crisis that threatens our nation.

Wednesday morning at 6:15 am Provo time, Craig Robertson was shot and killed by the FBI after posting to Facebook that he was going to assassinate President Biden during his trip this week to Utah.

Had the FBI not stopped him, he may well have pulled it off: he had a high-tech sniper rifle and apparently knew how to use it. The shoot-out he started with FBI agents trying to arrest him, if nothing else, was a tell.

This, I believe, is exactly what Donald Trump wants.

In response to Trump’s rants, according to Vice News, Robertson had posted to Facebook multiple screeds about the “stolen” 2020 election. Believing Trump’s lie that President Biden was an illegitimate pretender to the White House, he posted:

“IN MY DREAM I SEE JOE BIDEN'S BODY IN A DARK CORNER OF A DC PARKING GARAGE WITH HIS HEAD SEVERED AND LYING IN A HUGE PUDDLE OF BLOOD. HOORAH!!!”

When news came that President Biden was coming to Utah this week, Robertson posted:

“PERHAPS UTAH WILL BECOME FAMOUS THIS WEEK AS THE PLACE A SNIPER TOOK OUT BIDEN THE MARXIST.”

Just a few days earlier, Trump had publicly condemned “the Marxists” who he said were persecuting him.

In openly encouraging rage and violence, Trump is following a well-worn path blazed by many terrorist leaders before him.

Osama bin Laden, for example, never killed anybody. Several narratives suggest he didn’t even know the details of 9/11 until the twin towers had fallen.

Bin Laden also apparently didn’t fund the attack on 9/11 (according to the 9/11 Commission), just as Trump didn’t fund Robertson or the thousands of terrorists who attempted to murder Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi on January 6th.

As ABC News reporter John Miller, who interviewed bin Laden and covered 9/11 extensively, wrote:

“He didn't pay for the World Trade Center bombing or the plot to kill Clinton, but [he thought] they were good ideas.”

Bin Laden inspired the attack with his rhetoric, just as Trump has inspired numerous terrorist assaults here in America with his rhetoric.

ABC News did a deep dive into presidential-inspired terrorism in America. While George W. Bush and Barack Obama said a lot of things in their combined 16 years in office, some fairly controversial, the network reports:

“ABC News could not find a single criminal case filed in federal or state court where an act of violence or threat was made in the name of President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush.”

That was very much not the case with Trump, however:

“But a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence, or allegations of assault.”

From August 15, 2015 to April 30, 2020 (the article was published in May, 2020, long before the January 6th terror attack on the Capitol), ABC News identified over fifty separate cases where acts or attempted acts of terror were carried out against people Trump had targeted.

They ranged from beatings to murders to attempted mass killings:

“The 54 cases identified by ABC News are remarkable in that a link to the president is captured in court documents and police statements, under the penalty of perjury or contempt.
“These links are not speculative – they are documented in official records. And in the majority of cases identified by ABC News, it was perpetrators themselves who invoked the president in connection with their case, not anyone else.”

In the three-plus years since, there have, no doubt, been hundreds more. And now Trump is turning up the volume, stoking the often-violent fury of the people unfortunate enough to believe his lies.

Consider the top headline at Raw Story yesterday:

“‘Just the beginning’: Ex-FBI official warns more assassins could be inspired by Trump”

No former president in American history has encouraged such violence or tried to inspire stochastic terrorism.

It has simply never happened here before.

Outside of the Confederacy, no American politician has worked so hard to tear America apart, to pit citizens against each other, to destroy our republic from within. Neither has any former president made alliance with and taken hundreds of millions of dollars from hostile foreign agents like Putin’s oligarchs and Saudi Arabia’s MBS.

No president has ever invited a mob to attack the US Capitol and terrorize lawmakers to change the outcome of an election. This terrorist act led to the death of nine people, including four police officers, and Donald Trump has not only not apologized, but he has praised the terrorists he summoned and promised to pardon them.

He plays a song he sings with them at every one of his rallies. He speaks along with the prisoners, people accused of violence that could extend as far as murder. In solidarity with “their cause.”

He has never once condemned any of the murders, attempted murders and bombings, or other acts of violence that have been committed in his name over the past seven years. Instead, we hear that there are “very fine people on both sides.”

Frank Figliuzzi, former Assistant Director for Counterintelligence at the FBI, whose work involved terrorism and understands it well, told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner last night:

“If you think you've seen this before, it's because you have. It is a common theme, this concept that somebody is controlling the globe, controlling elections, and politics. And it's all bad. They're vile, they're subhuman. And it's also something called stochastic terrorism, which is the concept that some leader figures are putting out people as less than human, dehumanizing them, they're evil, and therefore it becomes easier for people to respond to that ideology and act out violently.

He talked about how this would actually be the second wave of Trump terrorism in America, were it to happen again.

“We certainly saw it in large numbers of people, a thousand arrested already, on January 6th, we saw people willing to die, including Ashli Babbitt, who consumed these Trump conspiracy theories, wrapped up in a Trump campaign flag as she's breaching security at the Capitol. We saw it in Cincinnati where a man breached security, or tried to, at the FBI's Cincinnati field office. Ended up dying in a cornfield after hours of standoff.”

Figliuzzi seemed struck by the solemnity of a former president encouraging acts of terrorism, and where it may go:

“I’m afraid this is not in any way the end of this, but rather just the beginning, as we continue to see Trump and his cohorts making vile accusations against people that are now prosecuting Trump, whether they are prosecutors or judges. So there is more of this coming. And law enforcement's challenge, of course, is to get out in front of this before the really bad thing happens."

Trump posting a picture of himself threatening New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg with a baseball bat isn’t cute or funny: it’s a call for brutality or an assassination. It’s an incitement to terrorism.

Now, facing the possibility of time in prison for his crimes, Trump is encouraging the wannabe and weekend terrorists among his base to murder witnesses, prosecutors, and the judges overseeing his case. And to influence jurors so at least one person may lie when questioned by the judge and claim that he is not a fervent Trump follower but then vote to hang the jury.

That would teach them to challenge him. They should have known better, like all those women, he would tell you. The criminal justice system shouldn’t have tried to come after him, he proclaims. Soon there will be carnage.

Outside of the occasional mob boss prosecution, only cases of terrorism have provoked state or federal officials to engage in the extensive security precautions now needed because of Trump’s incitements.

How can our newspapers and other media not see this? Anybody who has been in or near a country in a civil war understands the role Trump is playing.

Trump has openly said he wants to release information which the government says could be used to target people who have investigated him, testified against him, and might serve on the jury that could condemn him.

He is demanding the right to release it all, in defiance of every legal norm known, to devastate the case against him by polluting the jury pool through winning the case in the media before it even gets to court. If he can do that, the court action will seem petty.

Perception is everything, and he knows it. Every dictator in history knows it: that’s how they became dictators.

This is a man with no scruples and no limits. Anything you can imagine, he can probably exceed. Consider the headline at Mediaite yesterday:

“‘My Blood Ran Cold’: Ex-Trump Official Horrified By ‘Criminal Plot’ to Have Military ‘Turn Their Guns on Civilians to Facilitate a Losing Candidate’”

He has repeatedly lied to his followers that his First Amendment free speech rights are being abused, as a setup to cause Americans to lose confidence in our form of government.

In fact, the protective order that will be the focus of this Friday’s meeting in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom is designed to make sure the jury sees the evidence against Trump before he can publicize it to pollute the jury pool and intimidate witnesses who may testify against him.

Such protective orders are routine, but Trump wants to be tried in the court of public opinion, which he knows how to manipulate, rather than in a court of law, where he knows he will probably lose. He believes if he can get in the White House he can pardon himself, a classic dictator’s move. Terrorists like this kind of thing, too.

The mainstream American media has always been a few steps behind Trump in his march toward an attempted fascist takeover of America.

It took them years to use the simple word “lies” to describe his lies. They were reluctant to use the word “terrorism” in connection with January 6th (although The New York Times published an op-ed concluding that it was, in fact, a terrorist attack).

Now, even in the face of naked attacks on the rule of law, our court system, the FBI, and President Biden and VP Harris — they are reluctant to bluntly identify what are clearly incitements of a terrorist reaction to Trump’s prosecutions like we saw yesterday in Idaho.

Had similar characterizations of our police, courts, and intelligence agencies come from the president of Iran, for example, every media outlet in America would be identifying it as an explicit call to either tear the country apart or justify and activate terrorist violence.

Rachel Maddow recently noted that history won’t be asking how it was possible that a former president of the United States could be prosecuted for his crimes; instead, history will ask how such a criminal could have ever become president in the first place.

The answer, as we all know, was laid out by Robert Mueller’s investigation (the unredacted version of which Merrick Garland is still keeping confidential, even though it was written specifically to be released publicly).

Vladimir Putin made sure Paul Manafort was installed as Trump’s campaign manager after Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin puppet Manafort had installed in Ukraine, was thrown out.

Manafort, who didn’t even ask for a paycheck for running Trump’s campaign but did all the work for free, then fed confidential internal polling data to Russian intelligence showing where “persuasion” could help Trump or hurt Clinton.

That persuasion came to America by way of 29 million social media posts, viewed or liked 126 million times, from Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency — the Kremlin — specifically targeting American voters Manafort had identified in a half-dozen or so states.

In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 44,292 votes. In Wisconsin it was 22,748 votes, and in Michigan a mere 10,704 votes. Had Prigozhin not been successful in targeting those 77,744 voters for Putin and Trump, Hillary Clinton would — by any reasonable estimate — have become president in 2016.

Putin’s terror campaign is now targeting Ukraine, the country Trump withheld weapons from and tried to blackmail into helping him steal the 2020 election.

Putin’s man Trump’s terror campaign is now targeting us, at least those of us who are not straight white Trump supporters, as he has done virtually every day since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower and began his hateful rant about “Mexican rapists and murderers.”

How long will our court and criminal justice system tolerate this ongoing assault, this open campaign to promote stochastic terror?

How long will our media recoil from calling him a terrorist as more and more Americans are terrorized, beaten, and murdered by people invoking his name the way Mohamed Atta invoked bin Laden’s?

How long will the GOP continue to tolerate a man who encourages terrorism — even against members of his own party — among their ranks?

It’s possible that we “ain’t seen nothing yet” and Trump will activate far more widespread terror activity and violence before he goes down.

It could be a disaster like none of us have ever lived through, but that I have personally seen in several countries that descended into war.

I helped develop a refugee center in Uganda in the middle of the war with Idi Amin. And I was in South Sudan, on the border with Darfur, as the villages were being burned by the Janjaweed just 15 miles from me. And a few other uncomfortable places in the years I did international relief work.

When people turn against each other in the same country, from what I’ve seen, it is the most brutal kind of warfare.

It’s also possible that this fever will soon break, and America will begin to return to some semblance of normalcy as a whole new set of crises provoked by climate change beset our land and redirect our attention.

Or that Trump may simply self-destruct.

As they say in the news business, stay tuned.

If you live in the Blue part of a Red state, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And their latest strategy is their most brute-force method: simply remove you from the voting rolls.

A shocking new study from Demos lays out the dimensions of this voter purge crisis of democracy brought to us by an increasingly desperate GOP.

Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.

So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic neighborhoods (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).

When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.

For example, in this week’s election in Ohio the state changed polling places for mostly Black voters in Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled:

“Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions”

Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:

“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio's state constitution)—is wrong.”

Another X user noted:

“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”

The fact that this little trick in Ohio this week got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of it in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 elections.

But that’s just the beginning.

Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line just to vote, losing out on income.

Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs typically run less than 10 to 15 minutes.

Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.

As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:

“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”

The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well.

But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where the GOP finds their best result. As the Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, seventeen million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be twice or three times that percentage in the states where these purges are concentrated.

They added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).

This is called “caging” and used to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in their 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute when the five Republicans on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Husted said that] they changed their residences.”

The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone leading up to his 50,000 vote 2018 election win against Stacey Abrams.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”

Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.

While some of these poll watchers will be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.

All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.

As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

Voting in Red states has become difficult, and registering voters is now treacherous since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized all these little tricks and strategies to purge or discourage Democratic voters.

If you live in a Blue area of a Red state, get ready: the GOP plans to pull out all the stops for the 2024 election.

Double-check your voter registration every month or two, and be sure to double-check it in the weeks just before the deadline for registration, as Republican Secretaries of State prefer to purge people in this window so by the time people discovered they’re purged it’s too late to re-register.

Forewarned is forearmed. Pass it on to your friends in Red states.

WILMINGTON, N.C. — Federal prosecutors today agreed to not bring up classified materials found in possession of a Marine Corps veteran and neo-Nazi when he goes on trial on charges related to an alleged plot to attack the power grid to provide cover for an assassination campaign.

Raw Story exclusively reported that federal prosecutors notified the court that they found documents that appeared to be classified materials on devices seized from Jordan Duncan, the ex-Marine, following his arrest. In February 2021, the government notified the court that authorities were reviewing Duncan’s electronic devices for evidence of potential violations of federal law that criminalize mishandling government records and sensitive national defense information.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Kocher told Judge Richard E. Myers II during a Classified Information Procedures Act hearing on Friday that the government will refrain from making references to the materials during the upcoming trial of Duncan.

RELATED ARTICLE: Neo-Nazi Marine Corps vet accused of plotting terror attack possessed classified military materials: sources

Duncan is charged along with co-defendant Liam Collins with conspiracy to illegally manufacture and transport firearms and conspiracy to damage an energy facility. The two men could face up to 25 years in federal prison if convicted.

Duncan was arrested outside of his workplace at a U.S. Navy contractor in Boise, Idaho, in October 2020 as part of an FBI takedown of five young, white men with military ties who the government alleges relocated to Idaho to carry out a terror campaign to instigate a race war.

Kocher told the court on Friday that following Duncan’s arrest, authorities found classified materials on two hard drives seized from Duncan’s apartment in Boise, as well as an additional document that was classified. A previous court filing by Duncan’s lawyer had only referenced the materials as being found on a single hard drive.

Raymond C. Tarlton, Duncan’s lawyer, told Raw Story after the hearing that he does not expect the government to bring separate charges against his client related to the materials. But Don Connelly, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, later clarified to Raw Story that the only agreement that the government made in court on Friday “was that classified documents won’t be referred to during the trial.”

Duncan, who has been detained since his 2020 arrest, was led into the courtroom in handcuffs and shackles while wearing a tan New Hanover County jail jumpsuit and round glasses. A tattoo of a coiled snake was visible on his forearm.

ALSO READ: How the government's social media screening fails to flag extremists from within

In a protective order issued last week, Myers designated the classified documents as “particularly sensitive discovery materials,” prohibiting Duncan’s counsel from disseminating them to the media, and placing strict controls on showing them to potential witnesses. The protective order indicated that those documents labeled “FOUO,” or “For Official Use Only,” would receive the “particularly sensitive discovery materials” designation.

“This stuff came from the internet, not from his military service or through security clearances issued to him through his employment with a defense contractor,” Tarlton told the court.

Myers conferred in his chambers with Kocher and another federal prosecutor for closed-door hearing so that the prosecutors could describe the contents of the classified materials. Afterwards, Judge Myers reported in open court that he received a proffer from the government that the materials were not relevant to the trial, and they have no intention of discussing acquisition of the materials in front of a jury.

Concerns about sensitive national security materials falling into the hands of domestic extremists were highlighted earlier this year with revelations that Massachusetts National Guard airman Jack Teixeira [sp] shared classified documents about the war in Ukraine on a Discord server.

Meanwhile, during Duncan’s detention hearing in late 2020, a Naval Criminal Investigative Services investigator testified that Duncan amassed a library of documents with information about explosives, car bombs and chemical weapons. Kocher noted to the court shortly after the classified materials were discovered that “the defendants engaged in substantial sharing of other information.”

An Ohio maker of firearms and warfare weaponry, which says its “notable customers” include the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy, has violated federal election law.

Ohio Ordnance Works of Chadron, Ohio, whose fully automatic machine guns are “currently deployed by U.S. and international forces” and “ready for battle right out of the box,” will pay a $19,000 fine, according to an agreement with the Federal Election Commission.

The company admitted making money from the U.S. government as a contractor and, later, making a $100,000 donation to a right-wing super PAC, said the conciliation agreement with the FEC, a bipartisan regulatory agency.

That’s against federal election law, which bars “contributions to political committees by any person who enters into a contract with the United States or its departments … if payment on such contract is to be made in whole or in part from funds appropriated by Congress.”

ALSO READ: Oops, I did it again: This Democratic congresswoman violated a federal law for a second time

A complaint to the FEC said Ohio Ordnance Works made the donation in 2022 to the Club for Growth Action, which lists as a priority “defeating big-government Democrats in red seats and swing districts and replacing them with pro-growth conservatives.”

Club for Growth Action refunded the $100,000 contribution in May of this year, and the FEC did not penalize the super PAC.

As a super PAC, Club for Growth Action may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for and against political candidates, and it frequently does so in support of conservative politicians. During the 2021-2022 election cycle alone, it spent nearly $70 million to back or attack federal-level candidates, according to nonpartisan research organization OpenSecrets.

Ohio Ordnance Works had argued that while it did have a “master contract” with the Defense Logistics Agency, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense, it wasn’t a federal contractor because there were no active purchase orders when it made the donation to Club for Growth Action.

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But the FEC’s legal office disagreed, and the agency’s six commissioners — three Republicans, three Democrats — unanimously voted to approve the $19,000 fine.

Ohio Ordnance Works says it has “grown into a world class manufacturer of light, medium, and heavy machine guns able to compete globally with much larger manufacturers.”

The company’s website features the OOW249 Squad Automatic Weapon (S.A.W.), which “provides infantry fire teams with the heavy volume of fire of a machine gun combined with light weight and accuracy. It fires the NATO standard 5.56mm cartridge from a belt or magazine, and is capable of engaging targets out to 800 meters.”

In May, when police interrupted the Rushingbrook Children’s Choir performance of the U.S. National Anthem inside the U.S. Capitol, a viral video of the singing shut-down thrust the small group from Greenville, S.C., into an unexpected limelight.

It also prompted new performance opportunities for the children — including singing at a recent campaign rally for former President Donald Trump.

Now, the kids are slated to reprise in Washington, D.C., next month with an all-expenses-paid trip to the Capitol, sponsored by South Carolina’s congressional delegation, Raw Story has learned from David Rasbach, director of the Rushingbrook Children's Choir.

The choir is scheduled to visit Washington, D.C., from Sept. 18 to Sept. 22 — days before the federal government could itself shut down unless lawmakers on Capitol Hill strike an elusive funding deal.

“It's been crazy, that's for sure,” Rasbach said. “Millions have seen us, and that's very unusual. We're not used to that kind of attention.”

The choir used to perform three or four times per year for audiences of 200 to 300 people, he said.

ALSO READ: Oops, I did it again: This Democratic congresswoman violated a federal law for a second time

The choir is invited back to “sing without interruption” and members of the South Carolina delegation will be paying for the group’s bus ride, accommodations and meals on its own — not out of “tax money,” Rasbach said.

“I'm very satisfied that there’s been so much support for us for what happened,” Rasbach said. “I’m very pleased with the South Carolina delegation who very graciously invited us back at their expense to finish our song. I think that’s very kind of them.”

The viral video of the children’s rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” being cut short was prompted by a congressional staffer, directed by U.S. Capitol police, asking Rasbach to stop the performance because “demonstrations” were not allowed in the building, Rasbach said.

Rasbach said the group of 61 children and family members received permission months ahead of time from three congressional offices — Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), Rep. William Timmons (R-SC) and House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — to perform and had been taken on a guided tour by congressional staffers that ended in the National Statuary Hall.

The Capitol Police later called the situation a “miscommunication” because they were not aware that the speaker’s office approved the performance, WYFF, a Greenville, S.C., NBC affiliate reported. But Rasbach said there was no miscommunication, and the group had the appropriate permits.

The Capitol Police website lists that marches, musical performances, demonstrations, foot races and commercial filming and photography require permits.

“I was told I was going to receive an apology. I never did,” Rasbach said. “What I saw was what the Capitol Police statement was and half of it was not true, so I’m not pleased at all with the Capitol Police.”

Wilson, Timmons and representatives for the Capitol Police did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment at the time of publication.

Music, politicized?

Rasbach said he and his choir have never intended to make a political statement with their singing.

“This shouldn't be a political thing at all. It shouldn't be left versus right. I don't think we should make children a political football,” Rasbach said. “We didn't plan to do this. All we planned to do was innocently come up and sing and leave. We had no purpose other than to have our kids have a good experience.”

Rasbach continued, “It would be really encouraging to me if I saw our country come together on something like this and just say ‘yeah, we ought to be able to sing the national anthem,’ and just leave it at that, rather than making a political football.”

But the video of the choir’s silencing set off pitched reactions from politicians across the country, with many of the nation’s most notable and vocal Republicans taking up the choir’s cause.

“Just learned kids were interrupted while singing our National Anthem at the Capitol. Unacceptable,” McCarthy tweeted.

“Rushingbrook Children's Choir were singing the National Anthem in the Capitol and were stopped by Capitol police. They were told that ‘certain Capitol police said it might offend someone/cause issues,’” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Twitter. “The National Anthem sung by children is not offensive, it’s needed more.”

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Even while facing a Department of Justice 13-count indictment, including charges of fraud and money laundering, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) tweeted, “If this really happened, I want to ask the Capitol Police why are children expressing their First Amendment rights, especially while singing our country's national anthem, is offensive? My office will be looking into this.”

Shortly after the incident, Wilson along with his South Carolina Republican House colleagues, Reps. Timmons, Russell Fry, Nancy Mace, Ralph Norman and Jeff Duncan, introduced the Let Freedom Sing Act that would prohibit any regulations on the singing of the National Anthem on any federal property.

“In typical Washington fashion, it literally takes an act of Congress to allow children to sing the National Anthem in the People’s House. At least these kids will have no allusion that DC is a functioning place,” Mace said in a release about the legislation.

Rasbach composed a song called “Let Freedom Sing” in celebration of the legislation and to encourage people to contact their representatives in support of the proposed law.

“That's pretty exciting, and if that gets passed, it'll be a result of what happened with our choir,” Rasbach said.

The group debuted the song at Trump’s July 1 rally in Pickens, S.C., where they performed three songs and had the opportunity to meet Trump and South Carolina politicians, including Gov. Henry McMaster, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Rasbach said “it was an honor to sing for that event,” which left the kids “starstruck.”

“The crowd was just amazing. They were so supportive, calling out to us saying thank you kids, and thank you for standing up. Thank you for singing and really very supportive and shouting, chanting USA, USA, very loudly. It was really kind of thrilling,” Rasbach said.

Trump, in particular, is known for his support of — and sometimes fascination with — choirs and the National Anthem.

Earlier this year, he featured himself in a song “Justice for All” that was performed by inmates facing charges for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Stage name: the “J6 Choir.”

The song briefly hit number one on iTunes music.

Trump currently faces three felony cases, including one federal indictment involving four felony counts in relation to the insurrection and Trump’s alleged effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

When the Rushingbrook Children’s Choir returns to the Capitol in September, they hope to be able to perform five songs like they original planned on on May — this time including “Let Freedom Sing.”

GREENSBORO, N.C. — An avowed white nationalist who openly supports Russia is a member of the U.S. Army Reserves, recently served in the North Carolina Army National Guard and worked for a local sheriff’s office as a detention officer, according to a Raw Story investigation.

Christopher Woodall, 34, of Winston-Salem, N.C., has a long history of activism in the white power movement that coincided with his service in the U.S. military and government work.

In an interview this week with Raw Story, Woodall acknowledged that he is the author of texts that promote a “white nationalist training group," and added: “I don’t see it as an issue to have a white-friendly group of people that get together and teach each other.”

Woodall’s extremist resume, by his own account, includes involvement with the Ku Klux Klan and National Socialist Movement, the latter being a violent neo-Nazi group whose membership peaked in the mid-2000s. In 2021, Woodall indicated in text messages that he was an active member of a chapter of the chapter of American Guard — a group aligned with the Proud Boys but with more pronounced white nationalist leanings — for the western half of North Carolina. And recently, he organized what he described to online acquaintances as a “white nationalist training group.”

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While enlisted in the North Carolina Army National Guard and continuing as a member of the Army Reserve, Woodall made statements in support of Russian military activity in Ukraine — siding with a country that President Joe Biden has said “poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability.” The United States is committing to billions of dollars in aid to support Ukraine in its war with Russia.

As a member of the North Carolina Army National Guard until this past April, Woodall actively trained with a unit that was on call to respond to orders from the governor to assist during hurricanes or quell riots — “to protect life and property and to preserve peace, order and public safety,” as the state Department of Public Safety explains it.

When Woodall separated from the North Carolina Army National Guard on April 18 following completion of a four-year contract, he went into the U.S. Army Reserve Control Group, also known as the “inactive ready reserve,” spokesperson Patrick Montandon said.

Montandon told Raw Story that Woodall’s status doesn’t require him to “come in for drills” and “he’s no longer assigned to a specific unit,” but is “on call if there was ever a need for additional service members to be called in for unique circumstances.”

Reached by Raw Story, Woodall disputed the National Guard’s claim that he remains a member of the reserve.

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Informed of Woodall’s white supremacist activity, Montandon told Raw Story: “I will take that into account and speak with those that need to know that information.” He added, “I can’t speak on behalf of what action would be taken or not taken.”

Asked for the North Carolina National Guard’s position on white supremacist or extremist activity by its members, Montandon later provided a written statement citing a guidance from the U.S. Department of Defense that “expressly prohibits military personnel from actively advocating supremacist, extremist, or criminal gang doctrine, ideology, or causes or actively participating in such organizations.”

Guarding jail inmates

Woodall was also recently employed by the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office as a detention officer at the Greensboro jail.

He was hired in September 2020 and voluntarily resigned in February 2022, according to a response from the agency to a public records request by Raw Story.

Guilford County Sheriff Danny Rogers said in a prepared statement on Wednesday that Raw Story’s reporting “was the first notice the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office had received of these allegations.”

Because the sheriff’s office could not independently confirm Woodall’s reported activities, Rogers declined to comment further about Woodall, but added: “The Guilford County Sheriff’s Office is, however, a racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse organization and condemns any type of discrimination based on those factors.”

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Woodall told Raw Story he voluntarily left the sheriff’s office because he didn’t appreciate how he “was treated by leadership” and because the job was stressful. The sheriff’s office said in response to the public records request that “Mr. Woodall did not have any disciplinary actions resulting in dismissal.”

Woodall was previously suspended from the sheriff’s office for seven days in September 2021 for discipline, according to the agency He told Raw Story that the discipline resulted from him getting into a fistfight outside of work during a road-rage incident, adding that the other individual struck him first. Woodall was charged with “misdemeanor simple affray.”

Woodall told Raw Story that the other man didn’t show up in court, and court records reviewed by Raw Story show that the district attorney dismissed the charge.

‘We are a brotherhood and a war band’

Following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the formation of a working group to root out extremism from the U.S. military.

But a recent investigation by USA Today found that more than two years later few of its recommendations have been implemented, including one that would require recruiters to screen applicants by asking about past membership in extremist groups or participation in violent acts. An audit released last week by the Inspector General for the Defense Department echoes USA Today’s reporting, including a finding that only four out of 10 recruits in a sample were asked about or responded to questions about extremist or criminal gang affiliation.

Extremist activity in the military and among veterans, which received significant scrutiny after Jan. 6, is a politically fraught topic, even researchers have reached different conclusions.

A recent report by the RAND Corporation found that support for extremist elements such as the Proud Boys, QAnon and political violence, in general, were lower among veterans than the general population, but a report by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that affiliation with the U.S. military is the “single strongest” predictor of violent extremism in America.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why violent extremists get security clearances — but people of color must sometimes wait and wait

Woodall, for his part, is a frequent user of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, which is popular among right-wing extremists, and he administered a channel that was originally set up in September 2021 for “patched” members of the North Carolina American Guard Western Division chapter.

As former officers of the chapter became inactive, Woodall repurposed the channel as a platform to recruit for his white nationalist paramilitary training group. Raw Story reviewed dozens of text and audio chats by Woodall as he interacted with about eight different users.

Members of the chat made little effort to downplay race as an organizing principle.

On Telegram, Woodall invited “like-minded folk” to attend paramilitary-style trainings to learn about firearms, tactical gear and survivalism. The only eligibility requirement, he said, was “dedication to learning and being part of a brotherhood and a tribe here in NC that will look out for one another if SHTF.” (The acronym stands for “s--- hits the fan.”)

Reached by phone, Woodall did not deny that he made the posts to the Telegram chat about recruiting for the training group. Asked by Raw Story about the purpose of the trainings, Woodall said preparation for “SHTF” was “a generalization for a societal collapse.”

One member of the chat, who went on participate in Woodall’s training camp, celebrated Robert Jay Mathews — founder of the violent white power group the Order, who was killed during a shootout with the FBI in Washington state in 1984 — as an inspiration for “future leadership to rise to the occasion and other men to follow in their footsteps.”

Woodall himself ran a TikTok channel whose bio included the acronym “WPWW,” which stands for “white pride world wide,” and made a post with the inscription “RaHoWa,” short for “racial holy war.”

Woodall told Raw Story his use of the phrase was “satire.”

A video of one of Woodall’s trainings that was initially shared on his TikTok account, shows Woodall and three other men who are dressed in tactical gear advancing in formation and firing assault rifles. In mid-March, Woodall reshared the video, which is set to an electronic dance music and heavy metal soundtrack, on Telegram.

“Here’s a video from our last session. If anyone is foggy on the nature of our activities,” he wrote at the time.

Woodall had mentioned in the chat in late January that the group had property in Reidsville, N.C. — a small city north of Greensboro — suggesting the training recorded in the video took place at that location.

There was no age restriction for the white nationalist training group. One Telegram user in Durham told Woodall that he would have trouble getting transportation to the trainings “partially because I’m young and live with my parents,” adding that he could probably make it in the summer.

Woodall replied, “Just let me know and we’ll get you plugged in with the crew.”

To another user who asked whether teenagers could attend, Woodall replied: “All family is allowed. Young and old.”

Woodall and the other participants felt comfortable talking about firearms training and various strains of white nationalist ideology under the apparent belief that the channel was closed. It was not.

“This is a private chat,” Woodall wrote in March. “No worries.”

He went on to share his qualifications: “I have 8 years experience in the Army (combat arms), and Law Enforcement. A further 2 years of private out of pocket training with various groups and instructors in CQB [close-quarters combat], Contractor courses, and defense scenarios.”

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Despite Woodall’s assurance, the chat was, in fact, not private. The chat was discovered by anonymous antifascist researchers in North Carolina, who then determined Woodall’s identity. Raw Story independently confirmed Woodall’s identity by comparing his various social media accounts, and when asked, Woodall did not dispute that he was the author of the Telegram posts.

From January through March 2023, Woodall repeatedly solicited Telegram users to join his “white nationalist training group,” often addressing users individually. The solicitations almost invariably included the phrases “training group,” “firearms,” “brotherhood” or “tribe” — or, in one instance, “war band,” — and “SHTF.”

When Woodall first issued an invitation to join the trainings, he announced that they would take place once a month. But by March, he said he hoped to increase to twice a month as the group grew. On occasion, when access to a firing range wasn’t required, he said, they would convene at a “clubhouse” on his property in Winston-Salem, N.C., for a “home station meet.” Eventually, he said, he planned to start collecting dues.

In late March, Woodall put out a notice for a training to be conducted on private property outside of Salisbury, N.C., roughly midway between Greensboro and Charlotte, for the second Saturday in April.

The agenda, according to Woodall’s message, included “firearms fundamentals/live fire”; “team movement/CQB” — an acronym for “close quarters battle”; and “SALUTE/LACE reports,” two acronyms that respectively address assessments of opposing forces while on patrol and the capacity of one’s own force.

Then, six days before the training, Woodall abruptly announced: “Sorry guys, but I’ve officially killed the group. Sudden, I know, but I’m tired of people being fair weather warriors if that makes sense. No more training, at least not by me. We are still open to meeting everyone here and at least becoming Tribe together.”

Despite disavowing “groups” following the cancellation of the April 8 training, Woodall still aspired to gather like-minded white nationalists together in central North Carolina.

When a new member joined the chat in early June, Woodall explained, “I’ve always wanted to get everyone together for a meet and greet, but it doesn’t seem like anybody wants to take the time or effort to do so really. I’ve kept the chat open just in case, but if you’d like to try to get something together, feel free to reach out.”

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To the same user, Woodall expounded, “Groups really aren’t the way to go anymore IMO. I’ve done everything from running a state for the KKK to larping [live-action role play] for the NSM. I’ve been in too many political groups to name, brother. They all end up the same. All talk, lots of drugs usually, lots of useless hot air. It’s the biggest reason that I preach tribalism these days. My buddies’ families and mine are bound and we’ll have each other’s backs if SHTF.” (Woodall’s past involvement with the Ku Klux Klan is by his own account and could not be independently verified by Raw Story.)

He added: “But since there’s been some renewed activity here, I’m going to try to orchestrate maybe a cookout at a park somewhere next month and invite everyone.”

Stephen Piggott, a researcher and program analyst at the Western States Center who focuses on white nationalist, paramilitary and anti-democracy groups, told Raw Story it’s always concerning when white nationalists move from online networking to in-person mobilizations.

“When you add firearms and routine training with firearms to the equation, the potential for violence increases dramatically,” Piggott said in an email to Raw Story. “These guys are not going to the range to practice target shooting, they are actively preparing for conflict.”

In one of the Telegram messages, Woodall wrote that “similar ideology and the importance of communicating with people that believe the same things as we do” were important principles for the trainings, and he acknowledged to Raw Story that the trainings were “for white people.”

But he repeatedly insisted the trainings were not violent or insurrectionary.

“I don’t espouse violence against anyone for any reason unless it’s self-defense,” he told Raw Story. He also said, “I don’t espouse overthrowing any government.” And: “I don’t espouse a white takeover of any country.”

Piggott told Raw Story that Woodall’s statements should be treated with skepticism.

“We can’t see into this man’s heart, but there’s little to indicate that his activities are doing anything other than preparing for violence,” Piggott said. “His social media postings of ‘no political solution’ and ‘ra-ho-wa,’ short for ‘racial holy war,’ are indicators that he ascribes to the view that for white nationalists to succeed requires a violent overthrow of the current system.”

Pro-Russian content on TikTok

While the Telegram chats focused on firearms training and food-related topics like canning and raw milk, Woodall explored a different topic in his TikTok channel: Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.

One video shared on Woodall’s account promotes the view that Russia is winning the war — an assessment most U.S.-based national security analysts reject.

He also commented favorably about Russian forces fighting a battle while outnumbered on a pro-Russia TikTok account that highlights Russian military successes.

The pro-Russia TikTok account had previously complimented Woodall for a weight-lifting video he posted, writing, “Holy s— you are strong.”

“I’m trying, brother,” Woodall replied, adding a smiling face emoji.

“I do have pro-Russia standpoints,” Woodall told Raw Story.

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While Woodall disputed the assertion by the National Guard that he’s still enlisted in the reserve forces, he said he doesn’t think his pro-Russia views would pose a conflict with military service, even considering the United States’ adversarial relationship with Russia and military support for Ukraine.

“It is not, because everyone is entitled to their opinion on any subject matter that they deem to be in their wheelhouse of understanding,” Woodall told Raw Story. “Even if I were still enlisted, it wouldn’t have any bearing on my serving. I’m not providing financial support to any side of the conflict. Having an opinion on who is right in the conflict is a First Amendment matter.”

Woodall’s support for Russia compounds the concerns surrounding his white nationalist activity, Piggott said.

“Right now, the military is under increased scrutiny for allowing white nationalists into its ranks because they pose a significant danger to American communities and American defense,” he said.

Heather Hagan, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army, referred questions about Woodall to the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va. The bureau, in turn, referred questions about Woodall to the North Carolina National Guard.

So, Donald Trump says that if Judge Tanya Chutkan orders him not to reveal details of the prosecution’s case before they can be presented to a jury, including the names, addresses, and testimony of witnesses against him, he’s going to do it anyway and challenge the court.

And there’s little reason to believe he won’t do it: he’ll take what he’s asserting as his First Amendment right to troll and threaten witnesses against him all the way to the Supreme Court he packed with three rightwing crackpots. If nothing else, it may buy him enough time to get elected president and pardon himself before he’s convicted.

In this, Trump has raised vicious social media trolling into a form of electoral performance art. He’s become our troll-in-chief.

America has been under the sway of right-wing trolls before. When I was a child in the 1950s, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting an active witch-hunt for “communists” in the federal government. This was the era when Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for, in part, declaring himself a “New Deal Democrat” and standing up to the witch hunters, as characterized in the new movie about his making the bomb.

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McCarthy destroyed the lives of thousands of people, and many were imprisoned because of his efforts. Historian Ellen Schrecker estimates his victims at over 10,000. He — and his right-hand man, Roy Cohn (who went on to be Trump’s mentor) — were classic trolls in the worst sense of the word.

Some of McCarthy’s efforts live to this day, including his insistence throughout the Army-McCarthy hearings on never saying “Democratic Party” but, instead, always saying, “Democrat Party.”

Similarly, McCarthy echoed the John Birch Society’s (JBS) argument that America is not a democracy but a republic, an argument that James Madison made — and then refuted — when he was trying to sell the US Constitution. McCarthy’s and the JBS’s apparent rationale was that “democracy” sounds too much like Democratic while “republic” evokes good feelings for the Republican Party.

Nelson Rockefeller, who would become Gerald Ford’s Vice President, got a dose of this with the John Birch Society-pushed Goldwater sweep of the Republican Party at their 1964 convention.

“It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now,” he said over boos and chants, “any doctrinaire, militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher (pause for ‘republic not democracy!’ chants set off by his attacking the John Birch Society)…”

Today’s trolling, however, has gone beyond the fringes defined in that era by the JBS, Cohn, and the occasional McCarthyite wannabee. It’s become the core, the essential identity, of the post-Trump GOP.

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From “rolling coal” trucks blowing poisonous smoke at Prius and EV drivers, to “Free helicopter rides for liberals” tee shirts invoking Pinochet’s murders, to hate groups and militia members showing up at school board meetings, today’s Republican Party has fully embraced hate and trolling.

“Owning the libs” is the main online sport of many Republicans today, as you can see by following the social media feeds or reading the hate mail of any high-profile progressives or Democrats.

In large part that’s because Republicans don’t have anything else to present to Americans as a positive national governing agenda.

Reagan at least tried to convince us that cutting taxes to the point where the average American billionaire today pays only 3.4 percent in income taxes would “trickle down prosperity” to workers because the “job creators” would have more money to build factories. Instead, we saw the middle-

How trolling became the core identity of the post-Trump GOP

class collapse from two-thirds of us when Reagan came into office to around 43 percent of us today, while the morbidly rich became vastly richer.

He and Bush negotiated the NAFTA agreement to offshore American manufacturing, which Clinton happily signed into law, trying to convince us that getting rid of all those “dirty” manufacturing jobs would produce a white-collar renaissance. Instead, we lost over 45,000 factories and 15 million good-paying union jobs.

Reagan largely ended, in 1983, enforcement of our anti-trust laws; gutted the EPA so badly that his EPA Administrator, Anne Gorsuch (mother of the SCOTUS justice), had to resign in disgrace to avoid prosecution; and deregulated the S&L industry, producing the worst banking crisis since the Republican Great Depression.

His actions by and large hurt America and Americans, but at least at the time he had a happy sales pitch. Much of his neoliberalism was experimental and people were willing to give it a shot, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, even if it didn’t work out.

But now that neoliberal Reaganism has been discredited, the GOP is bereft.

Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 opposing Reagan’s comprehensive immigration reform; promising to undo Reagan’s and Bush’s NAFTA agreement; embracing the worst aspects of post-communist Russia and Vladimir Putin; providing all Americans with cheap, comprehensive healthcare that Reagan warned would lead to socialism; and promising to raise taxes on the morbidly rich so high that his friends would refuse to talk to him.

He lied, by and large, but his followers bought his lies and many have followed him ever since. They love his hatred of Black, Hispanic, and Asian people. They adore his defiance of the law. They approve of his outing spies and helping MBS seize control of Saudi Arabia in exchange for a $2 billion payday. They agree with his embrace of dictators and his disdain for other democratic nations.

None of these are things that will “make America great.” But they all make for high-intensity trolling, which largely distracts from the GOP’s lack of a positive governing agenda.

Those who would replace Trump are now emulating him.

DeSantis and Abbott have reprised the old gimmick of 1960s southern white racists tricking Black people onto busses for northern cities, this time exploiting immigrants with limited English and a naïve trust in the “official” people who talk them onto planes for Blue cities.

Razor-wire barrels float in the Rio Grande, designed to kill any would-be asylum seeker who tries to breach them.

Public schools in Red states are using hardcore rightwing propaganda from a hate radio talk show host to tell students slavery wasn’t that bad and Columbus arrived to save “the cannibals” from themselves (the Taino weren’t cannibals).

In city after city, terrorists citing post-Trump Republican talking points have stalked and murdered Black people, Jews, and Hispanics.

Kyle Rittenhouse, after killing two unarmed protestors, is lionized across the GOP (an Idaho Republican Party recently raffled off “Trigger Time With Kyle,” an opportunity to shoot an AR15 with the man-child himself).

Pro-Trump and DeSantis events are often speckled with Confederate and Nazi flags and iconography.

At a recent DeSantis event in South Carolina, three teenagers — including a 16-year-old in a wheelchair — were kicked, punched, and thrown to the ground for holding up a rainbow flag. The governor trolled them for the flag, whipping up the rage of the crowd, saying, “We don’t want you indoctrinating our children! Leave our kids alone!”

Which raises the question that may define the future of our republic: how far can a political party take trolling as its main way of motivating voters before it turns into something like the fascist parties of Europe in the 1930s or modern-day Russia and Hungary?

Can political parties (and the nations in which they operate) recover from this without the dire consequences suffered by the Germans in WWII or Russian people today?

History, as Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat point out, isn’t comforting. Often, when countries are taken over by political parties that use violent rhetoric and trolling of minorities as their electoral weapons, they lose their democracy altogether.

On the other hand, America has a history of astonishing resilience. For all their flaws, the Founders and Framers of our nation created a system of government that has withstood a civil war, two world wars, and multiple criminal presidents.

While Republican presidential candidates try to out-Trump the Don himself, other Republicans and former Republicans are actively repudiating the criminality, hatred, and paranoia that characterized the Trump presidency and continues as the mainstay of his candidacy.

In many ways, the rightwing world seems to be collapsing in upon itself. Increasingly, the social media site that was Twitter has become a troll-filled echo chamber; many of us have simply given up on responding to challenges and attacks, as any attempt at rational discussion these days is fruitless.

As the ever-brilliant Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon:

“One can see the sheen of desperation in the world of self-identified conservatives who make a living by ‘triggering’ the liberals. The usual dose of outrage bait isn't working as well any longer, so the right-wingers are escalating the provocations.”

Rightwing hate radio and Fox “News” and its imitators have become parodies of themselves, going full-out snowflake over the slightest of provocations while using pathetic slurs to characterize their opponents.

The apparent high point of Trump’s New Hampshire rally yesterday was his saying:

“[Chris] Christie, he’s eating right now.” [laughter] “Sir, please do not call him a fat pig. … See, I’m, I’m trying to be nice. Don’t call him a fat pig. You can’t, can’t do that. So now, because you’re not allowed to do that, and therefore, we’re not going to do it, okay? We want to be very civil.”

The role model for America’s young Republicans is a schoolyard bully.

And for the rightwing billionaires who own and fund the GOP, so far it’s worked out well: instead of discussing how they should pay their fair share of taxes, we’re fixated on Trump’s criminality and attempts to end democracy in America.

Meanwhile, Democrats are working hard to undo the damage of Reaganomics and Trump’s disastrous handling of Covid and the economy.

Joe Biden has seen more jobs created on his watch than the last three Republican presidents combined.

Inflation is down and both unemployment and factory construction are at levels we haven’t seen since the 1960s.

The country is rapidly greening its power and transportation systems.

People of goodwill are showing up in record numbers to vote for women’s rights, civil rights, and a return to fair taxation of billionaires. Yesterday’s Ohio vote is a very good sign.

The next two years will determine if the poison Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn peddled for six long years and Trump has embraced will become the norm in America and we’ll endure a Russian-style strongman rule, prosecuting and imprisoning people for their politics while trashing the rights of women and racial and gender minorities.

Or will the GOP hit bottom and return to some form of rationality, albeit one that purely reflects the interests of the morbidly rich?

It’s not too late. The power to stop this slide into autocracy — and help the GOP hit that bottom — is in our hands, if only we’ll use it.

Dear Trump-loving Friend,

Donald Trump and the fascist-supporting, billionaire-funded rightwing have been lying to you about these indictments, particularly the federal one that charges Trump with trying to overturn the 2020 election in defiance of the Constitution and federal law.

His lawyer has been all over TV telling anybody who will listen that Joe Biden ordered this prosecution and that it’s all about “denying Trump’s free speech right to question an election.”

Both are lies, being spun to try to justify a criminal conspiracy of shocking proportions that nearly ended the American Experiment after 247 years.

First off, Joe Biden has had nothing to do with this: if he had, there would have been shocked news about it out of the DOJ like there was when Trump ordered them to investigate and try to prosecute Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.

Special counsel Jack Smith is independent of both Biden’s office and Merrick Garland’s: that’s the whole point of a special counsel. It’s why Nixon was only able to rid himself of a special counsel by firing him.

Remember the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973?

Attorney General Elliot Richardson had appointed Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to look into Nixon’s association with the Watergate break-in, and that night in 1973 Nixon ordered him fired. Richardson refused and resigned, leaving William Ruckelshaus in charge of the DOJ. Nixon ordered Ruckelshaus to fire Cox and he, too, refused and resigned, leaving Robert Bork in charge. Bork carried out the order and Cox was fired.

Jack Smith is operating independently of the DOJ just like Cox was (and Ken Starr was): they can’t give him marching orders of any sort; the only authority they have is to fire him or not.

Second, Trump’s lawyers are claiming that Trump had every right to say whatever he wanted to about the election, which is true. But that’s purely a straw-man argument: nowhere in the indictment does it say he’s being prosecuted for expressing his opinions.

In fact, the second page of the indictment makes that totally clear:

The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.

He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.

Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

Instead, Trump has been charged with several specific crimes that have little to do with his “free speech” about the election. They include:

• “A conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371;
• “A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified (“the certification proceeding”), in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k); and
• “A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241.”

Trump literally tried to prevent the votes of Democrats — specifically Democratic voters in cities with large Black populations — from being counted. Instead, he wanted them thrown out or ignored so, even though he lost the election by 7 million votes, he could claim he was still president.

In his effort to do this, he engaged in specific actions designed to end American democracy and turn our republic into a totalitarian strongman oligarchy.

Trump promoted and publicized repeated lies about the integrity of the election itself, all to create public acceptance of his efforts to overturn the election. In this, he was attacking the foundation of American democracy: the right to vote and have your vote counted. And to a tragically large extent those lies have worked on gullible Republican voters: about 70 percent now believe those repeatedly disproven lies.

Trump conspired with Republicans in seven states to organize slates of fake electors that could be used to criminally overturn the election results and throw out the ballots of people who’d voted for Joe Biden.

Trump tried to get Mike Pence assassinated, presumably so he could declare a state of emergency and have the military seize ballot boxes and impose martial law. Trump repeatedly told his followers the lie that Pence had the power to overturn the election, eliciting the predictable rage — and murder attempt — from them when Pence refused.

Twice in the indictment the specter of the US military taking over our nation is raised; as I noted last week, it would have been Kent State times a thousand. Trump then watched approvingly on TV as the mob searched for Pence, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” with a fully functional and professionally made gallows sitting on the lawn of the Capitol.

The indictment even notes that Trump “caused” his campaign to issue a statement that Pence agreed with Trump, when Trump knew it was a lie and would put a target on Pence’s back.

While this is technically speech, it’s the kind of speech that nearly caused the death of Pence and did cause the death of nine other people, including four police officers, and the injury and hospitalization of over 140 other officers. It clearly falls into the “yelling fire in a crowded theater” exception to the First Amendment.

Along those lines, Trump repeatedly and knowingly told other lies that were designed to bolster and gain public acceptance for his criminal conspiracy to get the swing states to throw out the ballots of Democratic voters. They include, as summarized in the indictment:

— The lie that “the election was stolen” and he had “actually won.” (Page 1)
— The lie that the fake electors’ ballots could legitimately be counted. (Page 5)
— The lie, which he tried repeatedly to get the DOJ to put on their letterhead and send out to the seven swing states, that that agency and the Attorney General believed the election had been riddled with fraud (this led to Bill Barr’s resignation). (Page 6)
— The lie that thousands of “dead people” voted in Georgia (Secretary of State Raffensperger told Trump he could only find two dead people whose ballots had been turned in). (Page 8)
— The lie that Pennsylvania had counted almost a quarter-million more votes than there were registered voters in the states. (Page 8)
— The lie that there were “dumps” of pro-Biden votes in Detroit, a lie he repeated even after both Attorney General Bill Barr told him it hadn’t happened and that was confirmed by Michigan’s Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mike Shirkey. (Page 9)
— The lie, which he repeated even after it had been refuted by Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, that “thousands” of Nevadans had voted more than once. (Page 9)
— The lie, which he repeated even after it had been refuted by Arizona’s Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers, that “over 36,000” non-citizens voted in that state. (Page 10)
— The lie, which he repeated even after the head of his Cybersecurity agency told him was false, that voting machines were switching Trump votes to Biden. As the indictment notes: “The Defendant's Attorney General, Acting Attorney General, and Acting Deputy Attorney General all had explained to him that this was false, and numerous recounts and audits had confirmed the accuracy of voting machines.” (Pages 9 and 12)
— The lie that Georgia election workers were “stuffing” the ballot boxes with Biden votes, and that “thousands” of people outside the state of Georgia had voted in that state. (Pages 13, 14, 16)
— The lies, repeated after the Wisconsin state Supreme Court had ruled them lies, that “tens of thousands” of fraudulent votes were cast in that state and that more votes were counted than there were registered voters. (Page 21)
— The lie that Pennsylvania officials wanted the election re-certified. (Page 38).

As you can see, this wasn’t an exercise in free speech: it was a planned, organized, carefully executed conspiracy to defraud Biden voters in those seven states out of their right to have their votes counted.

Which may be why some Republicans say they believe Trump’s lies: what’s actually going on is that many know he lied and committed crimes but nonetheless support his attempt to steal the election from a Democrat. Trump’s public supporters don’t, in other words, believe in democracy. To cover up that tolerance for criminality, they pretend this is all about free-speech.

But it’s not. It’s about criminal fraud.

Fraud almost always involves speech: it’s hard to defraud somebody out of something without talking to or at them. But that doesn’t even remotely make it protected by the First Amendment’s free speech provision. Our prisons are filled with people who defrauded others purely with their words.

When Trump defrauded thousands of Trump University students out of their hard-earned money, for example, he was convicted and ordered to pay $25 million in restitution for the things he said. Had it been a criminal rather than civil case, he could have gone to jail: the attorneys for Trump’s victims, however, opted for the money instead of jail time.

So why would you go along with his criminality? Because either you share his bigotry or you believed his other lies on the campaign trail.

The bottom line is that you, dear Trump lover, have been lied to literally thousands of times by this man and his sycophants.

Trump lied to you when he said he was going to give everybody in America inexpensive healthcare that was “better than Obamacare.”

He lied to you when he said that he’d cut your taxes and then instead cut taxes for himself and his billionaire buddies.

He lied to you when he said he’d bring our jobs back from China and then instead got China to give his daughter tens of millions of dollars worth of patents.

He lied to you when he said he’d rebuild America’s infrastructure: instead, Biden has put trillions into rebuilding our nation.

He lied to you when he said he had “the best economy in history”; instead, Biden has created more jobs than Trump, Bush Jr., and Bush Sr. combined.

He even lied to you about Covid, causing deaths from that disease to run about twice as high in Red counties as in Blue counties since the vaccines became available.

And now Trump isn’t alone in pushing these lies.

The media outlets who gloss over Trump’s lies do so because it’s profitable for them: when, for example, Fox “News” stopped supporting Trump’s lies for a few weeks they lost a large chunk of their audience to another TV network that was willing to parrot his lies. Which is why they’re now back to supporting his lies and are again making money.

The politicians who approve of or repeat Trump’s lies do so because they see it as their path to fame and power: they want you to believe those lies and then vote for them.

And the billionaires who push Trump and his lies through their publications, think-tanks, and media outlets do so because they believe if he’s re-elected, they’ll get even more tax breaks and that Trump will continue his efforts to gut the IRS and EPA, which they hate.

The simple reality, dear Trump-lover, is that you’ve been suckered.

Now might be a good time to change the channel…

“Tiger King”-star-turned-presidential-candidate Joe Exotic is earning income in creative ways while in prison — despite facing a hefty liability from his big cat rescue foe Carole Baskin, according to a new federal financial disclosure filing.

Exotic — real name Joseph Maldonado — reported just one liability on his disclosure report, a requirement for all presidential candidates: a “$814,465 judgment from “Big Cat Rescue (Carole Baskin).”

Maldonado is in federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, serving a 21-year sentence for two counts of murder-for-hire related to alleged plans to kill Baskin, along with 17 other crimes, including violations of a law prohibiting illegal wildlife trading.

ALSO READ: ‘They blew up my life’: Fox News, a hidden camera and threats to an Indiana school administrator

Baskin and Maldonado’s animosity toward each other as rivals in the big cat rescue industry was the center of the Netflix documentary, “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” that was a cultural touchpoint in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite serving a lengthy prison sentence, Maldonado is bringing in some income from diverse sources, ranging from a book advance to toy payments and music royalties.

The average hourly prison wage is 52 cents per hour, The Marshall Project reported.

Maldonado reported a $35,000 advance from Simon & Schuster for a book payment, a $5,000 advance from a contract with Wilder Toys and $2,000 payment for an NFT promotion from a contract with E&J Holdings.

ALSO READ: Oops, I did it again: This Democratic congresswoman violated a federal law for a second time

Plus, he’s earned $11,197 in royalties from SoSouth Music Publishing, $3,150 in podcast and interview stipends and $1,017 from Facebook views, according to the filing.

Maldonado is running for president as an ultra-long-shot Democratic candidate against President Joe Biden, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and author Marianne Williamson — a field that’s a fraction of the size of the Republican race, which former President Donald Trump leads despite his own legal issues.

Maldonado’s campaign, Joseph Maldonado to Free America, reported raising $10,294.10 with $1,764.49 cash on hand as of June 30, after spending most of the funds on campaign merchandise, according to the Maldonado campaign’s most recent financial filing with the Federal Election Commission.

Maldonado's press secretary, Michael Robison, was not immediately available for comment.

Editor's note: The author of this piece was corrected to Arnie Arnesen.

CONCORD, N.H. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed his presidential candidate status in New Hampshire by filing a declaration of candidacy and paying a $1,000 filing fee; that's all it takes in the Granite State — sign your name and put up some chump change.

Identifying as a Democrat and purchasing real estate on the presidential primary ballot gives insight into the RFK Jr. campaign strategy: run as a Democrat while serving as the MAGA Trojan Horse.

For those not paying attention in ancient history class:

The Greeks succeeded in conquering Troy through trickery. They built a huge wooden horse and left it at the gates of Troy. They then pretended to sail away.

The Trojans believed the huge wooden horse was a peace offering to their gods and thus a symbol of their victory after a long siege. They pulled the giant wooden horse into the middle of the city. That night, after the Trojans had gone to bed, the Greek soldiers inside the horse got out, opened the gates of the city, and let in the remainder of the Greek army, which had sailed back under the cover of night. Taking the Trojans by surprise in the middle of the night, the Greeks were able to conquer Troy.

The blueprint is ancient, but the strategy is timeless. For decades, the Kennedy name served, like the horse to the Trojans, as a symbol of Democratic Party power and victories. Who better than a child of beloved Bobby Kennedy to climb on board as the Camelot-bred primary challenger to 80-year-old incumbent President Joe Biden — someone admired, but not necessarily desired, for 2024?

This Trojan horse doesn't even need to do the heavy lifting; no need to open the gates and let the Republican army in, since there is no Joe Biden on the New Hampshire presidential primary ballot. That’s right: Thanks to an intramural Democratic Party dispute (more on that shortly), RFK Jr. may very well win New Hampshire early next year. No matter that New Hampshire’s Democratic voters overwhelming prefer the White House’s current occupant.

ALSO READ: ‘They blew up my life’: Fox News, a hidden camera and threats to an Indiana school administrator

But RFK Jr is blessed twice. Not only is there no Joe in New Hampshire, but RFK Jr. is flush with cash that comes not from the Democratic faithful but a single GOP megadonor who has donated more than half the millions amassed by RFK Jr.'s super PAC.

A little research shows that there is so much more to RFK Jr. than his anti-vaxx rantings during the pandemic. But the attraction of his name, coupled with his crusade against all things pharma — even suggesting that ‘Vaccine Research’ was likely responsible for HIV and the Spanish Flu and pushing the false notion that antidepressants are linked to school shootings — plays the MAGA base like a fiddle, pipe and drum. Suggesting that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was bioengineered to spare the Jews and Chinese people, RFK Jr. proved that he does antisemitic/racist falsehoods nearly as well as the thrice-indicted Trump.

In true MAGA style, when questioned by Elizabeth Vargas at a town hall event whether he’d pledge to support whoever wins the Democratic nomination, Kennedy said, "of course I’m not gonna do that.”

Is Steve Bannon writing his script?

Speaking of Bannon, just a week ago, Bannon once again let the tiger out of the bag by suggesting that a Trump-RFK Jr. ticket would win in a “massive landslide”. The GOP, Bannon continued, would welcome RFK Jr., this ersatz Dem, into their lair. Kennedy has a favorability rating among Republicans that exceeds a 2-to-1 margin, and unlike a Kristi Noem or a Kari Lake, he has instant connection, via his surname, to every voter in America.

ALSO READ: How S.C.’s honor-bound military college camouflaged its connection to Rudy Giuliani

Not to leave a stone unturned: Last Friday the RFK Jr. campaign filed a 27-page complaint in California alleging that YouTube and Google were acting as "state actors" by censoring his anti-vaxx interviews. RFK Jr.'s suit contends this is a way of serving the concerns of the federal government, and aiding and abetting his democratic primary rival Biden. The complaint gives him a free media strategy and serves as a convenient tool to gin up thousands of small-dollar donors who will revel in the free speech and anti-vaxx arguments being rolled out by RFK Jr.

But RFK Jr. has a surprising accomplice in his presidential primary strategy. The decision by the Democratic National Committee to change the primary calender — and awarding South Carolina the first presidential primary voting state — has turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving to the MAGA GOP. They have free "reign" to spin their partisan/fascist adjacent agenda in Iowa and New Hampshire, with RFK Jr. flipping the bird to the DNC. Who wouldn't be reveling in New Hampshire’s state law that requires New Hampshire to be the first-in-the-nation presidential primary?

So much to lose in 2024 and the Democratic Party appears to be unprepared to fight a war Trump has been promising since 2020. Ancient history wrote the script but well-paid democratic strategists preferred courses in economics and political science and not in the academic discipline known as classics — the study of ancient Greeks and Romans.

If he expects to win re-election next year, Biden needs to consult strategists who know Trojans are more than a condom.

Arnie Arnesen is the host of syndicated radio program "The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen". A former fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, Arnesen was the 1992 Democratic nominee for governor of New Hampshire and served as a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 1984 to 1992.

MARTINSVILLE, Ind. — It started April 12, right after Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, one of the most-watched news programs in the country.

A phone call: “You stupid b*tch.”

Then an email: “Everyone you ever encounter … should spit in your face, fling their feces at you (with impeccable aim), punch you, knock you down, kick you, piss on you and hold you there for similar treatment by everyone waiting in line for their turn — you despicable sad excuse for a sub-human being.”

And that was just the first 11 minutes for Jenny Oakley, a mid-level public school administrator in Martinsville, Ind., who found herself depicted in a nationally televised secret camera video and thrust suddenly — and, she said, unfairly and inaccurately — into culture war cruelty.

It would get worse.

During sleepless nights, Oakley’s husband Justin took out his guns for the first time in 10 years. Police began patrols outside the Oakleys’ home after they reported harassment. The couple bought a Doberman named Zeus for added protection. Late on a Saturday night in their quiet neighborhood, a burst of sound — Pow-Pow-Pow — startled them and then a louder Boom.

Having previously enjoyed a quiet life, Jenny Oakley found herself in a debilitating new reality, breaking down when people merely asked how she was doing. She enjoyed reading, but now she couldn’t concentrate. She liked watching videos, but a video got her in this situation. Videos triggered dread.

Oakley describes herself as someone who wants to be liked, someone who has “always cared what people think, to a fault.” She said she avoids controversy and isn’t very political. Justin is the opposite. He works for an Indiana teachers union and ran for state Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2012 before dropping out of the race.

But on social media, strangers took off on Jenny’s character, including one who wrote, “I do not believe in any way that she is a good person.”

An email from the night of the program carried the subject line “God Bless You,” but what it said stung Oakley the most. She could handle the heinous screed of some kook. But this cut deep as an educator and mother of a middle schooler.

“You should never be near any children again, including your own…,” the email said.

That middle schooler helped her mother during the difficult days ahead.

“I don't think she had ever seen me cry except at funerals,” Oakley said. “And I was walking around here like a zombie, basically. And she made out little Bible verses and stuck them all over the house, you know, trying to hold me up.”

And to what end are the Oakleys suffering through this ordeal?

“I just think it's just part of a bigger attack on public education,” Oakley said. “And, you know, that's the ultimate goal. I wasn't the target necessarily, but I'm definitely the collateral damage.”

Hidden camera, open wounds

In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, Oakley recounted her experience as one of seven public educators from different school districts in Indiana who Accuracy in Media recorded on a hidden camera. Fox News used the video for its April 12 segment on Jesse Watters Primetime.

Accuracy in Media, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, and Fox News alleged that the educators were “stealthily” teaching “principles associated with Critical Race Theory,” a highly controversial front in the culture wars that, at its core, alleges systemic racism in America.

Raw Story last week requested an interview with Accuracy in Media President Adam Guillette. Accuracy in Media responded with an unsigned email requesting Raw Story submit written questions in advance. Raw Story declined to do so, and Accuracy in Media did not respond to subsequent interview requests. Accuracy in Media also did not respond to several emailed questions.

Fox News did not respond to requests for an interview.

The supposed deception of parents, Accuracy in Media argues, reinforces the need for public tax money to go to charter and private schools.

“Our goal is school choice where the money follows the child,” Guillette said on Fox News. “That is the only solution.”

Within the past few months, Accuracy in Media also published hidden-camera video of public educators in Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and Nebraska. In those states — plus Indiana and several others — such recordings are legal because only one party to a conversation needs to consent.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist warns: We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history

Educators were accused, as in Indiana, of sneaking CRT concepts into public school curriculum.

“After this happened, I was like, ‘How in the world did they align what I was talking about to CRT?’” Oakley said. “Because in fact, I couldn't even talk intelligently about CRT at that time.”

Through open records requests to the districts involved, Raw Story obtained Accuracy in Media’s lightly edited video from the Elkhart, Ind., public school district, plus hundreds of pages of emails from all of the districts.

Oakley said she spoke to Raw Story to explain her side, advocate for the teaching profession and to show the human cost of rabid culture war fighting.

She appears for 24 seconds in the Accuracy in Media video.

“We’ve talked about, to our textbook companies that are coming in to do presentations — and I actually prep them a little because I’m like, “We want this in our curriculum, so if you could just not say specifically this, then it won’t cause a red flag with the community,’” Oakley says. “And I hate that we have to do that. But that way, it’s still there. And the community would support it if just the content was there. They just … it’s the title.”

The Fox News story started with a graphic over Watters’ shoulder showing children’s blocks with the letters CRT.

“Children are fed CRT propaganda,” it said on the lower-third of the screen.

Watters started the segment by asserting, “Schools are brainwashing our kids and then lying about it.”

Jenny Oakley is the first educator shown. The Fox News segment cut something Oakley sees as critical from the Accuracy in Media video — the part where she says, “And the community would support it …”

In an interview, Oakley said the red flag she meant was Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which is sometimes mistakenly conflated with CRT. Teaching SEL is part of Indiana’s state academic standards and is promoted on a flyer from three state agencies.

It equates to skills such as building resiliency, communicating effectively, and goal setting. Indiana schools are required by law to teach SEL concepts, the Plainfield, Ind., school district explained in a Q&A strongly supportive of its administrator who appeared in the Accuracy in Media video.

CRT, however, is another matter. In June, the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville sued Accuracy in Media, saying it defamed the district and presented it in a false light by saying it teaches CRT. In July, the district withdrew its complaint.

The complaint alleged, “MSD of Martinsville believes that AIM has manipulated a surreptitious recording of a School District employee in an effort to falsely claim that the School District is teaching CRT and is lying to School District parents about it."

Superintendent Eric Bowlen declined comment for this story, including why the district dismissed the lawsuit it brought.

Oakley has not seen the unedited version of the video. The school district’s lawsuit said Accuracy in Media initially agreed to provide it and then went silent.

A day after the Fox News segment, a truck with a large screen on the side played the Accuracy in Media video as it rolled around downtown Indianapolis, with the city about to host the National Rifle Association’s annual convention.

It’s unclear who hired the truck, but Accuracy in Media’s tactics were generating attention.

‘Sydney Greenberg’

On a Thursday morning in February, two women who Oakley thought were in their 20s showed up at Martinsville’s administration building unannounced, saying they were looking for a school district for their child in first grade.

Their story, according to an email Oakley wrote later that day to district colleagues: They came from Texas, but Texas was too conservative and they wanted a new community and school. They expressed concern about censored curriculum and book banning.

It was more than two months before the Fox News story.

Oakley wouldn’t normally be the one to talk with school shoppers. That would be her boss, Suzie Lipps, assistant to the superintendent for curriculum, instruction and human resources. But Lipps was working on an issue outside the building, so Oakley, the director of e-learning and literacy, spoke with them. These opportunities are not taken lightly. That’s especially the case with Indiana’s legislature using tax money for a robust voucher program supporting private, usually faith-based, schools.

When Oakley asked the women what part of town they moved to, they named a local church. The conversation lasted five or 10 minutes, Oakley said. She later contacted the principal of the elementary school the child would be attending and suggested inviting the women to a cultural festival at the school that night.

Oakley got a name from one of the women, “Sydney Greenberg,” and a phone number.

Nobody returned the call inviting them to the cultural event. When Raw Story called the number this month, there was a generic message to leave a voicemail.

Martinsville is a conservative town in a red state. It’s not the place one would think of for a couple seeking a community aligned with their progressive politics.

ALSO READ: Why violent extremists get security clearances — but people of color must sometimes wait and wait

Nothing came of the women’s visit until an email at 2:39 p.m. on April 12 from Max Kiviat, associate producer for Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. He addressed it to Lipps and copied Oakley.

“Tonight we will be covering a story about an undercover investigation involving your school district,” the email said. “Video shows administrators admitting that the schools are using misleading language to confuse parents into stealthily teaching students principles associated with Critical Race Theory. We wanted to offer the school district a chance to comment on the story. We are going live at 7:30pm ET.”

The email didn’t say what specifically the district was being asked to comment on. Oakley said during ensuing conversations, she, Lipps and Bowlen all wondered if they were the one being targeted.

A little after 5 p.m., after internal discussions and consulting with lawyers, Lipps emailed back to say the district would wait to see the story. Two minutes later, Kiviat sent a link to the video Accuracy in Media had posted.

In their living room at home, Jenny and Justin Oakley watched the video on a laptop. Then Jenny started to hear from friends that her face was being used on Fox News promotions for that night’s Jesse Watters Primetime show.

The attacks on her would start in a few hours.

Oakley did have supporters in the community. Some came to her defense on social media. She sought therapy.

Before a school board meeting, local pastors led a prayer circle outside the building for people with all points of view on the situation. One of the pastors invoked the Gospel of John: “Love one another. Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other. This is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another.”

About a week later, Justin learned his mother had brain cancer. This added to the pressure on their daughter who couldn’t have both of her parents in a prolonged dark place.

“So I had to snap out of it,” Jenny Oakley said. “I had to snap out of it for her, just being strong in the fact that I did not do anything wrong and that it'll be interpreted how it is no matter what.”

Unedited video

Accuracy in Media reported $908,000 in contributions and grants on its latest federal tax filing.

As a federally recognized nonprofit organization, it did not have to detail the source or sources of its money. Accuracy in Media says its mission is to “monitor the accuracy of news reporting activities by the media” and “promote accuracy, fairness and balance in news reporting.”

Guillette, the group’s president, makes $200,000, according to the document.

As part of a public records request, Raw Story obtained what Accuracy in Media described in an email to the Elkhart, Ind., school district as a lightly edited, 15-minute hidden-camera conversation with Brad Sheppard, assistant superintendent of instruction.

The edits, Guillette wrote, were to protect Accuracy in Media’s tactics during an “ongoing investigation.”

In the video, what sounds like a man and a woman gave Sheppard frequent affirmations of his answers — “right on,” “good,” “I love that.” The couple’s full pretense for showing up wasn’t part of the video, but what they said to Sheppard left little doubt about their supposed political views.

ALSO READ: A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

“In Texas, unfortunately, we banned anything that has to do with the 1619 Project,” the woman says, referring to the controversial New York Times project that put slavery at the center of America’s history.

“In Texas, they passed one of those stupid laws banning what they call Critical Race Theory,” the man says.

“We’re really hoping not to get a MAGA version of history, to put it bluntly,” the woman says.

Regarding what’s taught in the classroom, Sheppard emphasized the Indiana state academic standards.

“As long as (teachers) can tie it back to the standards, they’re covered,” he said. “That’s really the bottom line. Are you teaching the academic standards?”

Sheppard was shown in the Fox News video answering what educational material in the district needs to be “relabeled.”

“I think CRT, Social-Emotional Learning are the two biggies,” he says. “We just have to avoid the words. You know? The labels.”

An Accuracy in Media person says, “We can still do the content, just no labels.”

Sheppard says yes, to which the Accuracy in Media person says, “That’s cool.”

Sheppard was placed on paid administrative leave, returned to his same position and retired in June, according to a lawyer for the district.

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Other records obtained by Raw Story show that Sheppard and another administrator in the Fox News story, Laura DelVecchio of the public school district in Plainfield, Ind., received the same email Oakley did suggesting a line of people punch her and urinate on her.

All of them arrived within 15 minutes after Jesse Watters Primetime ended. Attorney Jon Little, who represents the Oakleys, believes that indicates a connection to an organization with all-purpose, pre-written screeds for perceived political enemies.

Trustees from the Plainfield school district received a long, racist email suggesting, amid the talk of CRT, a “Thank You White People Day.” It said, “White people created the very high standard of living all races in the USA enjoy” and “many immigrants don’t want to assimilate.” It claimed discrimination against “heterosexual White males.”

In the weeks that followed, Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita got involved on social media, encouraging journalists to write about the Accuracy in Media video.

When DelVecchio received an interview request from Indiana Public Media, she echoed what Oakley said, although they have never met or communicated.

“The story really isn’t about me,” DelVecchio wrote, “it is about the fate of public education.”

A life, changed

Jenny Oakley recalled with a touch of disbelief how, years ago, her husband used to rave about being an eighth grade teacher.

“He would come home every day and say, ‘I just can't believe I get paid to do this as a job,’” she said. “He would come home. He was so excited about the impact that he was making on kids and his conversations every day and the light bulbs going on and all those things.”

For many, teaching is a calling. Pay is often low, but the rewards are supposed to be great. That perception seems to be changing. Indiana has a teacher shortage.

Young teachers, Oakley said, “turn on their TV or hop on Facebook, and all they're seeing are attacks on their profession. And it's hard to keep up the intrinsic motivation of teaching when you have so many of these negative external factors.”

Many of the attacks come from advocates for private and charter schools.

“I don't think that they're going to be happy until public education just completely crumbles,” Oakley said. “And then they're going to see what kind of pillars of the community we really are, and they'll have to build it back up.”

Among the administrators in the Accuracy in Media video, four are in the same job, one retired, and two districts (Monroe County and Fairfield) did not respond to Raw Story’s inquiry.

Oakley has continued to work. But she said she still can’t be certain about her future in the district.

Oakley still doesn’t know the identity of the women who came to Martinsville. They weren’t asked to sign in. Now the district office uses the same system as its schools, scanning the driver’s license of everyone who comes in.

“Thankfully, they didn't walk in here with a backpack that they left behind,” Oakley said, “but they blew up my life.”

A Democratic congresswoman from North Carolina with a history of more than 50 late stock disclosures appears to have violated a decade-old federal transparency and conflicts-of-interest law.

Again.

Rep. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.) reported purchasing $29,122 worth of stock in investment management company Blackstone Inc. on June 10, 2022, jointly with her husband — more than a year late, according to an Aug. 2 federal filing reviewed by Raw Story.

“The purchase was inadvertently omitted due to an administrative error. The error was discovered during preparation of the 2022 Annual Report for timely filing on August 2, 2023,” read a description on Manning’s filing.

The description noted that Manning sold the stock at a loss five days later for $25,755 on June 15, 2022, which she correctly reported to U.S. House officials on July 7, 2022 report.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Aren’t we a little more grown up than that?’: Ex-lawmaker rips Congress for ‘dog ate my homework’ excuses

But Manning never disclosed she purchased the stock in the first place — a requirement of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act. The law, passed in 2012 to stop insider trading, curb conflicts-of-interest and enhance transparency, requires prompt reporting within 45 days of most purchases, sales and exchanges of stocks, bonds, commodity futures and cryptocurrency by key government officials, particularly members of Congress.

This is Manning’s second known STOCK Act violation. Sludge reported in February 2022 that Manning and her husband failed to properly report 51 trades totaling between $275,000 and $1.25 million.

Many of the 51 stocks were in tech companies such as Meta and Amazon, which have faced high-stakes legislative battles in Congress.

The couple’s stock transactions with Nvidia, meanwhile, came at a time when the semiconductor company stood to benefit from billions in subsidies from the America COMPETES Act, according to Sludge.

Manning was one of eight representatives who signed a letter asking for the delay of a House Judiciary Committee markup of antitrust bills, Sludge reported as well.

Manning also purchased shares in chip manufacturers, Micron Technology and Nvidia, on July 27, 2022, the day before she voted for the bipartisan CHIPS Act. But she said the purchases were made by a third-party broker, not by herself or husband directly, local North Carolina Fox station WGHP reported.

“Congresswoman Manning and her husband have no discretion or control over the underlying assets held in the accounts. Neither Congresswoman Manning nor her husband exercised, or attempted to exercise, any control or direction over any transactions executed within the accounts,” said a statement from Manning’s staff sent to WGHP. “Congresswoman Manning supported the CHIPS Act because it will incentivize investments in semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, which will create good-paying jobs, strengthen our country’s competitive edge, and protect our national security.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Busted: These 6 members of Congress violated a federal conflicts-of-interest law

Manning’s congressional office did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

The standard fine for violating the STOCK Act is $200, but the House Committee on Ethics and Senate Select Committee on Ethics have historically waived the fees for many violators.

In a recent interview with Raw Story, one of the STOCK Act’s original authors, former Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), blasted Congress for its continued excuses for failing to abide by the law.

“I mean, come on. ‘The dog ate my homework,’ aren’t we a little more grown up than that?” Baird said. “If we're capable of voting on whether or not to raise or lower taxes or send people to war, I think we can report when we make an investment.”

Epidemic of violations

Dozens of members of Congress have failed to comply with the STOCK Act. During the 117th Congress from 2021 to 2022, at least 78 members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — were found to have violated the STOCK Act's disclosure provisions, according to a tally maintained by Insider.

Raw Story has this year identified at least 19 members of the 118th Congress who have broken the federal conflicts of interest law, including the new addition of Manning.

In recent weeks, repeat violators have broken the federal disclosure law again — Rep. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) violated the STOCK Act for the third time in 14 months, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) was several months late disclosing a family stock sale — again.

And Manning isn’t the only North Carolina legislator to violate the STOCK Act.

Of the 19 legislators Raw Story has identified as violating the STOCK Act, four of them are from North Carolina — Manning, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C). and Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C). That’s one in four members of North Carolina’s 16-member congressional delegation — 14 House members and two senators.

The ongoing violations come at a time when a bipartisan group of lawmakers have introduced several similar bills aimed at banning congressional stock trading.

The most recent legislation introduced is the Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act, which would prohibit members of Congress, the president, the vice president, senior executive branch officials, their spouses and children from trading stocks and would require greater transparency with financial disclosures, The Hill reported.

Another two-party bill, the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act was introduced in May and is co-sponsored in part by political rivals in Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

Other materially similar bills include the Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act, the TRUST in Congress Act and the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act. In the decade since the STOCK Act’s passage, the push for a total ban on lawmakers trading stocks while in office gained but then lost momentum last year when the Democratic-led House, then led by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, decided not to conduct a hearing on any of stock-ban bills and never brought it to the House floor for a vote.

News organizations including the New York Times, Insider, NPR and Sludge have documented rampant financial conflicts of interests among dozens of members of Congress, such as those who bought and sold defense contractor stock while occupying positions on congressional armed services committees or otherwise voting on measures to send such companies billions of federal dollars. The executive and judicial branches are riddled with similar financial conflict issues, too, as the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The Wall Street Journal won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for its investigation into financial conflicts among officials who work in federal agencies while Insider won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sunshine Award for its reporting on congressional financial conflicts.

The Honor Code of The Citadel, South Carolina’s 181-year-old military college, states that cadets “will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do.”

But The Citadel now finds itself quietly tolerating one of its most recognizable honorary degree recipients — Rudy Giuliani — who, in the estimation of the U.S. House’s January 6 select committee, lied and cheated while attempting to steal the 2020 presidential election away from its duly elected winner, Joe Biden.

“Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy,” a DC Bar Association panel wrote last month in recommending Giuliani, who served as former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, be disbarred. “The misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments.”

Those accomplishments include “leadership and inspiration to all Americans in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks” — the reasons The Citadel’s Board of Visitors cited in 2007 when awarding Giuliani an honorary doctorate in public administration.

These days, however, The Citadel officials don’t want to talk about Giuliani, his myriad troubles — including newfound status as "co-conspirator 1" in Trump's latest federal indictment — or the honorary The Citadel degree he continues to enjoy.

And in a series of internal The Citadel emails, which Raw Story obtained through a South Carolina Freedom of Information Act request, school officials detail how they decided to close ranks, protect themselves and deflect Giuliani-related scrutiny.

‘Domestic terrorist behavior’

Giuliani’s honorary degrees first caught my attention in early 2022 while working as deputy editor at Insider.

Three schools — the University of Rhode Island, Drexel University, Middlebury College — had recently stripped “America’s mayor” of honorary degrees.

Such actions are uncommon in academia, the rationales notably severe.

Upon Rhode Island University relieving Giuliani of his honorary degree, President Marc Parlange concluded that Giuliani had “encouraged domestic terrorist behavior”.

Giuliani aided “an insurrection against democracy itself,” Middlebury President Laurie L. Patton declared.

Drexel admonished Giuliani for “undermining the public’s faith in our democratic institutions and in the integrity of our judicial system”.

Given this, I asked then-Insider reporter Hanna Kang to contact five schools that had also bestowed honorary degrees on Giuliani — Georgetown University, Syracuse University, St. John Fisher University, Loyola University Maryland and The Citadel. See whether they, too, planned to take those honors back, I asked.

ALSO READ: Giuliani’s ‘donkey show’: How fake electors and coercion allegations may doom ‘America’s mayor’

With the possible exception of Syracuse University (full disclosure: my alma mater), the schools had made no formal moves to deep-six or otherwise alter the status of Giuliani’s honorary degrees. Nor did they have much, if anything, to say about Giuliani.

But of these five schools, The Citadel alone is a public institution. As such, it’s subject to something the others are not — public records laws.

So in May, while recently working with Raw Story investigative reporter Mark Alesia to determine whether the five schools had reconsidered their stances in light of new Giuliani-related developments, Raw Story filed a South Carolina Freedom of Information Act request with The Citadel for school records pertaining to Giuliani.

In late July, The Citadel released to Raw Story several hundred responsive documents.

Within the document dump were a series of emails sent among school officials, administrators and members of the Board of Visitors — a government-appointed body responsible for the “direction and supervision” of The Citadel — detailing their plans to stay mum on Giuliani’s honorary degree.

‘Protect them’

The Citadel Board of Visitors’ consists of up to 14 voting members who are elected to six-year terms by South Carolina’s General Assembly and governor.

The members of The Citadel Board of Visitors are “dedicated to the principles of duty, honesty, loyalty, integrity, and accountability,” according to its “Commitment to Excellent and Ethics” document.

And conferring honorary degrees ranks among the specific duties of The Citadel’s Board of Visitors.

But when faced with questions from Raw Story about the status of Giuliani’s degree, Board of Visitors remained silent.

School officials, for their parts, angled to “protect” the Board of Visitors, according to emails obtained through Raw Story’s South Carolina Freedom of Information Act request.

“We could decline to reply, like we have with Business Insider recently, or provide a modified version of what we first sent BI when they asked, which is: Honorary degree recipients are determined by the Board of Visitors, the college’s governing body. Here is a link to the announcement when the Board presented Giuliani with an honorary degree in 2007: https://www.citadel.edu/root/honorary_degrees,” The Citadel spokesman Zachary Watson wrote to Col. William R. “Sonny” Leggett, The Citadel’s vice president for communications and marketing, on May 17.

No to the latter, Leggett replied.

“I would just not respond- I wouldn’t put it on the BoV- we still need to protect them,” Leggett wrote Watson. “The worse they run is we failed to respond.”

Watson concurred: “Yep, that’s my preference too. Just wanted to pull options in case.”

Raw Story’s article, published on May 22, would go on to report: “The Citadel spokesman Zachary Watson acknowledged — but did not answer — Raw Story’s questions about the status of the honorary degree Rudy Giuliani received from the South Carolina military school in 2007.”

This was just the latest example of The Citadel dodging questions about Giuliani.

When Board of Visitors member Allison Dean Love received a Giuliani-related email from Insider in June 2022, she did not reply, but instead forwarded the message to Leggett, according to records obtained by Raw Story.

Similarly, Board of Visitors member Dylan Goff demurred.

“We will not be responding,” Goff wrote to Love and Leggett.

Leggett briefed The Citadel’s president, Glenn M. Walters, a retired general in the U.S. Marine Corps and school alumnus. He carbon copied three other top school officials.

“Business Insider has asked whether the school has any additional statement regarding the degree, we are directing them back to the original release- which notes Giuliani was also recognized as Time's Person of the year in 2001 and granted honorary knighthood in 2002 by Queen Elizabeth II,” Leggett wrote Walters. “The reporter is now reaching out to BOV members seeking comment. We will send a message to the Board and encourage them to direct all queries to [the Office of Communication and Marketing].”

Leggett then issued marching orders.

“Business Insider is working on a piece regarding Rudy Giuliani's honorary degrees. The Citadel presented Giuliani with an honorary degree of Doctor of Public Administration in 2007 … Business Insider is seeking comment regarding the degree, we are directing them back to the original release. If contacted, please direct the reporter, Hanna Kang, back to [the Office of Communication and Marketing],” he wrote on June 17, 2022, in an email addressed to more than 30 recipients, including Board of Visitors members and top college officials.

After Insider published an article featuring The Citadel and Giuliani’s honorary degree, Leggett quarterbacked damage control.

“Thoughts? Should we tell the board,” Cardon B. Crawford, senior vice president of The Citadel and a retired Army colonel, wrote to Lori Hedstrom, executive assistant to the Board of Visitors.

“Yes I think COL Leggett should craft an email to the Board. I can send to them on his behalf. Please let me know how you would like to proceed. Thank you,” Hedstrom wrote back.

Leggett also wrote Crawford.

“Since we are updating the board on Irizarry, we may wish to flag this for them as well,” Leggett wrote, referring to a former The Citadel cadet who had recently been sentenced to jail time for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Leggett continued: “The Citadel is mentioned in the piece as having awarded Giuliani an honorary degree and the opening image of Giuliani at The Citadel receiving said honor (below)… but no one from the staff or alums provided comments to the article. It’s business insider so it isn’t getting much attention, though they did @citadel1842 in their twitter posting.”

Kang, a most diligent reporter, kept trying to get answers.

But throughout 2022, The Citadel kept stonewalling her.

“FYSA in case Ms. Kang did not reach out to you all. I did not intend to respond of course,” Citadel Alumni Association Executive Director Tom McAlister wrote Leggett later that year after receiving an email from Kang.

“Thanks, we are not engaging with her either,” Leggett wrote back.

Is Giuliani a role model for cadets?

In late July, Raw Story asked The Citadel about these internal emails, posing questions to each member of The Citadel’s Board of Visitors and several top college officials, including Walters, the school president.

Among our questions:

• Is The Citadel's Board of Visitors currently reviewing the status of the honorary degree The Citadel granted Mr. Giuliani in 2007? If so, what has prompted such a review, and where does this process stand? If not, why not?
• To what degree is The Citadel concerned about Mr. Giuliani's role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election?
• The Citadel's honor code states that cadets “will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” Rudy Giuliani has been accused by various entities, including the U.S. House January 6 Select Committee and DC Bar Association, of lying and cheating in an attempt to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Does The Citadel believe that Rudy Giuliani has lied or cheated?
• Does The Citadel still consider Mr. Giuliani a role model for cadets?
• Why — per the emails Raw Story reviewed — did several of The Citadel's Board of Visitors decline to answer reporter questions about Mr. Giuliani's 2007 honorary degree after receiving inquiries from Insider and Raw Story?
• Why did The Citadel's communications staff in 2022 "encourage" Board of Visitors members to "direct all queries to OCM" regarding Mr. Giuliani?
• In a May 17 email between [vice president for communications and marketing] Col. Sonny Leggett and [college spokesman] Zach Watson, which is discussing a request for comment from Raw Story, Col. Leggett states: "I would just not respond- I wouldn’t put it on the BoV- we still need to protect them. The worse they run is we failed to respond." What, specifically, is The Citadel staff protecting the Board of Visitors from?

Four days passed after Raw Story sent the questions. None of the 20 officials responded.

On July 25, Raw Story followed up by phone and email to again ask them for their answers.

More silence.

Instead, Watson, the school spokesman, emailed Raw Story a two-sentence statement:

“The Citadel has never revoked an honorary degree and does not have a process to do so. Designated members of The Citadel’s Office of Communications and Marketing serve as spokespersons for the college and, therefore, often act as designees for media inquiries directed to members of the Administration or Board of Visitors.”

Watson did not respond to a follow-up question asking whether this statement represents the views of The Citadel’s administration, The Citadel’s Board of Visitors, or both.

Nor did he respond to later questions about Giuliani’s newly established status as “co-conspirator 1” in Trump’s newest federal indictment.

Representatives for Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment. In May, Giuliani spokesman Ted Goodman blasted the schools that had taken honorary degrees away from Giuliani.

"It'll be interesting to see who is behind these efforts to attack Mayor Giuliani and if anyone at these schools will inform these students about the basic principles of ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ and if they'll educate these students on the mayor's past as the man who took down the mafia, cleaned up New York and comforted the nation following 9/11," Goodman told Raw Story. "Frankly, we weren't even aware of those decisions, and it's just disappointing, and it says more about the culture of these institutions than anything else."

‘When you know better, do better’

A 2019 The Citadel memorandum concerning honorary degrees states that there should be a “compelling reason why it would be particularly fitting for The Citadel to honor the nominee, in the form of a clear link between the nominee’s achievements and The Citadel’s mission and its core values.”

The memorandum doesn’t detail a formal process for revoking an honorary degree that’s already been awarded.

It also doesn’t expressly state the Board of Visitors cannot take an honorary degree back. Under the heading “compliance,” the memorandum states: “Failure to comply with this policy may prevent a deserving individual from receiving appropriate recognition from The Citadel.”

With this as backdrop, Raw Story asked three lawmakers with direct ties to The Citadel about what the school’s Board of Visitors should do with Giuliani’s honorary degree.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who in 1999 became the first female cadet to graduate from The Citadel, dismissed the notion of her alma mater rescinding Giuliani’s degree.

ALSO READ: Inside Trump’s six-person team of alleged co-conspirators and their effort to overturn Election 2020

“I’m not a big fan of cancel culture. Giuliani 20 years ago is different than the Giuliani today,” she told Raw Story correspondent Matt Laslo during an interview at the U.S. Capitol. “Everyone, including colleges, has a 1st Amendment right to do things like that. And I don’t think that any college should be discredited for that sort of thing.”

Mace noted that the “world changed” on Sept. 11, 2001, and Giuliani, as mayor of New York, provided rare and essential leadership in the midst of an unthinkable crisis.

“It was a very historic moment. And I actually think it’s kind of gross to take that away from someone,” Mace said. “This whole cancel thing — people got to grow the f— … just grow up. You know what, just grow up. Move on and look forward. Because it’s very divisive. It’s very divisive for our country.”

Even with Giuliani facing a host of legal and ethical problems?

“What’s he been convicted of? That’s the problem,” Mace said. “And if you believe in the Constitution and due process, and the law, then people are innocent until proven guilty. Even if you don’t like him personally, that’s the way it works.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), the U.S. House's assistant Democratic leader whose Charleston-area congressional district includes The Citadel, is more dubious.

“He’s embarrassed himself so much,” Clyburn said of Giuliani in a brief interview with Raw Story. “The school, I don’t think, would want to be embarrassed by him. So, it’s up to them.”

The Citadel’s elected representative in the South Carolina House of Representatives went further.

“When I think about the ongoing revelations of the behavior and statements of Rudy Giuliani, I am reminded of the old Southern adage that ‘the chickens always come home to roost’,” said state Rep. Wendell Gilliard (D-SC). “There is nothing that surprises me about him anymore and, frankly, the less said about him, the better.”

As it pertains to The Citadel, Gilliard said, “I am more apt to think of the wisdom in Maya Angelou’s words, ‘do the best that you can with what you know, and when you know better, do better’. So, I am more interested in what those that run The Citadel will do with all the things that have been revealed about Giuliani.”

The Citadel's Honor Code, for its part, advocates "doing the right thing when no one is watching," and also, to “do the right thing when everyone is watching".

Matt Laslo contributed to this report.

When former President Donald Trump and other prominent presidential candidates come to town, local governments often find themselves expending significant public resources to ensure public safety.

Greensboro, N.C., was no different when the North Carolina Republican Party Convention came to town in June, and city officials enlisted its understaffed police force to provide security for thousands of visitors and three presidential candidate headliners — Trump included.

But in the days leading up to the event, Greensboro began asking, is it all worth it?

After all, the convention would end up costing the city about $45,000 for 1,150 police officer work hours.

“Do we get reimbursed any of our additional expenses for security from the GOP?” Tammi Thurm, a councilwoman for the City of Greensboro, wrote to the city’s police chief and assistant city manager on June 7.

Raw Story obtained the email through a City of Greensboro public records request.

Thurm later followed up: “In a time where we are so short handed, and OT budgets are limited, we need to figure out if the [Convention and Visitors Bureau] should still be recruiting these events to Greensboro, or if they cost us too much.”

Greensboro’s concerns come a time when cash-strapped municipalities across the country find themselves paying tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of dollars to provide public safety coverage for Trump campaign visits.

But Trump’s campaign has almost universally refused to help defray the unexpected public safety costs stemming from his rallies at a time when he’s facing 78 felonies across three criminal cases.

Trump’s campaign has to date racked up millions in public safety bills from his MAGA rallies that his campaign neglected to pay, with his campaign arguing that its under no obligation to pay them.

The presidential campaigns of Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who headlined the North Carolina convention, could have volunteered campaign funds to cover security costs incurred for their visits. The North Carolina GOP that hosted the event could’ve chipped in, too.

But they didn’t.

‘Plan for contingencies’

Nathaniel “Trey” Davis, an assistant city manager for the City of Greensboro, replied to Thurm’s email and explained that reimbursement for such events has been a “challenge” in the past.

He pointed to the Greensboro Department police chief to “add some context on recent successes.”

“We are working with staff from the NC GOP to coordinate our security and response for the event, which includes who will bear the cost for the services,” John Thompson, Greensboro Police Department chief of police, replied in a June 7 email. “In most dignitary visits we never fully recoup the costs as we have to plan for contingencies typically not covered for the event.”

In an interview with Raw Story, Thurm explained that political event-related police expenditures have “traditionally” been a “city expense” that the taxpayers will cover. The City of Greensboro didn’t send a bill to the Trump, Pence or DeSantis campaigns or the North Carolina GOP as many other municipalities have done in similar situations, with limited success.

RELATED ARTICLE: How Waco got Donald Trump to pay a huge bill for his MAGA rally

“It's always a concern when you're short staffed to have to dedicate people to be at certain places at certain times, that kind of thing, but it's what we do as a city,” Thurm said. “It's our obligation to protect the public and that's the role we have to fulfill.”

Since the convention was a state-level event, Thurm said the city wasn’t eligible for federal reimbursement of public safety costs.

“Just the GOP convention, it's just kind of our obligation,” Thurm said. “There's a function in our city — support that and work with those function sponsors to make sure that everything goes smoothly for them.”

The Greensboro Police Department said in a statement in response to Raw Story’s open records request, “GPD was involved in the GOP convention. There was no contract. It was treated as one of our normal dignitary visits using on-duty and activated Greensboro Police Department resources. There were no financial or contractual transactions between the Greensboro Police Department and the GOP.”

When asked how a $45,000 expense plays into the city’s broad budget, Thurm said, “Every dollar should be significant to the taxpayers, but in the grand scheme of things, $45,000 is not a huge amount of money in our budget. What's more taxing is the hours for police officers, when we're short staffed anyway, to have to be committed to events and traffic control, but that's true whether it's the convention or whether it's a major concert or some other function.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Pennsylvania city explains how it'll get Trump to pay ‘extraordinary’ police costs at MAGA rally

Thurm said she anticipates Greensboro will continue to host events such as the North Carolina GOP Convention. The upside to these events is that they attract visitors who spend money and support the local economy.

“It's a good thing for our community. Certainly, we welcome visitors to our community, and the dollars they spend, it helps offset the hotel motel taxes, helps offset these expenses,” Thurm said. “I can't say whether or not it covered it all, but certainly we had thousands of people come here and stay in our hotels and eat at our restaurants and shop in Greensboro, and that's a good thing.”

The North Carolina GOP did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

Trump visits often cost small-town taxpayers

From far-right Republican Ted Cruz to far-left Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, some presidential candidates have voluntarily paid public safety bills using campaign money.

Trump, Pence or DeSantis’s campaign could have all used their campaign funds to contribute to Greensboro’s costs, but Trump, in particular, is known for avoiding paying for public safety costs related to his speaking engagements, particularly MAGA rallies.

Take Erie, Pa.

Officials there are still trying to get Trump to pay for a $35,129.27 bill from 2018 for overtime pay that city workers, including police officers, earned for covering his previous rally. When he came to town in late July, the city tried billing him upfront for $5,200 for police overtime costs, Raw Story reported.

When Trump first didn’t pay his 2018 bill in Erie, the Center for Public Integrity reported that Trump had not only stiffed Erie but also hadn’t paid $841,219 total to various city governments. The campaign’s unpaid bills grew to nearly $2 million by December 2020, Insider reported.

Cities including Minneapolis and El Paso, Texas, have threatened or pursued legal action against the Trump campaign to no avail.

RELATED ARTICLE: Tiny South Carolina town officials at odds over eating $40K in costs after Trump visit

And some cities are still footing the bill to protect Trump, his supporters and the community, writ large. Among them: Manchester, N.H., where 35 officers supported a Trump hotel rally on April 27 — clocking in 216.5 hours of overtime that cost an estimated $12,870 — for which the city government covered the costs, according to records obtained by Raw Story.

In recent months, city governments have taken note of Trump’s debts and used creative techniques to ensure Trump pays up front.

They include Waco, Texas, where the Trump campaign settled up a $60,714.27 bill for a March rally on city property.

Trump, who leads all polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is continuing to have an active campaign and speaking schedule despite facing several legal battles, including two federal indictments.This week it was announced that Trump was charged with four felony counts in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and his alleged effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He also faces 39 felony counts related to the alleged willful retention of classified documents and conspiracy to conceal, along with felony business record falsification charges in New York City stemming from a "hush money" payment.

Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, are also investigating whether Trump tampered with the results of the state’s 2020 presidential vote.

Trump’s campaign did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment at the time of publication.

Federal regulators are going after Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro — again — for failing to follow the law.

Last month, for at least the 55th time — that isn’t a typo — the Federal Election Commission sent Pirro’s still-technically-active U.S. Senate campaign committee a letter warning it of accounting errors and missed deadlines. It threatened consequences.

“The failure to timely file a complete report may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action,” the FEC’s letter said. “The civil money penalty calculation for late reports does not include a grace period and begins on the day following the due date for the report.”

But Pirro knows better than most that nothing is likely to happen. In these cases, the FEC famously huffs and puffs without following through.

Pirro for Senate dates back to Pirro’s aborted 2006 challenge to Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate in New York. Late in 2005, Pirro quit after an inept campaign and polls showing Clinton would trounce her on Election Day.

The Pirro campaign committee failed to file required FEC financial reports for at least seven years before trying to dissolve in 2019.

That year, Pirro for Senate said in a hand-written FEC filing that its debts of about $600,000 “are not collectable as the (state) 6 year statue (sic) of limitation has long passed.”

It’s unclear from FEC filings whether the agency refused to accept the campaign’s explanation about the debt. The campaign’s most recent filing listed no money on hand, no fundraising and no spending.

Bruce Bellmare, treasurer for the committee, couldn’t be reached for comment.

The FEC said it wouldn’t comment on individual candidates or committees.

Generally, the FEC won’t let a political committee terminate itself until it’s resolved outstanding debts accounting issues.

Pirro’s “Justice with Judge Jeanine” show was a long-running Fox News staple until last year, when Pirro became a co-host of “The Five” — the highest-rated program in cable news across all networks, according to AdWeek’s TVNewser.

Despite her own unpaid creditors, Pirro last year criticized the idea of student loan forgiveness, saying, “This is a giveaway and it's disgusting.”

WASHINGTON – This week’s indictment and arraignment of former President Donald Trump was something some lawmakers trapped in the U.S. House Gallery on Jan. 6, 2021 didn’t expect to see, but there were no celebrations when the moments arrived. A part of them still mourns.

The first thought to flash through many minds wasn’t of Trump arrested, it was flashbacks of themselves and others facing likely injury and potential death — “hang Mike Pence” still rings in many ears.

January 6 and being trapped in the Gallery with my colleagues, worrying about my staff and all of the staff inside the Capitol and around the campus. It truly, it all came flooding back to me,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) told Raw Story the night the indictment was announced.

Escobar attended most of the House Jan. 6 select committee’s 10 hearings last year, along with a rotating cast of close to three-dozen other lawmakers who were also trapped alongside her Jan. 6, 2021, in the balcony overlooking the House floor.

That includes Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA). She says this week’s Trump indictment sent a wave of thoughts and emotions through her that have ebbed and flowed throughout the week.

“For me, it was stunning and shocking. Staggering … Sad for our country,” Dean told Raw Story. “Crazy yet not surprising.”

Congress is in recess for the month of August. While many of the members left stranded in the House gallery — the “Gallery Group,” to some — on Jan. 6 have remained quiet this week, a handful have shared their reactions to Raw Story and on social media.

Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO)

“I remember consoling my friend and colleague who had just spoken to her family. I remember telling my fellow members to take off their pins so we couldn’t be identified. My Ranger training kicked in and I remember gripping my pen to use as a weapon if necessary.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)

“I was in the House Gallery on January 6 as insurrectionists attempted to take over our nation’s capital. Trump urged these actions and then simply sat there as they unfolded, refusing to even immediately tell his supporters to go home. Our democracy survived, but barely.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS); chairman of Jan. 6 select committee

“January 6th was a test of American democracy, but the fair trials of those responsible will further demonstrate this Nation’s commitment to the rule of law and hold accountable those who attempted to undermine it.”

Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), then a member of the House

“January 6th will be remembered as one of the darkest days in American history. I was in the House chamber when rioters breached the Capitol, and I saw firsthand the devastation of the insurrection. Make no mistake: the tragic events of that day — and the lies and conspiracies pushed by former President Donald Trump and his followers — did tremendous damage to our democracy.”

Rep. Annie Kuster (D-NH)

“We have an independent judicial system for a reason — to ensure no one is treated with a separate standard of justice. No one is above the law.”

'Watch the trial'

Rep. Escobar of Texas and the others say they’re eagerly awaiting the trial.

“The indictments and a trial are so important. We cannot forget what happened January 6. We cannot ignore it. We cannot give anyone a pass,” Escobar said. “And frankly, the American public needs to read those indictments and they need to watch the trial.”

Still, Escobar fears Trump, who as a 2024 presidential candidate is leading all others for the Republican nomination, damaged American democracy for years to come.

“The fact that there are millions of Americans who are so deeply radicalized by Fox News and by extremist Republicans and by the MAGA movement, that they are willing to look past everything that Donald Trump has done, and that they actually see him as a victim,” Escobar said. “It is shocking to me. It is terrifying to me. Far more than what Donald Trump is doing, what is terrifying to me, is the millions of Americans who cannot see the truth through all the lies that they've been told.”

WASHINGTON — Your wall calendar may read “2023”.

But in the nation’s capital, 2024 is already raging. Election season firmly on lawmakers’ minds. Making laws? Not so much.

So far this year, Congress has only passed 12 public laws, including approving a 250th Anniversary of the United States Marine Corps commemorative coin and renaming the Veterans Affairs clinic in Indian River, Mich., the "Pfc. Justin T. Paton Department of Veterans Affairs Clinic."

Congress also averted a crisis of its own making when at the last minute they reached a deal to pay the nation’s debt obligations.

In the Senate, three-day work weeks have become the norm, while the House has now devolved into a perpetual digital dunk contest where the most cringe-worthy memes and statements win. Most of what passes for business this year on Capitol Hill are proposals that have little or no chance of ever becoming law — but what’s a law when you can rile up your base?

“Not very productive so far and there’s not a sense among the majority of members that productivity is what they’re after. What they’re after is messaging to their, unfortunately, most hardline base,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) — the former majority leader — told Raw Story while walking into the Capitol last week.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump fake elector prosecutions could soon ensnare members of Congress

Lawmakers are now on their month-long summer break. When they return to Washington, D.C. after Labor Day, House Republicans and Senate Democrats will need to come together and hammer out their competing federal funding measures or risk a government shutdown on Oct. 1.

The clock is ticking.

Not everyone — particularly far-right Republicans — says the 118th Congress is hopelessly gridlocked and unproductive.

“No, we’ve done a whole lot,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told Raw Story last week when asked about the 118th Congress’ record.

Norman, like others, pointed to the 10-year balanced budget House Republicans crafted. But this budget proposal will never pass the Senate, which you wouldn’t know from talking to Republicans, especially members of the Freedom Caucus, who have fought for deeper and deeper spending cuts than Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden agreed on in their debt-ceiling deal earlier this year.

“Things are going well. We’re having a really robust discussion, but at the end of the day, it's math,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) told reporters in July as the Freedom Caucus was demanding further budget cuts than party leaders wanted. “This isn't a policy discussion. This is a math discussion.”

While a government shutdown looms in September, Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) spent much of July pushing for votes on their respective measures clearing former President Donald Trump of his two impeachments.

“We’re still working on that,” Greene told Raw Story outside the Capitol in July. “Expungement is important. It’s writing the wrongs that were done here, impeaching President Trump twice, politically. Weaponizing the government against him just to smear his name and affect presidential elections.”

To be clear, the second impeachment involved charges Trump incited an insurrection after the 2020 election, on Jan. 6, 2021.

And Trump, for his part, is scheduled to be arraigned today in Washington, D.C., on his latest set of felony charges — these pertaining to his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“I believe we're witnessing the collapse of what used to be one of America's great political parties,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story. “I mean, there's an utter [Republican] descent into conspiracy theory, paranoia, pornography and extremist antics. I mean, it's just like a bag of desperate tricks and there's no program for the country.” Raskin calls the far-right turn of the House “dangerous.”

“Their lurching from antic to antic masks the collapse of their party into right wing authoritarianism,” Raskin said.

To others, the GOP under McCarthy is turning the House into “kind of a laughingstock.”

“Under McCarthy, we just see the House, as an institution, continue to decline,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told reporters at the Capitol recently. “One thing that has really shocked me over the last several years is, I thought so many of my Republican colleagues stood for something. That they cared about the institutions, took their political office seriously, but time after time, they really debase themselves in the service of Donald Trump.”

While Trump and his presidential campaign feel ever-present in the House, over in the Senate, lawmakers’ own 2024 reelection bids seem to be setting the tempo And the tempo, with its aggressive fundraising schedules and plenty of travel, has resulted in many three-day Washington work weeks.

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“It's a little schizophrenic,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told Raw Story just off the Senate floor last week. “Members of both parties are not delighted. So, I know I'm circumspect about how I choose my words, but, yeah, it would be nice if things were predictable, and I don't know why they’re not.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) brushed aside criticisms of his new three-day Senate.

“We're working all the time,” Schumer (D-NY) told reporters last week. “Look at how much we're getting done. In the last month and a half a [National Defense Authorization Act] bill. Huge, with ramifications in many areas. Twelve appropriations bills and avoiding default, I'd say in a month and a half. That's a damn good record.”

Those appropriations bills may have made it out of committee, but they have yet to hit the Senate floor and the pressure campaigns that often accompany measures that are taken up by the full Senate.

The Senate floor schedule is also affected. As of July 27, the 118th Senate has held 212 roll call votes, compared to the 280 votes taken by the 117th Senate at the same point.

Fewer Washington work days has meant less time for Senate investigations, or hearings — along with more double-booked senators forced to choose one hearing over another — and less time for voting on measures touching just about every aspect of Americans lives, including stalled technology, climate and health care measures.

A light schedule while in Washington isn’t how the Senate ran when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) first arrived — in 1981.

“When I started the United States Senate, we started at 10 a.m. on Monday and finished at 4 p.m. on Friday, and nobody complained about it,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) complained to Raw Story. “And it's hard to get all the work of the country done when you only work two and a half days.”

While Schumer denies the 2024 elections are top of his mind, Republicans say it’s obvious the leader’s running the Senate to help his long list of vulnerable incumbents next year — and to save the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority.

“I think Democrats recognize that they had a real challenging map for ’24, so they wanted to give their folks more time back in their home states,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) told Raw Story last week. “Once the House was Republican, they figured they weren't going to get much done in terms of a Democrat agenda. So why spend the time here when they could be home trying to regain the Senate?”

The Senate worked two back-to-back three-day weeks in its lead up to recess. Those short weeks meant a couple late nights wrapping up work on the sprawling, must-pass National Defense Authorization Act, which frustrated senators — especially those who had to change out of their shorts and into a suit so they could preside over an empty chamber past midnight.

“It's just surreal. I'm going to have to get dressed in my suit at like 11 p.m.,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) told Raw Story last Wednesday, predicting an audience size of “two people watching C-SPAN.”

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With end-of-summer politics eating up the Senate’s time, Fetterman’s heart was far from last week’s overheated Washington.

“I just want to go home and be hanging out with my kids and wife,” Fetterman said. “I promise, as a senator, I will never put out an amendment that is guaranteed to go down, because then that's performance art. That's kind of the thing that's frustrating.”

At the end of July, Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Jon Tester (D-MT) reintroduced their Transparency in Congress Resolution requiring members of Congress to publish their official schedules online, which the two senators already do, in contrast to most of their colleagues.

It’s not aimed at the Senate’s three-day work week, specifically. But, especially with his own much-watched 2024 race hovering over all he does, Tester thinks a little transparency will go a long way, especially when opponents can point to the Senate voting three days a week for much of the 118th Congress.

“Well, we work more than that. But you're right, voting [days],” Tester told Raw Story while heading to cast a vote on the floor last week. “I think you got to look at getting things done. If we're gonna get things done, that isn't an issue. If we're not able to get things done, like the appropriations bills, then that becomes an issue.”

President Donald Trump is the only person charged — to date — in the special counsel’s indictment for conspiracy and other alleged violations related to the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

But the 45-page indictment lists six unnamed co-conspirators who, alongside Trump, allegedly crafted and executed a novel — and wildly illegal — schemes to keep the defeated president in power.

The indictment lays out a remarkably concise case that seamlessly integrates the multiple stages of the operation. The co-conspirators allegedly promoted baseless claims about election fraud, assembled fake electors slates, attempted to corrupt the Justice Department and pressured Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct Congress’ electoral vote certification. Finally — using the same falsehoods — they allegedly helped launch violent Trump supporters toward the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 for an afternoon of democracy-shaking mayhem.

It remains unclear whether any or all of these alleged co-conspirators will ultimately face charges in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation or a parallel investigation led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, which is expected to yield indictments any day.

And while the U.S. House January 6 select committee identified a sprawling cohort of Trump-backing political operatives, lawyers, grifters, conspiracy theorists, influencers and militants responsible for mobilizing an insurrection, the latest federal indictment makes the case that a half-dozen of them did uniquely dirty deeds.

Based on Raw Story’s extensive reporting on the January 6 insurrection and its aftermath, here’s what can be deduce about the unnamed co-conspirators, who could themselves face indictments, with the potential to limit their liability by cooperating with prosecutors:

“Co-Conspirator 1,” described in the indictment as “an attorney who was willing to spread false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 reelection campaign attorneys would not,” is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who took control of legal challenges from the Trump campaign’s senior-level lawyers after the election.

“Co-Conspirator 2,” described as holding responsibility for a “strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification of the presidential election,” is former Chapman University law professor John Eastman. As recounted in the final report by the January 6 House select committee, Eastman argued to Vice President Mike Pence on Trump’s behalf that he could unilaterally reject certified electors in states won by Joe Biden.

“Co-Conspirator 3,” an attorney allegedly described by Trump as sounding “crazy,” is likely Sidney Powell, who was officially dismissed by the Trump campaign but continued to work in tandem with Giuliani while promising to unleash the “kraken” through lawsuits filed in several states that were based on wildly conspiratorial claims.

“Co-Conspirator 4,” described as “a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters,” is Jeffrey Clark. He reportedly tried to get the department to send a letter to state officials that falsely claimed that the agency was investigating election “irregularities” while requesting that at least one state call a special session to consider replacing the certified Biden electors

“Co-Conspirator 5,” described as “an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding,” is an outside lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro. The final report of the January 6 select committee concluded that although Eastman held a more prominent role in advising Trump in the days immediately before Jan. 6, Chesebro “was central to the creation of the plan.”

“Co-Conspirator 6,” described as “a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors,” is almost certainly Mike Roman, a former Koch network opposition researcher who served as director of election day operations, and was placed in charge of executing the fake electors scheme.

As for what these individuals did in service to Trump during the weeks after Election Day 2020, these are their stories.

Giuliani at center of pressure campaign

The indictment — which also charges Trump with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights — places Giuliani, as “Co-Conspirator 1,” squarely in the middle of a strategy launched soon after Election Day “to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function.”

Robert Costello, Giuliani’s lawyer, has reportedly acknowledged “Co-Conspirator 1” appears to refer to his client. Giuliani responded to the indictment on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter, by saying that it “eviscerates the First Amendment and criminalizes the ruling regime’s number one political opponent for daring to ask questions about the 2020 election results.”

The charging document details several episodes in a pressure campaign against state officials that Giuliani is already known to have quarterbacked.

Trump and Giuliani, as “Co-Conspirator 1,” are specifically accused of asking the “Arizona House Speaker to use the legislature to circumvent the process by which legitimate electors would be ascertained for Biden based on the popular vote, and replace those electors with a new slate for the defendant.”

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers publicly testified before the January 6 select committee in July 2022 that he accepted a phone call from the White House, and Giuliani spoke first before turning the call over to Trump.

“Well, we have heard by an official high up in the Republican legislature that there is a legal theory or a legal ability in Arizona that you can remove the electors of President Biden, and replace them,” Trump said, according to Bowers. “And we would like to have the legitimate opportunity through the committee to come to that end and remove that.”

The indictment also focuses on Giuliani’s role in setting up a presentation to the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Dec. 3, 2020, and promoting a false claim that two Fulton County election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shae” Moss, manipulated votes at the State Farm Arena counting center.

Last month, Giuliani stipulated in court documents that he “does not contest” that his statements were “false,” in an effort to resolve a defamation lawsuit brought by the two women. He later denied that he lied.

As detailed in the federal indictment, the election worker vote manipulation claim was debunked the day after the presentation in a press conference held by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. But Giuliani and Trump continued to air it, repeatedly.

According to the indictment, Giuliani appeared at a second state legislative hearing in Georgia on Dec. 10, and — singling out the two Black women by name — claimed they were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” The language in Giuliani’s claim, beyond being false, invokes a racial stereotype.

Trump similarly invoked racial stereotypes when he mentioned Freeman’s name almost 20 times during a Jan. 2 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, referring to Freeman as “a professional vote scammer and hustler.”

Without naming Giuliani, the indictment cites Raffensperger’s response: “You’re talking about the State Farm video. And I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it all out of context.”

The indictment accuses Trump of lying to Raffensperger through a myriad of false claims, including the attack on Freeman, “to induce him to alter Georgia’s popular vote count.” Homing in on Trump’s effort to pressure Raffensperger, the indictment describes how Trump said “he needed to ‘find’ 11,780 votes, and insinuated that the Georgia Secretary of State and his Counsel could be subject criminal prosecution if they failed to find election fraud as he demanded.”

The indictment also alleges that Giuliani sent a text to Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Skirkey, stating, “So, I need you to pass a join resolution from the Michigan legislature that states that

* the election is in dispute

* there’s an ongoing investigation by the Legislature, and

* the Electors sent by Governor [Gretchen] Whitmer are not the official electors of the State of Michigan and do not fall within the Safe Harbor deadline of Dec 8 under Michigan law.”

‘A corrupt plan to subvert the federal government’

As described in the indictment, the purpose of the fake electors scheme in seven states where Biden carried the popular vote was to “create a fake controversy at the certification proceeding and position the Vice President — presiding on January 6 as President of the Senate — to supplant legitimate electors with the Defendant’s fake electors and certify the Defendant as president.”

Trump allies also made a bid to assemble Republican electors in New Mexico, where Biden prevailed by a 10-percent margin, although they appear to have abandoned the effort.

The indictment alleges that the plan “capitalized on ideas presented in memoranda drafted by Co-Conspirator 5.” The January 6 select committee identified the author of the two memoranda, dated Nov. 18 and Dec. 9, as Kenneth Chesebro, a Boston-based attorney who volunteered for the Trump campaign.

The indictment charges that “the memoranda evolved over time from a legal strategy to preserve the Defendant’s rights to a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”

Chesebro could not be reached for this story prior to publication.

When Chesebro was deposed by the January 6 select committee, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. His lawyer told investigators that he was “faced with a tremendous amount of jeopardy” while citing the separate investigations by the special counsel and the Fulton County district attorney.

The indictment describes a Dec. 12, 2020 conference call that allegedly took place to address concerns by Republican electors in Pennsylvania about the propriety of the fake electors scheme. The indictment names “Co-Conspirator 1,” who is Giuliani, “Co-Conspirator 5,” who is Chesebro, and “Co-Conspirator 6,” who is likely Roman, as participating in the call.

The identities of the participants are confirmed through an email obtained by the January 6 select committee. In the email, which is likewise dated Dec. 12, Chesebro wrote, “Mike Roman and I were on a conference call with Mayor Giuliani today, and the mayor indicated he’d like to wait until all the electors have voted before putting out any statements or otherwise alerting anyone to focus on making sure the vote gets done and minimize the chances of electors being harassed.”

According to the indictment, when the Trump electors in Pennsylvania “expressed concern about signing certificates representing themselves as legitimate electors,” Giuliani “falsely assured them that their certificates would be used only if the Defendant succeeded in litigation.”

In his Dec. 12, email, according to the January 6 select committee, Chesebro wrote: “Here is my suggested language dealing with the concern raised in the PA conference call about electors possibly facing legal exposure at the hands of a partisan AG if they seem to certify that they are the valid electors.”

As previously reported by Raw Story, Trump campaign associate counsel Joshua Findlay described Roman in an email to the campaign’s state-level contacts as “the lead for executing the voting” during the Dec. 14 meeting of the fake electors.

Chesebro would be “the point person for the legal documents.”

All would report to Giuliani.

In a Dec. 12, 2020 email obtained by the January 6 select committee with the heading, “Elector Whip Operation,” Roman wrote to his state-level subordinates that needed “a tracker for the electors,” while listing Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

He asked members of the team to populate the tabs with the names of the electors, their phone numbers and addresses, with a check-off if they were contacted and a “yes” or “no” response indicating whether they planned to attend. Roman’s email also alerted the team members that they would be expected to join a conference call at 9 p.m. that day.

Christina Bobb, an attorney on the Giuliani legal team, summarized the conference call in an email that she sent to Roman at 9:30 p.m. and that he then forwarded to the team.

Bobb’s notes included a breakdown of logistical considerations for each state. Bobb’s report for Pennsylvania flagged some challenges: “4 definite yeses out of 20. 7 backups. Not sure the updated language will be acceptable. It seems fine, but there are concerns. Waiting to hear from [state Sen. Doug] Mastriano’s office about getting a room. Mayor may need to make a call. Still replacing electors.”

Roman has accepted a proffer agreement from the special counsel team to speak informally with prosecutors that allows him to avoid testifying before a grand jury, according to a report by CNN.

Typically, under such conditions, according to the report, prosecutors agree to not use witnesses’ statements against them in future criminal proceedings.

Roman could not be reached for this story.

Similar to the concerns raised by the Trump electors in Pennsylvania, the indictment cites misgivings by Trump allies in Arizona to make the case that Trump and his co-conspirators knew that the fake electors scheme was illegal.

The indictment indicates that Chesebro placed a phone call on Dec. 8, 2020, to an Arizona attorney, who appears to be Jack Wilenchik, who helped organize the Trump electors in that state.

The indictment quotes an email from Wilenchik at length recounting the conversation. Wilenchik wrote that Chesebro’s “idea” was for the Trump electors in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania to “send in their votes (even though the votes aren’t legal under federal law — because they’re not signed by the Governor); so that members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6th.”

Wilenchik described Chesebro’s plan as “kind of wild/creative,” adding that “we would just be sending ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.”

Wilenchik’s email was cited by investigators on the January 6 select committee during Chesebro’s deposition. Asked to explain his conversation with Wilenchik by the House investigators, Chesebro pleaded the Fifth.

‘Remember this day forever!’

Although the indictment does not include any charges for insurrection or incitement, specifically, the charging document directly links the false claims made by Trump and his co-conspirators — and their pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence — to the violence that took place on Jan. 6, 2021.

As a final step in what the indictment describes as a “conspiracy to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function through dishonesty, fraud, and deceit,” the indictment charges that “after it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the Vice President would not fraudulently alter the election results, a large and angry crowd — including many individuals whom the Defendant had deceived into believing the Vice President could and might change the election results — violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding.”

The indictment also makes the case that Trump “repeated knowingly false claims” about supposed election fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin during his speech at the Ellipse, just south of the White House, on Jan. 6.

Alongside Trump, the indictment makes the case that Giuliani and Eastman personally fueled the violence on Jan. 6 with their rhetoric during the rally at the Ellipse by intensifying “pressure on the Vice President to fraudulently obstruct the certification proceeding.”

Speaking before Trump, Giuliani “told the crowd that the Vice President could ‘cast [the Electoral Count Act] aside’ and unilaterally ‘decide the validity of these crooked ballots,’” the indictment recounts. “He also lied when he claimed to ‘have letters from five legislatures begging us’ to send elector slates to the legislatures for review, and called for ‘trial by combat.’”

As for Eastman, the indictment recounts that he told the crowd at the Ellipse: “[A]ll we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o’clock he let the legislatures of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not. We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can’t get the answer to this question.”

Harvey A. Silverglate, Eastman’s lawyer, told Raw Story that “Co-Conspirator 2” is “probably, almost certainly” his client, adding that the Department of Justice did not notify them that Eastman would be part of the indictment.

Silverglate said Eastman’s legal team is drafting a memorandum to the Department of Justice “arguing why it is that Eastman, on the basis of the facts and applicable law, did not commit a crime and urging them not to indict.”

If the special counsel opts to indict, Silverglate added, “Eastman is going to trial. There will be no plea deal.”

The indictment argues that Trump repeated false claims of election fraud, encouraged suspense around the notion that Pence might alter the election outcome, and directed his supporters to the Capitol.

Among the particulars in the barrage of falsehoods, the indictment cites a tweet from Trump at 6:01 p.m. on Jan. 6 after thousands of his supporters had swarmed the Capitol and, armed with chemical spray, batons, Tasers and other weapons, fought pitched battles with police officers.

“These are things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

This story was updated with additional reporting on Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023 at 6:05 p.m. EST.

Unless Donald Trump’s legal defense fund is being run out of an apartment in Wheaton, Ill., and its email address carries the extension “opayq.com,” scammers are on the hunt to punk loyal supporters of the former president.

On Monday morning, a day after the New York Times reported that Trump was creating a legal defense fund to cover the bills of witnesses and defendants, a person (or people) filed separate paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to create the “Donald Trump Legal Defense Fund”.

Other hallmarks of it being a scam? The listed custodian of records and treasurer for the Donald Trump Legal Defense Fund gave an address in Downers Grove, Ill., that tracks back to a building that houses a “workspace and social lounge designed for suburban professionals”.

A voicemail left by Raw Story at the phone number on the application was returned but the caller was silent.

On Tuesday, the FEC itself sounded a skepticism alarm. It sent a letter to the Donald Trump Legal Defense Fund’s treasurer, identified as Taylor Stewart, saying, basically: Not funny, guys.

“Knowingly and willfully making any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation to a federal government agency, including the Federal Election Commission, is punishable under the provisions of (law),” the letter said. “The Commission may report apparent violations to the appropriate law enforcement authorities. If the information you submitted in FEC Form 1 is, to the best of your knowledge and belief, true, correct, and complete, please file a response to confirm this.”

The letter added that “each treasurer is personally responsible for accuracy of any information or statement in a filed report.”

The New York Times and others reported that the real legal fund will be called Patriot Legal Defense Fund Inc.

It is not unusual for the FEC to receive fake applications for political candidates and committees and has struggled to stop them and it rarely pursues the matter legally, either through civil or criminal channels.

Just about anyone can create a federal political committee and generate an official, public organizational document that appears on the FEC’s website, FEC.gov.

It may take weeks for FEC officials — in classic whack-a-mole fashion — to “administratively terminate” committees that violate commission regulations or are otherwise unresponsive to the agency’s inquiries.

Earlier this year, one candidate’s name was a reference to a 1970s porn movie.

Some of President Donald Trump’s Republican challengers have started to break from him in their initial reactions to the four felony counts he faces in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s 2016 running mate and former Vice President Mike Pence, for one, said that today’s indictment serves as an important reminder: “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”

“I will have more to say about the government’s case after reviewing the indictment,” Pence continued. “The former president is entitled to the presumption of innocence but with this indictment, his candidacy means more talk about January 6th and more distractions.”

Pence also used the statement to scrutinize President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, saying, “As Americans his candidacy means less attention paid to Joe Biden’s disastrous economic policies afflicting millions across the United States and to the pattern of corruption with Hunter.”

Former Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), a recent entry to the GOP presidential fray, condemned the former president’s alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Let me be crystal clear: Trump's presidential bid is driven by an attempt to stay out of prison and scam his supporters into footing his legal bills. Furthermore, his denial of the 2020 election results and actions on Jan. 6 show he's unfit for office,” Hurd wrote on Twitter.

Hurd continued, “The 2020 election wasn't stolen, rigged, or fraudulent. It was lost by Donald Trump because he was incapable of uniting the country. Now, we've got to ask ourselves if we really want a president who's willing to violate his oath to the Constitution just to cling to power?”

Hurd called on his fellow candidates to break from Trump, the hands-down frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination, saying that keeping Trump the focus of the 2024 race will give “Joe Biden another four years in the White House."

“The Trump of 2016 is a far cry from the desperate figure we see in 2024. It's about time our party, including the 2024 candidates, wake up to the fact that this guy only cares about himself, not our country's future,” Hurd wrote. “As Republicans, we need to prioritize offering solutions to difficult issues affecting all Americans and not allow ourselves to be distracted by Trump's baggage.”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been a vocal Trump opponent but didn’t immediately release a statement when the indictment was first announced Tuesday. Christie’s campaign did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment at the time of publication.

But just the day before, Christie called out Trump’s legal problems.

“If Trump is a billionaire, why is he tricking middle class donors into paying his legal bills? Over $56 million,” Christie posted on Twitter. “Answer: Donald Trump loves using other people’s money.”

“He should crack open his own wallet and come up with the cash,” Christie continued. “I’ve got some ideas. No. 1 — Sell Trump Tower.”

Self-funded Republican candidate, Ryan Binkley — an entrepreneur and pastor, from Texas — said in statement, "While the other indictments appear to be more political, this appears to be more serious. Our campaign is looking forward to helping America to heal and move on."

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson used Tuesday's indictment to push for his supporters to help him get to the first debate.

"Exactly one year ago, I told the Washington Post that Trump had disqualified himself from ever being President again," Hutchinson said on Twitter. "Today’s Trump indictment reinforced that. America deserves a leader who respects the rule of law."

Another Republican long-shot candidate, Steve Laffey, said in a statement, "Donald Trump now faces hundreds of years in prison after his third federal indictment in six months. The latest charges surround his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and block the transfer of power. How is he still pretending that he could become our next President?" Laffey wrote.

Laffey, a former mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, called out Fox and the GOP for making their standards "too extreme" for qualifying for the Republican debate on August 23. To qualify, candidates need at least 40,000 individual donors and be polling at at least 1 percent in two national polls and two early-voting stating polls, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

"The GOP continues to prove that it’s lost control of this race," Laffey continued. "Their qualifying conditions will exclude former Vice President Mike Pence. Oh right, and there’s that absurd and offensive pledge of loyalty that’s still on the table. They can’t seriously expect anyone to sign that, given the latest charges against Donald the Terrible. Some Republican candidates continue to avoid bashing Trump.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump immediately starts fundraising off January 6 indictment

Most notable among them is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican presidential candidate polling next behind Trump. DeSantis didn’t directly defend Trump, but he declared that Trump standing trial in the nation’s capitol is “unfair.”

“As President, I will end the weaponization of government, replace the FBI Director, and ensure a single standard of justice for all Americans,” DeSantis said via Twitter, now rebranded as X. “While I’ve seen reports, I have not read the indictment. I do, though, believe we need to enact reforms so that Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, DC to their home districts.”

DeSantis continued, “Washington, DC is a 'swamp' and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality. One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses — I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy released a four-minute video defending Trump and declaring the 45th president was not responsible for Jan. 6 insurrection, calling the indictment “political persecution” and an attempt on President Joe Biden’s campaign to “potentially eliminate its political opponents from competition.”

“The corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump. This is un-American and I commit to pardoning Trump for this indictment,” Ramaswamy posted on Twitter.

Ramaswamy continued, “Donald Trump isn’t the cause of what happened on Jan 6. The real cause was systematic and pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it. If you tell people they can’t speak, that’s when they scream. If you tell people they can’t scream, that’s when they tear things down. If we fail to admit the truth, Jan. 6 will just be a preview of far worse to come and I don’t want to see us get there.”

A super PAC supporting Miami Mayor Francis Suarez didn’t mention Trump at all when it fired off a fundraising message promising $20 gift cards in exchange for a $1 donation to Suarez’s campaign committee — a naked ploy to help Suarez clear a minimum donor threshold required to qualify for this month’s Republican presidential debate.

“We're not asking for you to cast your vote for Mayor Suarez...we're only asking for you to give him a fighting chance to make his case to Republican primary voters on the debate stage,” the super PAC wrote.

Former Arizona gubernatorial candidate and election denier Kari Lake, however, had a dramatic recommendation for all Republican presidential candidates not named Donald Trump: suspend their campaigns.

“This is the most egregious case of election interference in the history of our country. This a battle that a unified Republican party MUST fight. Otherwise, we will lose this country forever,” Lake said. “That is why I am calling on all Republican candidates for President to immediately suspend their campaigns, stop wasting hard-earned donor money and rally around our nominee, President Donald J. Trump.”

Trump’s latest indictment for alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States, two counts of witness tampering and conspiracy against rights adds to the list of indictments Trump faces.

Another federal indictment consists of 39 felony counts related to the alleged willful retention of classified documents and conspiracy to conceal them. He also faces felony business record falsification charges in New York City stemming from a "hush money" payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump has not yet been indicted in Georgia, but officials there have been investigating the former president for more than two years and charges could come soon.

This story has been updated to include new statements from Binkley, Laffey and Hutchinson.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House January 6 select committee had a lot of power.

But it never could access White House call records, which the Department of Justice now seems to rely on in its latest federal indictment against former President Donald Trump over his alleged involvement in Jan. 6, 2021, and quest to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“First reaction? They got the other end of the call records,” former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) – a senior adviser to the January 6 committee – exclusively told Raw Story on Tuesday evening.

Riggleman’s second reaction?

“Somebody flipped hard,” Riggleman says.

In his New York Times bestseller, “The Breach,” Riggleman calls former White House Chief of Staff Meadows’ 2,319 text messages in the weeks before January 6 the “crown jewels”.

“Think about the Mark Meadows text messages. I never got his call detail records, but I'm pretty damn sure the DOJ did and that is a huge, huge thing,” Riggleman says. “And when you're looking at the indictment for the co-conspirators, I did not see a description for Mark Meadows in there.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump's co-conspirators are almost certainly being told to flip or face charges: ex-president's former lawyer

Riggleman, who was a military intelligence officer before coming to Congress, says the calls are damning.

“I think they got more data on the other end of the White House calls with the interaction between Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and White House staff and rally planners, alternate electors,” Riggleman told Raw Story. “I think they put together sort of a map of everybody who was involved. They had the metadata on the other side of the calls, and I think people flipped that they could validate that they weren't lying based on the data.”

Without warrants or law enforcement authority, Riggleman and the committee couldn’t get geolocation data and other information he viewed as vital.

“We couldn’t get the White House numbers which were part of the call records, which I thought were the smoking gun. When you have Oath Keepers texting Andrew Giuliani, the son of Rudy Giuliani, in November/December of 2020, that’s a pretty big indicator,” Riggleman said. “They seem very confident, when you look at a 45-page indictment, my guess is they did get the other end of communications.”

While in office, Riggleman served as a Republican, but he no longer calls the party home. He’s hoping some of his former GOP colleagues look in the mirror and stop peddling dangerous conspiracy theories.

“As this evidence comes out, I think you're gonna have people getting angry or angrier because they know that they were part of this ridiculousness,” Riggleman tells Raw Story. “That type of dangerous rhetoric and pushing fantasy to their base, this is what happens, and that just means that you have some incredibly irresponsible legislators.”

How desperate was Donald Trump’s political action committee to avoid going broke while a black hole of massive legal bills sucked its $105-million bank account into near oblivion?

According to a recent Federal Election Commission filing, the PAC, called Save America, exploited a travel technique called “skiplagging” that airlines despise.

Save America spent $10 with Skiplagged, a website that helps travelers save on airfares by skirting ticketing regulations, federal records indicate.

The savings are a relative pittance compared to where the PAC’s bank account started the year. But Save America might have needed it as its coffers dwindled to $4 million, according to the FEC filing.

It’s unclear who the MAGA skiplagger is — likely a PAC staff member. It’s almost certainly not Trump himself, as he generally flies on a private Boeing 757 jet the former president has dubbed “Trump Force One”.

Save America PAC treasurer Bradley Crate could not be reached for comment.

READ MORE: Bikers for Trump is running out of gas

Skiplagging works like this: Because non-stop flights are in high demand, airlines can charge more for them than they would for passengers who continue to another destination.

Skiplagging is making the purported layover city your final destination and ditching the connecting flight.

Skiplagged.com uses as an example booking a one-stop flight from Atlanta to Dallas when you actually want to get off at the layover in Orlando. It claims that a $250 airfare can be reduced to $130.

Skiplagged.com calls the practice taking advantage of “loopholes.”

Skiplagging comes with its own headaches, and some airlines have sought to punish passengers who do it. But suffice to say, it isn’t something that conforms with Trump’s favored image of himself as a tycoon.

The legal bills listed in Save America PAC’s most recent FEC filing are massive.

Trump, who is leading in all polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, faces 37 criminal counts in a case involving classified documents and alleged obstruction of justice. He faces 34 felony charges related to an alleged scheme to cover up a sex scandal before the 2016 presidential election.

More indictments could be on the way from the state of Georgia and federal prosecutors investigating Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021.

Democratic candidates and committees have received nearly as much money as Republicans from the political action committee for Fox Corporation — parent company of Fox News, according to a mid-year report filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday.

FOX PAC reported disbursing nearly $232,000 during the first half of 2023. Of that amount, about $112,000 went to Democratic Party interests, with Democratic candidates receiving $62,000 in donations and committees and PACs primarily supporting Democratic candidates receiving another $50,000, the records indicate.

Democratic candidates receiving funds from FOX PAC so far this year are:

• Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA) — $2,000
• Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) — $2,500
• Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) — $5,000
• Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) — $2,500
• Defend the Dream, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) — $5,000
• Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) — $2,500
• Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX) — $2,500
• Country Roads PAC, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) — $13,500
• Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) — $1,500
• Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) — $5,000
• Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA) — $2,500
• Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) — $2,500
• Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA) — $2,500
• Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ) — $2,500
• Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) $2,500
• Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) — $5,000
• Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) — $2,500

Democratic committees receiving funds from FOX PAC:

• Congressional Black Caucus PAC — $5,000
• Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — $15,000
• Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — $15,000
• Moderate Democrats PAC — $5,000
• New Democrat Coalition — $5,000
• SAC PAC — $5,000

In the past, some Democratic candidates have appeared to decline FOX PAC’s donations, Insider reported. Sending back $12,500 in donations in 2022 were the campaign committees of Fletcher, Swalwell, Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), former Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and former Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA).

Earlier this year, Fox News settled — for $787.5 million — a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems that alleged the network promoted former President Donald Trump's baseless claim that its voting machines were used to rig the 2020 presidential election that he lost to President Joe Biden, Raw Story reported.

Representatives for Fox News Media and the Fox Corporation PAC did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Lieu's campaign and Stanton's campaign did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis earned at least $1.1 million from his new book, more than tripling his personal wealth from last year, according to a new federal disclosure filing.

DeSantis’s book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival,” earned him between $1.1 million and $6 million in combined royalties and advances, according to the public financial disclosure report released Monday, which confirmed DeSantis’s income boost that Insider reported from his separate Florida Commission on Ethics filing last month.

In 2022, DeSantis’ net worth was less than $319,000, according to Insider, meaning that DeSantis more than tripled his wealth with the book income, adding to his State of Florida salary ranging between $100,000 to $1 million, according to the federal filing. DeSantis’s governor’s salary was previously reported at $141,400.20.

A requirement for all presidential candidates, the federal public financial disclosure report provides a glimpse into presidential hopefuls’ personal finances and investments. It only requires candidates to disclose their assets and liabilities in broad ranges for most items. But the U.S. Office of Government Ethics does direct filers to provide exact dollar figures for most instances of book income — something DeSantis didn't do.

DeSantis had requested — and received — an extension to file his report.

DeSantis’ federal report also indicated that the Florida governor is still paying off a student loan up to $15,000, and he does not own personal real estate.

Notably, his wife, Casey DeSantis, who is a driving force behind her husband's campaign, reported no income or assets — a detail that was not included in his recent personal financial disclosure from Florida.

DeSantis has drastically cut his campaign staff in recent weeks. His main Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, still hasn’t filed his latest personal financial disclosure, while he simultaneously faces several legal challenges, Raw Story reported.

Trump’s most recent financial disclosure, however, shows the former president remains many orders of magnitude more wealthy than DeSantis, who is running a distant second to Trump in 2024 Republican presidential nomination polls.

Donald Trump may be cruising in all 2024 Republican presidential polls.

But Bikers for Trump — long lauded by the former president for its engine-revving, leather-appointed MAGA support — is in a ditch.

The group's political action committee — Donald Trump personally visited with Bikers for Trump members as president — is more than $81,000 in debt with less than $4,000 cash on hand, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission, which covers the first half of 2023.

During this time, Bikers for Trump's once robust presence appears to have waned.

Its website has on its homepage an outdated call to “draft” Trump for President in 2024. Trump declared his candidacy more than eight months ago.

The Bikers for Trump PAC page on X, formerly Twitter, is also outdated. It says the group’s “sole purpose is to help re-elect pro-Trump candidates and President Donald Trump in 2020.” The most recent tweet was in September 2022.

Chris Cox, founder of Bikers for Trump, couldn’t be reached for comment. A voicemail message left at a phone number on one of the group’s FEC filings was not immediately returned. The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bikers for Trump reported debts of $50,022 to InfoCision, Inc., of Akron, Ohio, a call center company with a political fundraising service. It also owes $31,125 to PAC Management Services of Alexandria, Va., according to the FEC filing.

Bikers for Trump reported $886 in receipts during the first half of 2023, all from mailing list companies for royalties.

What started as motorcycle riders supporting a political candidate added a role as a self-styled security force for Trump’s events in 2016. Bikers for Trump formally founded the Bikers for the President PAC in December 2017. The group changed its name to Bikers for Trump in 2021.

Cox became significant enough to have a photo with Trump in the Oval Office, which he features on his Facebook page.

Bikers for Trump reported contributions of $769,337 for all of 2020, the year Trump lost the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

That year, Cox, a chainsaw artist, ran for the Republican nomination for Congress in South Carolina’s 1st District. He finished third with less than 10% of the vote, and now-Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) went on to win the seat.

At the dawn of former President Donald Trump’s administration, government employees and contractors in need of security clearances could wait years for approval. Federal agencies stared down a backlog of 700,000 clearance investigations starting in 2017.

For one former senior-level State Department employee, who is a person of color, they waited more than two years to get approved for a top-secret clearance.

When the Trump administration arrived, many new Trump officials received “interim security clearances” because they didn’t initially meet standard security requirements, the former employee told Raw Story. This contributed to a screening backlog.

“With Trump it was a mixture of business with foreign governments, a lot of internal exchanges or engagements that needed more explanation, so there were a lot of outstanding issues that needed further explanation, and it just didn't happen,” said the former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to employment concerns.

But it wasn’t just clearing Trump’s appointees that created the delays — not even close. Problems started in the years prior and continued on in subsequent years, according to national security experts. Among them: the ending of a contract with a background investigations company, USIS, and the 2015 cybersecurity breach of the Office of Personnel Management, which compromised the background investigation records of more than 20 million federal employees and contractors.

That backlog was largely responsible for prompting the need for a multi-agency reform effort around personnel vetting, dubbed Trusted Workforce 2.0, and the related policy changes intended to streamline investigative processes, said Viet Tran, a spokesperson for Office of Personnel Management.

Around that time, in 2018, the Government Accountability Office first put the personnel vetting process on its “high-risk” list of areas of the government in urgent need of transformation or susceptible to waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement.

The reasons: IT system issues, a lack of performance evaluation throughout the process and slow processing times, said Alissa Czyz, director of defense capabilities and management at the Government Accountability Office.

Five years later, personnel challenges remain in the security clearance process, along with technological issues in terms of tracking and vetting cleared personnel, Raw Story revealed in its three-part “Losing Track” investigation. (Read Part I and Part II here.)

“It was a number of issues that led us to put it on our high-risk list back in 2018,” Czyz said. “It's still on there today.”

By December 2021, GAO expressed numerous concerns, according to a report based on an investigation into Trusted Workforce 2.0’s security vetting process.

There was a lack of assessment measures of agencies’ continuous vetting processes. Deficiencies with strategic workforce planning were endemic. Best practice guidelines for the software development of the National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) weren’t being followed.

A year later, Congress passed a law requiring the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to develop measures to assess the performance of personnel vetting. The office says it is working on “implementing metric collection that is going to be required for every department and agency,” said Mark Frownfelter, assistant director for the Special Security Directorate within the National Counterintelligence and Security Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“It’s an incredibly important process to have folks that come in and work for the federal government properly vetted, especially those that have access to highly classified information. It's really critical,” Czyz said. “We have seen progress. We're optimistic with some of the modernization efforts here too, but work remains in the area, so it's on our high-risk list so we can continue to monitor and hopefully help those agencies get there with the process.”

Why can extremists get cleared but others can’t?

Even as the National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) and the practice of continuous vetting are poised to catch more potentially bad actors from within, such as right-wing extremists and others who might compromise government secrets, potentially dangerous people can still get security clearances.

As a part of the clearance vetting process, applicants submit references who can speak to their character at different times of their lives. Take Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old airman who leaked classified defense documents. He allegedly spoke about violence, shared distrust of the government and expressed racist beliefs, The Washington Post reported.

So why didn’t a red flag come up during his vetting process?

“I don't think he would have volunteered someone to vouch for him who wouldn't have seen his conservatism and the things that his Discord buddies were highlighting,” said Kristopher Goldsmith, a former forward observer in the Army and CEO of Task Force Butler Institute, a nonprofit that targets extremist organizations.

“He loves guns. He's Christian. He's conservative. I don't think that anyone who saw that side of him would have thought that he shouldn't get a clearance,” Goldsmith said.

Earlier this month, 65 Democrats in Congress sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security inquiring about its efforts to weed out domestic extremists based on reports showing that more than 300 current or former Department of Homeland Security employees were members of the right-wing Oath Keepers or working with other conservative militia groups, The Washington Post reported.

ALSO READ: Neo-Nazi Marine Corps vet accused of plotting terror attack possessed classified military materials: sources

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, some people up for security clearances may experience increased scrutiny during the vetting process due to their ties to foreign countries, which is the source of many questions on what’s known as Standard Form 86, a 136-page document that asks numerous questions of an applicant seeking a security clearance on topics like employment history, family ties, foreign travel, residences, criminal history and drug use.

“The problem is when you come in as a person with ties to a foreign jurisdiction, even though it says you can be a dual citizen, you really can't,” said Dan Meyer, partner at law firm Tully Rinckey PLLC’s Washington, D.C. office and a former Navy communications security officer who used to process security clearances. “I know what the regulation says, but everybody's queasy about somebody who hasn't renounced the other jurisdiction.”

Unlike Teixeira and Jordan Duncan, a jailed neo-Nazi who Raw Story revealed had stored top-secret classified information on his computer, members of the Asian American and Middle Eastern communities often find themselves under greater scrutiny if they have ties to other countries, especially China, said the former senior-level State Department employee.

“There are national security implications because we need talent in place in the era of strategic competition,” said the former senior-level State Department employee. “Then you see extremists get them. The process is imperfect. There are some flaws.”

Meyer said that individuals seeking security clearances with the government need to cut ties with foreign countries by selling foreign property and closing any bank accounts in other countries in order to be approved for clearances.

“If you have relatives in a foreign country, you have to be able to tell security, and tell security convincingly, that if … somebody said they're gonna kill your mother unless your hand over the classified information — and they can do that because she's still living in Islamabad — then you have to tell security convincingly that you would let your mother go,” Meyer said. “You would let your mother die, rather than betray the secrets of the United States. I've had a couple of clients successfully do that.”

Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, said the State Department and FBI’s Post-Adjudication Risk Management (Parm) Program, which requires more frequent interviews and increased scrutiny of certain individuals in the program, unfairly targets Chinese Americans.

Even though the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report last year that said the People's Republic of China does not prioritize targeting Chinese Americans in the intelligence community, and employment decisions cannot be made based on the “ethnic or racial background of any U.S. person,” Eddington said a number of Chinese Americans are still being denied the opportunity to work for the government out of alleged concerns that they might be recruitment targets for Chinese intelligence.

“Chinese Americans are being discriminated against in their background investigations and readjudication investigations and even actual assignments where they could potentially be sent because of this kind of nonsense,” Eddington said.

But Frownfelter said eliminating bias in the vetting process is an area the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is “passionate” about. The office has examined its training standards and introduced “more robust cultural competency training for investigators and the adjudicators.”

The office has also met with groups that have expressed concerns about bias in the vetting process, including the LGBTQ+, Chinese American and other minority communities.

Part of those meetings includes discussing that investigating foreign ties is a standard part of the vetting process that needs to be investigated, and the office recognizes that there’s a difference between validating this standard information versus “unfair or lack of equity in the treatment of them going through the process,” Frownfelter said.

Another group that often does not get security clearances but could benefit from them for their jobs is congressional staffers, said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group.

“It’s appalling how easily the rules and the clearance processes … they can manipulate that, configure that in a way to lessen scrutiny,” Tien said.

A lack of high-skilled talent in counterintelligence

While the National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) automates much of the continuous vetting process, are there still enough high-skilled employees to do the work of vetting cleared personnel?

Robert Sanders, distinguished lecturer in the national security department at the University of New Haven and former Navy JAG captain, says no as he observed a shrinking pool of highly skilled national security talent while he worked for the government until 2018 — which included individuals who conduct security clearance investigations.

“It’s great to have new initiatives that allow for greater scrutiny of individual clearances, but you have to have enough people on the side to do the scrutiny,” Sanders said. “It may look like you are being more effective as you pass more paper through the mill or more people over the bridge, but are you getting the same quality in the process that you want?”

Meyer said the national security talent pool isn’t declining, but there’s long been challenges with employing quality talent in the counterintelligence space.

“Counterintelligence has always been the misfit sibling in the pack,” said Meyer, who also formerly worked for the U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General. “Your spies got the highest accolades. Your analysts were really valued, and then when you got to counterintelligence, that was where your problem children went to spend their careers.”

Frownfelter said he has observed the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency hire a lot of investigators in response to the backlog.

“If we had another 9/11 and the government all of a sudden had to hire thousands and thousands of employees very quickly, you could see this become an issue, but I think where we are now in this environment with the steady state, I think we're in good shape with investigators, adjudicators and even polygraph examiners,” Frownfelter said.

ALSO READ: Feds banned this violent J6er from nuclear plants — but they still haven’t arrested him

The backlog has vastly improved from 2017, now down to a “steady state” of 200,000, which is manageable considering the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency and the Department of Justice together receive 10,000 new requests a day, said Royal Reff, a spokesperson for the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

With continuous vetting, rather than reinvestigating employees with security clearances every five to 10 years, the new system prompts automatic database checks in areas such as public records, credit, financial activity and foreign travel for existing cleared personnel. If anything gets flagged, an investigator will take a look and might conduct more monitoring, Czyz said.

“There is really great potential to catch some situations in more real-time than the current process allows for now. When that gets fully implemented, that will be really an important modernization of the process,” Czyz said.

Still, Joe Ferguson, co-director of the National Security and Civil Rights Program at Loyola University Chicago, said resources frequently get diverted from background investigation teams who face staffing shortages.

“My observations working at both the federal level for the Department of Justice and at the local government level suggest we don't assign our best to doing background and security clearance checks, and that's a long-standing thing. The best agents and investigators did not get into the field to do background investigations,” Ferguson said. “Couple that with the fact that when there's bandwidth and resource issues, and as important as this realm can be, it doesn't go to core day-to-day mission-related operations."

Ferguson continued, “It's a risk, and it needs to be monitored, and it needs to be maintained in consciousness because, at the end of the day, if something is important enough to require security clearances, then it's important enough to invest the resources necessary to do it right.”

Vetting questionnaire changes aim to broaden the talent pool

Across the entire government, skill gaps for the nation’s employees has long been a considered high-risk concern by the GAO since 2001. As the government seeks to broaden its talent pool, it has prompted changes to Standard Form 86.

Making questions on the form more inclusive has encouraged more people to apply for jobs in the intelligence community, especially when they might have perceived something in their background as a disqualifier from even applying, Frownfelter said.

For instance, Charlie Sowell, CEO of IT government contractor SE&M Solutions LLC and former deputy assistant director for special security at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was a part of the team in 2013 that changed how the form’s Section 21 framed mental health and sexual assault and its questions around seeking counseling.

“We changed it because … there was this myth out there that if you said you had a mental health problem, you were going to have your clearance yanked,” said Sowell, who is also a former Navy security officer. “Definitively, there are in the single digit number of cases each year where a person's clearance is revoked solely because of a mental health issue.”

The Department of Defense has made a concerted effort to accommodate people who might experience post-traumatic stress disorder, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has emphasized the importance of intelligence community members taking care of their mental wellbeing, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, Frownfelter said.

“We really made a big push like, ‘Hey, if you're seeking counseling due to stress because the entire world is experiencing [the pandemic], we don't want you to think that this is going to disqualify you from staying in the intelligence community or applying to the intelligence community,” said Dean Boyd, chief communications executive at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Past drug use is another area of Standard Form 86 under evaluation.

Currently, the form asks about an applicant’s drug use during the past seven years. But the Office of Personnel Management took public comment earlier this year about significantly lowering the timeline — to 90 days — for past marijuana use, which is legal for recreational purposes in 23 states and DC.

The Office of Management and Budget is going through the process to change the question on Standard Form 86, Frownfelter said.

However, marijuana use is still federally illegal. Once an individual receives a national security position, they are expected to follow the federal laws around consumption, and they’re subject to drug tests, too, Boyd said.

“These changes were proposed in recognition of changing societal norms and the legal landscape at the state level regarding marijuana use,” Tran said.

The Office of Personnel Management expects these changes on the form “may improve the pool of applicants for federal employee and federal contractor positions,” Tran said.

An April 2023 report from ClearanceJobs, a network for professionals with federal government security clearances, surveyed young people ages 18 to 30 and found that 40 percent had used marijuana in the past year. Thirty percent had either withdrawn an application or not applied for a job based on the government’s policies on marijuana use for people seeking clearances.

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“Marijuana use might be legal where they live now, but when they report it on the form, different agencies will apply that information differently for different positions, so it's never quite clear to individuals whether marijuana use is going to be a disqualifier,” said Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. “Very often, it has been, despite it being legal where people live.”

“There’s a really dramatic change in the scope of questioning, looking for examination of marijuana use,” Smith Boyd continued. “Our organization thinks there is more that can be done to create a standard adjudication across the federal government, so that applicants really can predict what behavior is going to be allowable for what positions and when, so this is really a step in the right direction.”

The national security workforce is aging, too, which is why some of these changes to the investigation form have been proposed in order to encourage more young talent to work in the intelligence community.

Just 6 percent of the intelligence community is under 20, and 20 percent are under 40, ClearanceJobs reported. Those with more than 10 years of experience account for more than 70 percent of security professionals surveyed in a 2023 report on facility security officers working for the government and government contractors.

“The graying of those of the workforce, that's incredibly important to us too that the federal government overall is hiring young talent with enthusiasm to fix the problems in the country and the world,” Smith Boyd said.

The former State Department employee that Raw Story spoke with said military and government recruitment is low, which is a problem for attracting young people to national security careers.

“We are in the era of strategic competition coming out of post-9/11,” the former State Department employee said. “The old-school way of doing things is not working. China is a big deal, and a lot of Chinese Americans mean well and can make a difference and be trusted, but there’s still bias toward them. A lot are young.”

Are more leaks to come?

Many national security experts agree complete risk elimination isn’t realistic.

There will, undoubtedly, be another national security leak.

And the movie “Minority Report,” with its crime clairvoyant “precog” characters, is just that — a work of fiction. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s virtually impossible for the U.S. security apparatus to predict, with complete accuracy, who will commit a future violent or compromising act.

That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t constantly strive to improve its capabilities.

“The good news is the vetting program has been hugely effective in tracking what it is designed to track,” said Lindy Kyzer, director of content at ClearanceJobs. “We talk about risk reduction and risk mitigation. There is never going to be risk elimination. We're not going to go full Minority Report.”

But Sowell says with certainty — “absolutely, 100 percent” — that the U.S. government will continue to see more people compromise national security and classified information.

“The clearance process isn't created to identify who's going to be a spy in the future. That is such a difficult thing to predict. We're going to have more of them like the kid in the Massachusetts Air National Guard,” said Thomas Langer, retired vice president of security for BAE Systems, one of the government’s largest aerospace contractors, and principal at industrial security consultancy, Atlantic Security Advisors.

Extremists in particular pose the biggest threat to protecting national security, Goldsmith said.

“Leaks can be a weapon,” Goldsmith said. “The neo-Nazis are always looking to sabotage infrastructure, and sharing information publicly or with the nation's adversaries or terrorist groups can lead to deaths on the battlefield and deaths right here in the United States.”

When determining national security protocols for the future, government agencies struggle to find the right mix of policies and openness. It’s a balance of improving processes to detect and prevent leaks, but “we also don't want to overcorrect and create unnecessary information stove pipes that could be detrimental to our ability to do our job as the intelligence community,” Boyd said.

“We don't want to go back to pre-9/11 days where people aren't sharing information that's needed, so we're just trying to keep that balance there,” Boyd said.

Experts agree Trusted Workforce 2.0 has made major steps in addressing problems that have plagued the security clearance process for years — from reducing backlogs to streamlining processes — but with such a major overhaul, the system will be a work in progress for years to come.

“We'd say there's been a lot of progress achieved but still a lot of more work to do,” Boyd said.

“Losing Track” is a three-part Raw Story series investigating problems lurking within the U.S. government’s security clearance system. Read Part I and Part II.