Hey everyone. Welcome back. Hope you had a good weekend.
Our top story today: the Justice Department appears to have hired a man who was convicted of hacking election websites. His new job? The office that enforces your voting rights. That’s the same office sending a thousand election monitors to the polls in November. And while all that’s happening, the White House is sitting on the one election report federal law requires it to release: the assessment of foreign meddling in 2024. None of this is an accident.
We’ll also get into the President’s newly released financial disclosure showing more than a thousand stock trades in a single month, trade talks with Canada collapsing into a full-blown trade war, a federal judge throwing out Trump’s visa ban on seventy-five countries, and Democrats’ plans for their subpoena powers if they win a majority in November.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Convicted Election Hacker Joins DOJ Voting Rights Office
Democracy Docket reported Friday that a Florida lawyer named David Levin appears to have joined the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. That’s the office that enforces the nation’s voting rights laws. It’s also the office promising to put roughly a thousand election monitors at the polls this November.
So who is this guy? In 2016, Florida investigators arrested him on three felony counts of unauthorized computer access. He hacked the Lee County elections website, pulled out usernames and passwords, and logged in as an administrator using the election supervisor’s own credentials. He hit the state’s election site too. Investigators quoted him saying, “I hacked it.”
The felonies got knocked down to two misdemeanors. Twenty days in jail. And his explanation, years later, was that he’d been curious about the integrity of elections.
Now he shows up in photos and video from inside the department, including the division’s own swearing-in ceremony this summer. The DOJ won’t confirm he works there, and won’t say whether anyone knew about the conviction before they brought him in. The entire division is far smaller than the thousand monitors they’re promising. They’re staffing up fast, and this is an example of the type of people they are bringing in.
You would think that a President who never stops talking about election integrity would at least hire people who haven’t been convicted of tampering with elections.
But this is the pattern with this administration. We watched the same thing happen with ICE. Drop the standards, lower the qualifications, and hire for the right mindset. In other words, anger and aggression toward immigrants. For the election jobs, the priority is loyalty. Not people who know how elections work. People who already believe that if Trump loses, the only explanation is fraud.
So let’s be honest, this was never about election integrity. It’s about winning. Election integrity only matters to this President when it fits his narrative.
Case in point. In July, he gave a primetime address on this very subject. Here’s what he told you:
“The truth was hidden from the American people, and that all changes right now.” Well, the New York Times reported this week that one file is still hidden: the intelligence community’s assessment of foreign meddling in the 2024 election. Congress passed a law requiring it to be made public within sixty days of the election. That deadline passed more than a year ago.
And we know what these reports look like, because the 2020 version came out in early 2021. It found Russia worked to help Trump. Iran worked to hurt him. And nothing in it showed a single vote was changed. Foreign influence operations are real, they happen every cycle, and they are not the same thing as a rigged count.
So if the report from 2024 says what these assessments usually say, then there was foreign meddling in an election Trump won. And that wrecks the story he’s been telling for six years.
Let’s put both of these things together. The DOJ is policing your elections by hiring people convicted of breaking into election systems. While the administration preaches transparency as it picks and chooses which files to declassify. Both moves serve the same story, that the only election ever stolen in America is the one Donald Trump lost. That isn’t election integrity.
2. Trump Made Over 1,000 Stock Trades in One Month
But first, listen to what the Vice President said in Ohio on Friday:
Notice how he says “we,” like he’s standing out in the crowd with the rest of us. He’s describing a class of politician who cashes in on public office, and tries to paint himself with the victims. But the biggest offender of all is the man he works for, and this weekend only added to that list.
On Saturday, the Office of Government Ethics published the President’s June financial disclosure. Trump’s accounts made over a thousand transactions in a single month, with a total value somewhere between 78 and 263 million dollars. And if you look at those trades, it seems like the President has a real knack for buying at the right moment.
On June 18th, he bought between 250 and 500 thousand dollars of Boeing, the same day the Navy handed Boeing an 880 million dollar contract. And on June 23rd, he bought into SpaceX, the same day NASA recorded a 425 million dollar award to SpaceX. Some luck he has.
Look, Republicans have spent years turning Democrats’ stock portfolios into attack ads, talking about what the Vice President was describing: politicians who came to Washington with nothing and left after decades with millions. But Trump seems to be doing that every single month, and none of them have anything to say about it.
3. Trump Starts a Trade War With Canada
Last Tuesday, Trump announced a trade deal with Canada and pushed back his tariffs. But the announcement was premature, which anyone who’s watched this President negotiate could have told you, and talks collapsed late Friday night. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away, saying American negotiators dropped new terms on the table at the eleventh hour, including limits on who else Canada is allowed to trade with.
So fifty percent tariffs are now in force on about twenty billion dollars of Canadian goods. And Canada will match dollar for dollar, starting September 8th.
Remember, this is a crucial relationship, worth 376 billion dollars in trade just in the first half of this year. And the tariffs risk raising costs on American families yet again. Republican Senator Tim Scott got asked about that directly. Take a look at how it went:
They’ve run out of arguments for these tariffs, so they’ve gone back to the only thing they know. Biden. But when families are paying more for everything almost two years into this presidency, I’m not sure that’s much of a winning message for November.
4. Federal Judge Throws Out Trump's Blanket Visa Ban
On Friday, a judge in the Southern District of New York struck down Trump’s blanket suspension of immigrant visas from seventy-five countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Yemen, and even his best buddy Putin’s Russia.
Back in January, the State Department said it was pausing those visas because applicants were at high risk of becoming a “public charge,” and that the policy would stand until the country could be sure new immigrants wouldn’t extract wealth from the American people through government programs.
But the judge wasn’t convinced, writing, “In many ways, this is not a challenging case.” And it’s not. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 clearly prohibits discrimination based on nationality when issuing immigrant visas, which is exactly what the State Department tried to do. Accordingly, the judge called the suspension “contrary to law.” That’s the polite legal way of saying illegal. She also said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had exceeded his authority.
The judge also pointed out that the ban blocked visas even for people the government’s own officers found self-sufficient. There was even a cable telling embassy officials to rescind visas that had already been approved, as long as the actual document hadn’t left the building. Think about that: diplomats rushing to the mail room to take back visas they had already approved because the Trump administration thinks it knows better.
The ruling wipes out the ban and the denials based on it. Consular officers go back to calling the shots on an individual basis, which the law has required since 1952. The government can appeal.
Look, I have no problem with screening people carefully. I want that. But these people were doing it the right way. Waiting their turn, proving that they could make it on their own in the U.S., and then being turned away anyway.
Thankfully, the courts stepped in. And they keep having to. This is one more ruling in a long line of judges telling this administration the law isn’t a suggestion.
5. Democrats Draw Up Their Subpoena List
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Democrats are preparing investigations into Trump administration officials if they take the House in November, and that the White House is bracing for an avalanche of subpoenas.
Democrats staked out some targets: the Iran war. Trump and his family’s shady business dealings. The chaotic ballroom project. Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. And the controversial conduct of ICE officers.
There’s a real split over impeachment. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, says that “Nobody on the Democratic side is afraid of impeachment,” and calls it a tool. Other Democrats worry impeachment proceedings may shift the focus away from the issues that voters want a potential Democratic majority to address.
Questions of strategy aside, here’s the bottom line: this rubber stamp Congress hasn’t done real oversight of the executive branch in two years. So if the Democrats take the House they need to follow the incompetence, the corruption, and the crypto money. Put people under oath and make it stick.
Unlike Republicans, they won’t need to drum up conspiracies or put on show trials. When it comes to this administration, there’s dirt everywhere. It’s just one reason the White House pressured Republican states to gerrymander, and is now shuttling cabinet members around the country to campaign. Losing in November means the truth will come out. And for the administration and its enablers, that truth is going to be pretty uncomfortable.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
On Friday, the Pentagon fired Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte for insubordination. Their offense was a CBS interview in which Slavin said censoring news for service members would be a red line. Publisher Max Lederer, who had already announced his retirement, was dismissed too. The firings came days after the paper reported on grim conditions and mental health concerns aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, reporting that Pete Hegseth called “completely misrepresented.” It also follows the Pentagon forcing out the paper’s ombudsman in April and installing an active-duty Navy captain as deputy publisher without telling Lederer. That same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is expected to step down by the end of the year after months of tension with Hegseth. The two have been competing for Trump’s ear since last year, when the President picked Driscoll instead of Hegseth to lead Ukraine peace talks. If Driscoll goes before a replacement is confirmed, the Army will have no Senate-confirmed leader in its top civilian or top military job in the middle of a war with Iran.
Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay on Friday that lets construction on Trump’s White House ballroom continue. It froze a lower court injunction that would have halted aboveground work at midnight. The order is administrative only, with no reasoning, no vote count, and no dissent, and the full court still has to decide what happens next. Trump celebrated on Truth Social, calling it a “Military/Ballroom Complex” that is vital to national security. But on Sunday the Washington Post reported that three former officials say the White House already has a nuclear-hardened bunker that was built in secret after 9/11, undermining the President’s security justifications. The White House says the project is “inextricably tied” to the President’s security and criticized the former officials for talking about it. His administration told the court the project is 65 percent complete, with a 250-person crew working 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Two lower courts have already found that Trump likely needs approval from Congress, which he never got.
