Hey everybody. Terry Virts here filling in for Adam. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today. The Justice Department’s civil rights division used to be one of the best places in the country for a talented young lawyer to work. Under Trump, more than 300 career lawyers have walked out the door. Their replacements aren’t the best lawyers in the country. They’re the most loyal ones. And a lot of them come with baggage. One of them did jail time for hacking an election system. Another thinks January 6th was a false flag. And that’s the division now sending monitors to your polling place.
We’ll also get into the rough debate night for Susan Collins, a look inside Scott Bessent’s Treasury Department, the Trump administration going after voter registration groups, and the voters putting Democrats in position to win back the Senate.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump Loyalists Take Over Civil Rights Division
The civil rights division is the part of the Justice Department that enforces voting rights laws, fights discrimination, and prosecutes hate crimes. For decades, under presidents of both parties, it attracted some of the best legal talent in the country.
That changed last year. Since early 2025, more than 300 career employees have left the division. These are nonpolitical lawyers with decades of experience. They left after Trump’s pick to run the division turned it into a tool for the president’s agenda.
Now the department has to fill those seats. It has hired about 130 new lawyers, and the New York Times has been looking into who they are.
These are not the people who used to get these jobs. For a long time, you got hired into the civil rights division because you were one of the best lawyers in the country. Now you get hired because you’re loyal to Trump. And when loyalty is the qualification, you end up with hires like these.
One of them is a man who hacked into a Florida county’s election system. Not once, but twice. A Florida court also found he committed fraud in a business dispute and ordered him to pay more than 200 thousand dollars. But the Justice Department decided he was the right guy to monitor a polling place in Minneapolis back in August.
Another one is a prosecutor who got pulled off a murder case after a judge found he viewed and shared the defense team’s privileged communications. That’s about as serious as it gets for a lawyer. He’s now enforcing civil rights law.
Another is facing animal neglect charges in El Paso. The Times asked his former supervisor whether the department should have hired him. She said no. Then she corrected herself: “Hell, no.”
And then there’s the new senior counsel who suggested January 6th was a false flag run by liberals. This guy is now a senior lawyer in the division that’s supposed to protect your right to vote.
The civil rights division was built to be nonpolitical. That’s the only reason it works. Fill it with people whose main qualification is loyalty to Trump, and it stops being a safeguard and starts being a weapon. And right now it’s pointed at the election.
2. Collins Bombs Her Debate
Collins is running for a sixth term against Democrat Troy Jackson, who is the former president of the Maine Senate. Having an R next to your name in Maine has never been easy. But this year it’s a real problem. Trump’s approval rating in the state is 32 percent.
Collins has spent her campaign arguing she has done more than anyone in Maine’s delegation to push back on Trump. But during their first televised debate last night, Jackson refused to let voters forget her ties to the president.
And the numbers back him up. Last year, Collins voted with Trump 95 percent of the time. But she wants credit for the other five percent.
And then Jackson went after her on trade. Maine depends on business and tourism from Canada, and that’s taken a hit thanks to escalating tariffs. When Collins pointed to the tariff relief she’s won for Maine, Jackson hit back with the full picture.
Concrete, pulp, and road salt? Big whoop. That’s what six terms of seniority got Maine. A slightly shorter list of things that cost more.
And Maine voters are noticing. The Washington Post interviewed several Mainers who said they respect Collins but plan to vote against her. One voter said, “It’s not even anti-Susan Collins; it’s anti-Trump.” Another added he wouldn’t vote for any Republican: “I think this country will be destroyed if Trump has another two years unfettered.”
Look, Collins has outrun Trump before. In 2020, she won Maine by nine points on the same night Trump lost it by nine. And even this year, polls show a close race. But the anti-Trump sentiment might be too much for her to overcome this time around, and last night didn’t help.
Here’s the thing about Collins. She’ll say no to Trump once in a while. But voters in Maine have watched her express concern for ten years, and the concern never turned into anything. When the president needed her vote, he got it. And when she did vote against Trump, it never cost him anything. Her no votes always seemed to show up when they couldn’t change the outcome. That kind of fake independence isn’t working anymore.
3. Secretary Bessent Screams at His Own Staff
The Wall Street Journal talked to more than 30 current and former department officials. They describe tension and turnover. And ultimately, unmet economic goals.
In January, Bessent decided one of his top deputies was dragging his feet on a fraud probe ordered by Trump. So he screamed at him in front of aides, loud enough for staff nearby to hear. Weeks later, that deputy was shipped off to an ambassador post.
That outburst has become a pattern. Since he became Treasury secretary, officials report that Bessent has lost it on senior advisers and junior staffers over the slightest of issues.
The White House is standing by him. A spokeswoman called the professionalism he’s brought to the department “one of the great accomplishments of this administration.”
But his staff clearly think differently. By the end of August, seven Senate-confirmed officials had left the Treasury Department, in part because of his erratic behavior. That’s more than the last four administrations lost at this point combined.
All the while, Bessent has struggled to deliver results. The secretary promised what he called a 3-3-3 plan. Three percent economic growth. A deficit cut to three percent. And an additional three million barrels of oil produced per day. But he is lagging behind on all three metrics.
This mess happened under Trump’s oversight. And even Republicans are admitting it. Last night, a CNN anchor asked Thom Tillis whether voters should back Republicans in the midterms. Listen to his response.
That’s a sitting Republican senator acknowledging that the political landscape is “tough” for the GOP because they failed to deliver on their central promise: fixing the economy.
And it’s worse than that. Under Scott Bessent, the national debt surpassed 40 trillion. Borrowing costs stand at a twenty-year high. And the deficit is over 6 percent of GDP. Republicans didn’t just fail to fix the economy. They made it worse. Much worse.
4. DHS Hunts Fraud It Can't Find
The New York Times got its hands on some internal DHS documents through a public records request. They show the department snooping on more than 150 groups that they thought were helping noncitizens register to vote. Officials even considered sending in undercover agents to “disrupt activities.”
If there was a case here, that would be one thing. But there’s not. In New Jersey, DHS looked at 44 groups and found nothing. The investigations are still open, but after more than a year, nothing of substance has come out.
The woman in charge is Heather Honey. Before 2020 she was a private investigator working counterfeit goods cases. After the election, she came up with the false claim that Pennsylvania had more votes than voters. Trump repeated it on January 6th, right before a MAGA mob stormed the Capitol. Now she leads election integrity at DHS.
Under her direction, DHS is talking big. Their statement on the investigation was blunt: “We will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences.”
But at the end of the day, noncitizen voting is incredibly rare. Don’t take it from me: Utah, a Republican state, went through over 2 million voter records and found only 52 probable noncitizens on the rolls. DHS doesn’t want to believe that, of course. In July, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed 250,000 potential noncitizens were voting in four states. Nevada checked the names the feds sent them. Every single one was a citizen.
We should enforce the law, and we shouldn’t let noncitizens vote. But if DHS was serious about election security, the woman in charge wouldn’t be someone who spread election lies. What they really want is to sow doubt about this election. Given the polls, that’s no surprise.
5. Seniors Turn on Republicans
Yesterday Adam told you Democrats have a real shot at flipping statehouses this year. The Senate picture keeps getting better too.
New York Times and Siena polls show Democrats ahead in Senate races in Texas, Alaska, New Hampshire and Michigan, with an edge in Ohio. Iowa and Kansas are tied. Republicans still have a small edge in Maine.
What is pushing that momentum in red states? One voter group stands out. Seniors vote at much higher rates than young people in midterms. They also usually lean Republican. But this year, they’re split down the middle.
Voters over 65 in Ohio, for example, are equally divided between Democrat Sherrod Moore and Husted, the Republican incumbent. What’s more, that group says that they trust Brown over Husted to do what’s best for ordinary Ohioans, 51 percent to 46.
But seniors aren’t the only bloc. The New York Times reports that young voters, Latino voters, and independent voters are swinging toward the left with them.
Race ratings are moving the same way. This week, Cook Political Report shifted three Senate races toward the Democrats: Kansas, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.
Kansas is particularly remarkable. That’s a state Trump won by 16 points. And it hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century. In a normal midterm, it’s the last place Republicans are worried about. This year, they’re pulling money out of battlegrounds to shore it up.
We know the polls don’t always get it right, and Republicans still have a pretty big cash advantage. But when the GOP is spending millions to save Kansas, it means the alarm bells are ringing.
In any case, the only poll that counts is on November 3rd. So get out there and vote.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The New York Times reports that Ukraine is pushing Russian forces back in the Donbas, contradicting Vladimir Putin’s claim that the region’s fall is inevitable. A monthslong Ukrainian counteroffensive, known as Operation Vivaldi, has stopped Russia from encircling the last major Ukrainian-held cities in the region. Moscow tells a very different story. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed in September that its forces had captured more than 2,000 square miles this year. But western analysts say Russia has gained only slightly more land than it has lost, and that September marked its worst month for net gains since June 2023. That matters at the negotiating table. Putin has made full control of the Donbas a condition for ending the war. Meanwhile, Ukraine has rejected Trump administration proposals to hand over land Russia couldn’t take by force. And they are putting up stiff resistance. With its ground campaign stalled, Moscow has now stepped up missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian cities. Overnight attacks Wednesday killed at least 20 people.
The Washington Post reports that Trump is looking to turn his own West Palm Beach golf club into the new Camp David. Last month, the club’s lawyer sent Palm Beach County a proposal to carve out part of the course for a permanent presidential retreat. It would host foreign leaders and international summits, and house presidents on Florida vacations. Future presidents would even get comped memberships to Trump’s club. The lawyer called the project “a gift” to Trump’s successors, since construction won’t finish before he leaves office. And a White House official praised the site’s security and its location minutes from the airport, which now bears Trump’s name. The county owns the land and says it is seriously considering the plan. Meanwhile, Trump’s private club would keep running under his family company, which reported nearly $37 million in income from the golf course last year. The president himself has rarely used Camp David, once joking that its rustic charm would wear off after half an hour.
