Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today. Just days after we covered the bipartisan backlash to Pete Hegseth’s plan to broadcast a firing squad from Fort Hood, the president posted that it won’t be streamed after all. He still thinks it would have been a strong deterrent. He just found out nobody else did. That’s the pattern with this White House now. They float something indefensible, the backlash builds, and the president retreats while insisting he still would have been right.
We’ll also get into the fired FBI agents who are now suing Kash Patel, Russian bots pumping fake videos to boost Republicans before the midterms, new reporting that the order to throttle Ukraine’s satellite link came from inside the White House, and the man who saved the January 6th record the Justice Department tried to erase.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump Pulls Hegseth’s Execution Stream
We talked about this on Tuesday. Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, is set to face a firing squad on December 3rd. Hegseth wanted it livestreamed so the public could, in his words, understand there are serious consequences. Republicans in the Senate called it un-American. Mike Johnson called it a recruiting tool for terrorists. The Catholic archbishop for the military told Catholic soldiers to refuse the duty. Even Vance said he wouldn’t watch.
Yesterday, the president weighed in.
He says he still thinks streaming it would have been a strong deterrent for the world to see how America deals with terrorists. But “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die.” So, the livestream is off. Families of the victims can still attend in person if they want. And of course, Barack “Hussein” Obama got a shoutout. This guy is just the worst.
The Pentagon says Hegseth and Trump discussed it beforehand and the secretary supports the decision. They’re completely aligned. Of course they are. Hegseth announced the livestream on a podcast, defended it for a week, and then his boss reversed him in a social media post.
As I said a few days ago, taking a life is sometimes necessary in the military. But it is never entertainment. So the right outcome happened here. But look at how it happened. The president didn’t say the plan was wrong. He said it would have worked, and it’s too bad people couldn’t handle it.
2. Fired FBI Agents Sue Kash Patel
Yesterday, nine current and former FBI employees who were fired in February filed suit in federal court in Washington. They worked in different roles at the bureau: as agents, intelligence analysts, and operations specialists. But all of them had been assigned to investigate the classified documents Trump was storing at Mar-a-Lago.
The suit names Patel, Todd Blanche, the FBI, and the DOJ. It calls the firings what they were: political punishments carried out to satisfy a bitter president’s vendetta. It also calls out Patel for lying about the firings to Congress. In March, he told the House Intelligence Committee that the employees were fired only after internal ethics investigations took place. The employees say there was no such thing. No disciplinary process, no notice, no appeal. Their badges were simply snatched.
This was premeditated. Before Trump won in 2024, Patel was going on podcasts calling the agents who searched Trump’s club “corrupt government gangsters.” When he became FBI director, he simply did what he was always planning on doing.
These people were only doing their job. They were asked to look into classified documents at a private residence. They found them, and a grand jury indicted Trump. The case only stopped because the Trump appointed judge threw it out on a technicality.
The administration says the president can fire anyone in the executive branch no matter the reason. And maybe the courts will agree. But Patel didn’t tell Congress he was just following orders. He said there was an investigation, a process. And he said it under oath.
Nine FBI employees versus an incompetent, loyalist director, who reportedly drinks on the job. I know who I believe.
3. Russia Runs Fake Videos For GOP
Bloomberg reviewed 130 fake videos that a Russian operation pushed onto X over the past month. We’re not gonna play the videos, but here’s some of the thumbnails:
They’re using logos and graphics from reputable outlets to push AI-generated clips and bogus stories about Democrats. One fake ABC clip claims James Talarico used Texas money to pay Onlyfans models. Another with a CBS logo claims the IRS found 8 secret properties belonging to Jon Ossoff. In other videos, deepfake versions of celebrities like Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts accuse Democrats of the usual conspiracy theories involving sex cults and child predator rings.
Researchers trace the content to a Kremlin operation that’s been running since 2023. But this cycle the Russians aren’t just going after presidential candidates. Bloomberg found fake stories about 29 of the 36 Democrats running for governor and 20 of the 35 running for Senate.
Then the bot farms come in. These videos are posted by accounts with only a handful of followers, but the videos explode as soon as they’re posted. Fifty thousand views in twenty minutes. Seventy-five thousand views in half an hour. And then nothing. The views fall off a cliff. Bots swarm the videos in an attempt to get them recommended to real people.
The Russian government is doing everything it can to help Republicans win this election. And no wonder. With the GOP in power, Putin has friends in Washington. He has a way to sell his diesel, a ticket to the G7, and a friend in the White House. So if you needed another reason to come out and vote this November, there it is. Let’s stick it to the Russians.
4. White House Ordered Ukraine Blackout
On Wednesday we told you Ukraine’s military satellite link suddenly stopped working in the middle of a Russian attack. That limited their drones’ capabilities, and nobody knew why it happened.
Two U.S. officials told Reuters that the order to limit service came from inside the White House. Pentagon leaders got a message that Ukraine’s Starshield service, that’s the military version of Starlink, needed to be throttled. And the Pentagon followed through.
After the incident, Ukrainian officials reportedly called the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon. They were told the same thing: this was a White House decision.
The only answer out of the White House is that “no such request was ever made by the president.”
But Elon Musk certainly isn’t helping their case. “Starshield systems,” he posted on X, “are owned and controlled by the US government.” He added, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” I don’t know about you, but to me that looks like Elon Musk throwing President Trump under the bus.
And he isn’t the only one pointing fingers. Nine senators, including several Republicans, have asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether U.S. officials deliberately cut satellite service and missile warnings to Ukraine. They’re also asking whether the two were connected. They want an answer by November 1st.
Knowing this administration, we may never get the truth. Wherever that order came from, we can only hope that it was an aberration, and for the sake of the Ukrainian people, that the systems stay on.
5. They Can’t Erase January 6th
In May, the Justice Department gradually deleted its press releases on the January 6th prosecutions. More than a thousand of them. Guilty pleas, verdicts, and sentences alike.
When journalists caught on, the department called it stripping the website of partisan propaganda. That fools nobody outside Trump’s most loyal base. This was an attempt to erase one of our country’s darkest days from the historical record.
But Tom Joscelyn saw it coming. He served with me on the January 6th committee as a senior staffer and helped write our final report. He knew the case inside and out. He also knew this administration would try to bury it.
That’s why, in early 2025, he downloaded the Justice Department’s statements before they could be deleted. Now he’s made them public. It’s called the January 6 Memory Project and anyone can access it by going to jan6memoryproject.org.
The project offers more than a thousand searchable DOJ press releases and six hundred court filings for every case from 2021 to 2025. It covers each case from beginning to end: from charges to pleas to sentences.
Tom put it in four words: “They can’t erase history.” That’s what his project proves. The administration pardoned the rioters, fired the prosecutors, and scrubbed the record. But they couldn’t make the facts disappear.
We don’t want the facts to disappear either. That’s part of the reason we do this show: so the everyday abuses of this administration don’t go unnoticed. So keep listening. But don’t worry about making a copy, because we aren’t going anywhere.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The Justice Department sued California to block the state from counting mail ballots from 20,000 voters the Trump administration says may not be citizens. The suit lands less than three weeks before a midterm that will decide control of Congress. Voting is already underway in California, which mails a ballot to every active registered voter. The administration wants those 20,000 ballots set aside until each person’s citizenship is verified. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the state had a chance to fix its records and “refused to comply.” Secretary of State Shirley Weber says the DOJ never explained why it suspects anyone on its list. She called the standoff “an emergency of the DOJ’s creation.” This is part of a larger fight. The administration has sued 30 states, including California, for complete voter records. So far, 26 federal judges and an appeals court panel have sided with the states. Not one has sided with the administration.
Campaigns have spent more than $137 million promoting AI-generated ads this midterm season, and most of them don’t tell voters. That finding comes from the Wesleyan Media Project, which identified more than 220 of these videos. More than 80 percent came from Republican campaigns or GOP-aligned PACs. About 70 percent carried no AI disclaimer. Nearly half depicted real politicians, including a Bruce Blakeman ad that showed Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani pitching a fake “political delusion pill.” Blakeman’s campaign called the ad satire and said no disclosure was required. New York Democrats disagree. They filed a complaint in August under a state law requiring labels on “materially deceptive” political content. Researchers say the real total is likely higher, because some ads were only identifiable after running in one of the 30 states with disclosure rules.
