Florida Goes Full Police State Over Abortion Ballot Initiative

Florida is reportedly sending police officers to the homes of people who signed a petition supporting an abortion rights ballot initiative.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration has begun investigating thousands of verified signatures that helped to put a state constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion on the ballot in November. The amendment would overturn Florida’s current six-week abortion ban.

Petition organizers collected about 100,000 more signatures than they needed, surpassing the 900,000 that are required by the state and ensuring that their policy would be on the ballot. Now the Department of State’s spokesperson Ryan Ash claims that his agency has “uncovered evidence of illegal conduct with fraudulent petitions.”

Supervisors in Hillsborough, Orange, Palm Beach, Osceola, Alachua, and Broward counties have been requested to gather around 36,000 signatures for state review, according to the Tampa Bay Times. One supervisor with 16 years of experience told the Times that the state’s request was entirely unprecedented. Not only had the state requested signatures that had already been verified, but they did so for a validated petition, not a rejected petition, which are typically the basis of fraud investigations.

Multiple residents in Lee County have reported being visited by law enforcement following up on their petition signatures.

Fort Myers resident Isaac Menasche shared in a Facebook post Wednesday that a “detective investigating petition fraud” had come to his home.

“I had indeed signed a petition seeking to have the right to an abortion placed on the ballot in Florida. I remembered doing so and the circumstances surrounding it,” wrote Menasche, noting that he doesn’t usually sign petitions.

“The experience left me shaken. What troubled me was he had a folder on me containing my personal information—about 10 pages. I saw a copy of my drivers license and copy of the petition I signed. It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition.”

Menasche wrote that it was “troubling” that such resources were being allocated to the investigation and wondered if the same would have been done for a less divisive issue than abortion.

Florida state Representative Anna Eskamani responded to the reported police encounter in a post on Facebook Friday.

“This is unhinged and undemocratic behavior being pushed by Governor Ron DeSantis in an effort to continue our state’s near total abortion ban,” Eskamani wrote. “It’s clear voter intimidation and plain corruption—continue to call it out and fight back.”

At his press conference Friday in New York, Donald Trump not only complained heavily about the defamation judgment that he’s appealing, but also about his own lawyers.

Trump said, “I have all of this legal talent, but legal talent cannot overcome rigged judges, they can’t overcome a 4 percent Republican area, and I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you. They’re good, they’re good people. They’re talented people.”

After that, however, Trump went off on a tangent about some kind of dress involved in his defamation trial, wondering why his lawyers didn’t mention it, as it somehow exonerated him.

Later in the press conference, Trump criticized one of his lawyers for telling him not to attend the defamation trial in 2023, and seemed unsure if it took place while he was still president.

The attacks on his own lawyers were a small part of Trump’s incoherent ramblings during his Friday press conference, from his bizarre choice to mention other sexual assault allegations against him to attacking E. Jean Carroll and basically inviting another lawsuit. It could all be more examples of his increasing cognitive decline, or his famously thin skin.

Either way, maybe the former president should avoid attacking his lawyers, considering they may be the only people standing between him and actual legal consequences for his actions. Then again, the Supreme Court did give him a huge favor with its immunity ruling earlier this summer, which was a big reason why his hush money sentencing was delayed for a second time. Still, keeping his mouth shut and focusing on his campaign would be the smart thing to do for Trump, but that’s never been his strong suit, and his campaign knows it.

Liz Cheney has advice for Kamala Harris for her debate next week: “Let Trump be Trump.”

The former Republican Wyoming representative spoke with Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich in Texas on Friday, following her endorsement of Harris for president this week. In her conversation, she shared words of wisdom for Harris—and a brutally honest condemnation of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

When asked how Harris should approach Tuesday’s presidential debate against Trump, Cheney responded by saying that Harris should relish the fact that this is an “opportunity [where] Donald Trump gets to show the American people who he is.” And who he is, in her words, is a “misogynistic pig.”

“This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs,” Cheney said, speaking of Vance and Trump as the audience erupted in applause. “I think that will become clear.”

“Look at what J.D. Vance says on almost a daily basis about women; that guy’s got a real women problem,” Cheney added. “I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to psychoanalyze him, and there’s a lot of eyeliner jokes to be made in there …”

Women in this country “have had enough,” said Cheney, who urged Harris to focus on “substance and policy” during ABC’s upcoming debate against the former president, while also getting in a few quips about Vance’s weirdness.*

In the same presser, Cheney shared a shocking piece of news: Her father also plans to vote for Harris this November.

“If you listen to what [Vance] says about women and you look at what Donald Trump and what Donald Trump has done and what he says about women—these are not people we can entrust with power again.”

* This article originally misstated the network on which the debate will air.

Apparently, Donald Trump has gone too far for a former acolyte of unitary executive theory.

During an appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival on Friday, former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney made a startling announcement about her father’s plans for the November election.

“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said, as the crowd erupted into applause.

“My dad believes, and he’s said publicly, that there has never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is,” she explained. She had formally endorsed Harris during an address at Duke University on Thursday.

Later on Friday, the elder Cheney released a statement confirming that he would vote for Harris in November.

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again,” he said.   

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

The former vice president for George W. Bush had previously criticized Trump, calling him a “coward” in an advertisement for his daughter’s 2022 congressional campaign.

His daughter was one of a small handful of Republicans to openly criticize Trump after the deadly January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. As a result, Trump has suggested she be tried for treason in a “televised military tribunal.”

While in office, Dick Cheney advocated for a catastrophic and unnecessary war, invaded the privacy of millions of Americans, and sought to bolster presidential authority (and immunity). Back then, he propagated his own damage to democracy. Now it seems that Trump offends even his sensibilities.

Liz Cheney didn’t mince words when discussing Trump or his lackluster running mate, J.D. Vance. “This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs,” Cheney said, as the audience cheered. She said she remained hopeful that their characters would “become clear” during the upcoming debates.

This story has been updated.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan handed Donald Trump a massive win on Friday, delaying his hush-money sentencing until November 26, after the national election. But news of the reprieve wasn’t enough for Trump, who turned around and distributed a deliberately misleading message to his followers on Truth Social that claimed the trial—in which he had already been found guilty by a jury—amounted to “no case.”

“The Manhattan D.A. Witch Hunt has been postponed because everyone realizes that there was NO CASE, I DID NOTHING WRONG!” Trump wrote. “It is a political attack against me by Comrade Kamala Harris and other Radical Left Opponents for purposes of Election Interference, and is a case that should have never been brought. Nothing like this has ever happened in the United States of America—IT IS STRICTLY THIRD WORLD, BANANA REPUBLIC ‘STUFF.’”

Trump then proceeded to name-drop a host of Fox News contributors and legal analysts, including Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz, and Mark Levin, claiming that top attorneys “understand this.”

“I greatly appreciate the words ‘if necessary’ being utilized in the Decision, because there should be no ‘if necessary’—This case should be rightfully terminated, as we prepare for the Most Important Election in the History of our Country,” Trump continued, referring to the final words in the legal order that specified the future sentencing date. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Trump was found guilty in May of 34 felony charges related to falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree. Trump was accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug before the 2016 presidential election in an effort to skew public opinion.

Donald Trump is trying to appeal a multimillion-dollar judgment against him for defaming writer and author E. Jean Carroll. In a press conference Friday, though, Trump continued to attack her, accusing Carroll of lying.

“I should be suing [E Jean Carroll] for defamation,” Trump said, noting that “this is not the kind of publicity you’d like.”

“She has gone around for years saying this story, and it’s a total lie.… This whole thing started, along with just about every case I’ve been involved with, with the political campaign of Harris, who’s having a bad time,” Trump added.

Trump described Carroll as “a woman I have never met, I don’t know, I have no idea who she is,” before accusing her of making up the sexual assault to promote her book. These were the exact grounds that opened Trump up to the first defamation lawsuit in 2019.

Repeating such a lie probably isn’t the best idea, as Trump already owes Carroll $88.3 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. On Friday, oral arguments began in his appeal against a $5 million defamation judgment, which spurred his press conference rant. Carroll could easily have more legal ammunition from Trump’s press conference alone, where he even accused her of taking her accusations from a Law and Order episode.

It’s a recurring pattern for the former president and convicted felon, who can’t stop complaining about and attacking Carroll despite the legal judgments against him. During Friday’s press conference, Trump even went off on a tangent mentioning other possible sexual assault accusations against him, which probably freaked out his lawyers.

While Trump experienced some good news earlier on Friday when Judge Juan Merchan decided to delay the sentencing in his hush-money trial until after the election, his press conference Friday isn’t likely to help his appeal against Carroll. Maybe he thinks he can keep escaping the consequences of his actions, no matter what he does.

The guy who pushed the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016 and the #StoptheSteal lie in 2020 is a part of the official Republican “protect the vote” initiative—because of course he is.

According to an email shared by HuffPost politics reporter Igor Bobic, RNC’s Election Integrity Department is advertising a webinar with Jack Posobiec to teach Wisconsinites “how YOU can help protect the vote.”

The effort is part of the RNC’s “Protect the Vote” project, a battleground state initiative to recruit and train “thousands of poll watchers” for the November election. But their surrogates are just as sketchy as you might imagine.

Posobiec, whom the RNC calls a “great patriot,” is a political operative who has “collaborated with white nationalists, antigovernment extremists, members of the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis in his capacity as an operative,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is probably most remembered for his role in Pizzagate, in which he spread the 2016 conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton were running a pedophilic sex dungeon below a D.C. pizza joint. His story led to a gunman opening fire inside the pizzeria.

Two months prior to the 2020 election, he tweeted “StoptheSteal 2020 is coming,” allowing lies about the election to spread before ballots were even cast. More recently, the “social media influencer” has been peddling lies about Ukraine and celebrating what he called the “end of democracy” at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.

Clearly, this is exactly the kind of person the official Republican Party wants teaching poll watchers how to preserve election integrity.

Tenet Media is no more.

The conservative media network folded Thursday night, just one day after the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing it of being funded by Russian state-controlled media, according to Tenet Media field reporter Tayler Hansen.

The indictment accused Tenet and its founders of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

The company’s founders, Canadian Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovon, have not yet commented publicly on the scandal. The fallout from the alleged propaganda scheme lost Chen her broadcasting gig with another far-right media group, Blaze Media, which has already wiped episodes of her podcast from Spotify and deleted her contributor page from its website. Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon told Semafor that the conservative anchor had been “terminated.”

The Russian funds paid for videos by popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. Pool has since described himself as a “victim” in the Tenet scandal.

“I have been contacted by the FBI as a potential victim of a crime,” Pool posted on X on Thursday. “The FBI believes I have information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and have requested a voluntary interview. I will be offering my assistance in this matter.”

YouTube also wiped Tenet Media’s content from its platform “after careful review” following the indictment, telling NBC News that its decision to erase the channel and its affiliates was part of “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

Tenet is just the latest flavor of Russian-backed misinformation campaign that has plagued American politics, but it is a sign of just how sizable the foreign country’s budget is in 2024 for influencing the November election.

Donald Trump on Friday inexplicably started detailing two horrific sexual assault allegations made against him, as part of a hapless attempt to discredit a completely different sexual assault allegation.

During a press conference in New York City, Trump gave rambling remarks in which he made gross references to two women who claim he sexually abused them. His comments came shortly after oral arguments concluded for the day in Trump’s appeal of the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case against him. 

Trump’s lawyers argued in court Friday that  Carroll’s 2023 rape trial was tainted by the presence of other allegations. While attempting to follow their lead to downplay Carroll’s claims against him, Trump recapped the accusations two women made against him during the trial—as if that would somehow make him seem less guilty. 

“There were two witnesses. One is a woman who followed me for years,” Trump said, talking about Jessica Leeds, who told jurors at Carroll’s civil trial that Trump had groped her when they sat next to each other on a plane to New York City in the late 1970s. 

“There was no conversation. It was like out of the blue. It was like a tussle,” Leeds claimed at the time. 

Trump’s characterization of the interaction was quite a bit different: “She said in 1979 I was in an airplane with her, commercial flight, and … we became very intimate,” said the former president.

As he told the story, Trump interrupted himself to say, “I was famous then too. I’ve been famous for a long time,” apropos of nothing. Later Trump tried to return to this point, dismissing the claims, saying, “It’s very funny, when you’re rich and famous, you get lot of people come up with a lot of stories.” Combined, Trump’s remarks sounded eerily similar to his infamous Access Hollywood tape, where he claimed that “when you’re a star they let you” grab their genitals.

Throughout his explanation of the supposedly “totally made-up story,” Trump continued to insist that he didn’t know when exactly their interaction had taken place, noting that this likely happened “a long time ago,” in 1979.

“I believe I had some pretty big success then, and I was being talked about a lot. Maybe The Art of the Deal was out, you know, sometime after that, I’m not sure. But I was well known,” Trump said. As it happens, The Art of the Deal came out almost 10 years later, in 1987. In attempting to make light of the serious allegation, Trump boasted about his popularity and seemed to reveal his own faulty memory. 

“And passengers are coming into the plane, and she said I was making out with her, and then, after 15 minutes—and then she changed her story a couple of times, maybe it was quicker—that I grabbed her at a certain part, and that was when she had enough,” Trump said. 

“So think of the impracticality of this,” Trump urged. Later, he implied that her story made no sense because “back in those days” there was an arm rest between passengers on airplanes. 

“What are the chances of that happening? What are the chances?” Trump questioned. “And, frankly, I know you’re going to think it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen. And, she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”

The story was “a total lie,” according to Trump. “Now, I assume she’ll sue me now for defamation like I got sued by E. Jean Carroll.”

“No police reports, no witnesses, no corroboration of any kind. No criminal suggestions. No nothing,” Trump said, appearing to read off a card in front of him. 

Trump then moved on to the allegations made against him by journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who’d testified that while she visited Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump and Melania for an article in 2005, the former president had pushed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her, before they were discovered by Trump’s butler.

Throughout Trump’s remarks Friday, he repeatedly referred to pieces of paper he was holding, but that did not seem to help him recall key details—like, who he was actually choosing to defame in the first place. 

“Her name was … whoever. Let’s see. Her name … was who?” Trump leaned back so his lawyer, Alina Habba, could feed him the answer. 

“Swornov? Yeah. I don’t have it,” Trump said, confused. “Whatever her name was—I don’t know the lady, so. Perhaps it’s better that way, but I don’t know the lady.”

Trump claimed he couldn’t possibly have assaulted her, because she had ultimately written a “beautiful story.”

Throughout his remarks, Trump’s lawyers looked increasingly displeased with their client’s ramblings—but it seems that Trump wasn’t too happy with them, either.

“I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump said while standing right in front of them, complaining that they had not brought up “such a famous dress” that was “Monica Lewinsky part two,” which he claimed would have exonerated him.

Donald Trump will now be sentenced for his hush-money case on November 26, more than three weeks after the presidential election. This is a massive victory for the convicted felon.

Judge Juan Merchan in a four-page decision ruled that the delay should help relieve any concerns that sentencing would influence the November election.

“Unfortunately, we are now at a place in time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute,” Merchan said in his ruling.

“This is not a decision this Court makes lightly but is the decision which in this Court’s view best advances the interests of justice,” Merchan added.

The case’s sentencing ran into some procedural issues after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity in July. New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ominously warned just after the ruling that a sentence may never come, initially delaying the sentencing hearing until September 18.

In a court filing last month, Trump’s defense team asked Merchan to delay sentencing until after the November elections, claiming that Merchan had “appearances of impropriety” due to his daughter’s work for Democratic political candidates. Trump unsuccessfully pushed for Merchan’s recusal three times, only to be rebuffed.

Trump ally Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, sued the state of New York on his behalf, appealing to the Supreme Court following its immunity ruling to delay the former president’s sentencing. The long-shot effort failed, as the high court declined to postpone the hearing.

Bailey was also seeking to have Trump’s gag order in the case fully lifted, but the court similarly denied that request. The order had been partially lifted in June, allowing Trump to talk about the witnesses and jurors in the case, but he’s still barred from talking about court staff, prosecutors, Merchan and his family, and others connected to the case.

Trump still has attempted to skirt the gag order, which could worsen his sentence. He had his political allies act as surrogates to criticize the people he couldn’t, even editing their words at times. Some politicians, such as Representatives Bob Good and Lauren Boebert, admitted that they traveled to Trump’s Manhattan trial for this reason. Trump also criticized one of the prosecutors in the case without mentioning his name. And there are the 10 documented violations of the gag order, which Merchan has already punished Trump for to the tune of $10,000 in fines.

Trump was found guilty in May on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree. The Republican presidential nominee covered up his affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election with help from his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen. Merchan’s decision means that Trump will not face consequences at least until the end of November, if at all.

This story has been updated.