Judge’s Ruling Is a Devastating Setback for MAGA Election Meddling

A judge dismissed a lawsuit Tuesday from a member of the Fulton County, Georgia, elections board who refused to certify the results of the state’s primary election.

In May, board official Julie Adams launched a lawsuit against the county, arguing that she could not certify the results of the primary election without having access to all information about the voting procedures. Elections Board director Nadine Williams had barred her from seeing some information.

Adams also sought a court ruling on whether her duty to certify election results is “discretionary, not ministerial, in nature,” according to the suit.

Judge Robert C.I. McBurney dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning that Georgia election officials will continue to have a mandatory duty to certify the election results, scrambling Adams’s attempt to upend years of precedent and Georgia state law.

An amendment to Georgia’s state constitution allows for plaintiffs to seek declaratory relief from the government, which could determine Adams’s obligations in her role as an election superintendent. However, the law required that any complaint seeking relief must be brought against the state or local government only, and no other forms of relief can be included in the complaint.

“Failure to comply with either requirement is fatal: the non-compliant complaint ‘shall be dismissed,’” McBurney wrote in his order.

Adams’s first complaint in May was brought against the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, as well as Williams. According to the judge, “Neither is a proper party for such a suit.” The complaint also requested injunctive relief, which would prohibit Williams from denying Adams access to election materials and processes.

In July, the defendants argued a motion to dismiss using this argument, and Adams amended her original complaint, bringing her case solely against Fulton County. “That was too little, too late; the fatal pleading flaw cannot be undone,” wrote the judge.

Adams, a staunch election denier, was backed by the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.

McBurney made clear that Adams can refile her claim, this time listing the proper party, and that if she “moves with alacrity,” her claim “can be considered alongside” a challenge to the Georgia election board’s new rule requiring a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results. The rule, which was passed in August, would make it significantly easier for county election officials to delay or refuse certification of election results in populous Democratic strongholds such as Fulton or DeKalb counties in November.

At Tuesday’s night’s presidential debate, Kamala Harris is sure to get under Donald Trump’s skin. But just to be extra sure, she’s bringing two of his old administration staffers along.

Former Trump White House director of communications Anthony Scaramucci and former Trump national security official Olivia Troye will be attending the debate in Philadelphia as guests and surrogates of the vice president. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly tried to dismiss the news.

“Nobody is going to listen to someone who was a low-level staffer who didn’t even work for President Trump and someone who barely lasted more time than an expired ham sandwich as White House communications director,” Cheung said in a statement, referring to Scaramucci’s infamously short 10-day tenure.

Scaramucci has not held back on criticizing Trump and his campaign, warning about the repercussions of another Trump presidency and even offering predictions on how long J.D. Vance would last as Trump’s running mate. Troye has called out Trump’s mental fitness, alluding to multiple worrying instances during his time in office, and made a speech at the Democratic National Convention calling for her fellow Republicans to reject Trump and support democracy.

In 2016, Trump brought Bill Clinton sexual harassment accusers Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick to one of his debates with Hillary Clinton in an attempt to abuse and humiliate his opponent. Harris’s aim appears to be different: to show viewers that people who used to work for Trump now see the dangers of him returning to office. Bringing Troye and Scaramucci also offers the side benefit of getting Trump rattled.

The debate promises to be an interesting contest, especially since Trump has tried to get out of it and his campaign has argued over the rules, trying to keep microphones muted when it isn’t Trump or Harris’s turn to speak. The Trump campaign seems to be worried that the former president and convicted felon won’t be able to keep himself from interrupting or resorting to petty insults, and Harris’s campaign wants him to be able to hurt his own cause. Having guests at the debate who Trump can’t stand may allow Harris to get inside his head.

With less than three weeks to avert a government shutdown, House Speaker Mike Johnson is back to begging his caucus to keep the money flowing.

The Louisiana politico has vowed to bring a continuing resolution to the floor “as soon as possible.” In a meeting with House Republicans on Tuesday, Johnson reportedly encouraged his fellow conservatives to back the six-month funding bill, claiming that Americans around the country had been enthusiastic about the measure when he shopped it around in August, reported Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

Johnson can only afford to lose four House Republican votes on the continuing resolution, which has been integrally tied to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility—or SAVE—Act, a piece of legislation that would require proof of citizenship in order to vote. So far, he’s got six “nos,” including Representatives Tim Burchett, Jim Banks, Mike Rogers, Cory Mills, Thomas Massie, and Matt Rosendale.

Five House Democrats voted for the SAVE Act before it was rolled into the continuing resolution, which would extend government funding until March. Republicans have warned that any opposition from those five, who include Representatives Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, would be “pure politics.”

But there are other, fiscal reasons why the continuing resolution has a rocky future in the House, including fears that such a measure would have a negative impact on the Pentagon.

And even if the stopgap bill does manage to scrape by the House, its chances of passing through the Senate are slim to none, setting the stage for an ominously familiar experience to the one that preceded former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s exit.

“As we have said repeatedly, avoiding a government shutdown requires bipartisanship, not a bill drawn up by one party. Speaker Johnson is making the same mistake as former Speaker McCarthy did a year ago, by wasting precious time catering to the hard MAGA right,” Senate Democratic leaders said in a statement issued last week. “This tactic didn’t work last September, and it will not work this year either. The House Republican funding proposal is an ominous case of déjà vu.

“If Speaker Johnson drives House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the odds of a shutdown go way up,” they continued. “Americans will know that the responsibility of a shutdown will be on the House Republicans’ hands.”

Kamala Harris’s campaign is doubling down on mocking Donald Trump for his “weird obsession with crowd sizes.”

A new advertisement released Tuesday by the Harris campaign used video of Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, during which he ribbed Trump over his endless—and often baseless—bragging about how the crowds he draws are so much bigger than Harris’s.

Spliced into Obama’s brutal roast was the sound of crickets on top of footage of Trump’s half-empty arenas, with rallygoers yawning and looking bored. Ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate, the advertisement aired on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.

After Obama’s remarks at the DNC, Trump complained that the former president had “taken loose shots” and that he should be allowed to get personal too, amid his campaign’s desperate attempts to get him to “stick to policy.” Clearly, Obama’s comment had gotten under Trump’s skin, and that’s exactly what the Harris campaign is attempting to do with its new ad spot.

When it comes to Trump’s reliance on lame personal attacks, however, the Republican nominee is certainly compensating for something—whether it be deteriorating public speaking skills or his dearth of workable policy ideas.

Donald Trump’s shady new crypto venture is primed to make him and his family millions should he make it to the White House.

World Liberty Financial, or WLFI, a decentralized finance platform, promises to “put the power of finance back in the hands of the people,” but it’s actually looking a lot more like a get-rich-quick scheme for Trump and his sons, according to Judd Legum’s Public Information Substack.

The Republican nominee is the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate,” while Eric and Don Jr. are both Web 3 Ambassadors. Barron Trump, a freshman at New York University, is a “DeFi Visionary.” The company has gone to great lengths to disassociate from the Trump family in any formal capacity, according to a draft of the white papers obtained by CoinDesk, but it’s apparent that Trump’s family is a major part of WLFI’s inception—and most certainly its promotion.

Late last month, Trump posted the link to World Liberty Financial alongside a blurry edit of himself, with audio from one of his campaign speeches, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.” Wedged between their typical anti-immigrant slime, racist memes, and posts gushing over their father’s bravery, Eric and Don Jr. have repeatedly boosted WLFI’s posts announcing new additions to its team.

WLFI even appears to have adopted some of Trump’s rhetoric. Its mission, according to a recent post on X, is to “make crypto and America great by driving the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance.”

While WLFI purports to be a solution to the “rigged” finance system, it seems the Trump boys are the ones who stand to make a buck.

Seventy percent of WLFI’s governance tokens, which grant holders voting powers, will be reserved for “insiders,” according to the company’s draft white papers, leaving only 30 percent available for public purchase. Typically, governance tokens are used to fund a venture’s growth, but this abnormal distribution suggests that it could be a cash grab by the Trump family, according to CoinDesk.

WLFI’s tokenomics plans have not yet been finalized, one person close to the project told CoinDesk.

WLFI is already trying to get around strict Securities and Exchange Commission scrutiny by making its tokens “locked indefinitely,” or nontransferable. This is where Trump’s political ambitions turn WLFI into a blatant moneymaking scheme. Should Trump win the presidential election, he could install a new SEC chair who is far more friendly to cryptocurrencies than Gary Gensler, whom Trump has already pledged to fire. This would allow Trump and his family to “unlock” their shares without incurring the wrath of regulators.

Already, WLFI has given the Trump family some trouble. Last week, Lara and Tiffany Trump’s X accounts were hacked and used to promote a crypto scam designed to look like World Liberty Financial.

There are some concerns that WLFI itself could be vulnerable to hacks. The owner of World Liberty Finance LLC is Zak Folkman, who previously ran Dough Finance, a lending app that was hacked in July, losing its customers more than $2 million. It appears that some of WLFI’s code was lifted directly from the defunct Dough Finance.

Donald Trump is running his 2024 campaign on vengeance, even if his allies deny it.

In response to Trump’s violent threats against his political enemies over the weekend, CNN published a brief supercut of prominent Republicans trying to deny the former president’s appetite for revenge.

“Donald Trump has been the one that has been very clear,” claimed Senator Marco Rubio in July. “His vengeance is going to be by winning and making America great again, not going after his political opponents.”

“This is the new narrative by all the lemmings in the mainstream media this week: ‘Trump wants revenge and vengeance,’” said former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway in June.

“President Trump has said it himself, the best revenge is success,” said Senator Tim Scott back in May, going on to fight with CNN’s Abby Phillip, who attempted to offer an on-air fact-check to the South Carolina senator’s claims.

Though Trump did say in February that “my revenge will be success,” he has also made plenty of public calls to take revenge in the form of imprisonment, military tribunals, and execution. 

Over the weekend, Trump amped up his language around punishing his enemies. On Truth Social, he threatened to punish “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters and Corrupt Election Officials” to the “fullest extent of the Law which will include long prison sentences” if he believes they meddle in the election. At another speech in Wisconsin, he called for a violent mass deportation of migrants, stating that “getting them out will be a bloody story.”

Will Trump be held to account for his threats on the debate stage?

One of the architects of the conservative Project 2025 manifesto demonstrated on CNN Monday the many ways in which Donald Trump is tied to the project.

Speaking to Kaitlan Collins on The Source, the project’s former director, Paul Dans, admitted that he’s visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate several times and has spoken with Trump’s campaign staff there, including the campaign’s co-chair Susie Wiles.

Trump has tried desperately to distance himself and his campaign from the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, with little success. Collins pressed Dans, pointing out that six of Trump’s Cabinet members contributed to the document, along with some of Trump’s advisers, such as Peter Navarro and Johnny McEntee.

“And so some people say, ‘OK, well, 140 of his staffers worked on it. How can you say that he has nothing to do with it?” Collins asked Dans.

Dans tried to explain it away by saying Trump “personally didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Certainly, a lot of folks, you know, worked on it, came out of the Trump administration, but that’s natural for any Republican administration. You’re going to have the carryover for the next one,” Dans said.

Dans resigned as director of the project in July, thanks in part to Trump’s attempts to disavow the conservative manifesto and in part due to a power struggle for control over staffing in a possible second Trump term. But Dans’s resignation did not tamp down criticism from Democrats over the project’s aims, nor did it successfully give Trump any distance.

The project’s agenda items include everything from the dismantling of government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, to the implementation of national abortion bans and contraception restrictions. Trump has influenced the project, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, also has extensive connections to it, even writing the foreword to a book by one of the plan’s architects, Kevin Roberts. Project 2025 has become an effective attack line by Democrats, who have successfully pointed out that it’s a Republican wish list with disturbing aims.

In less than 24 hours, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance turned an idiotic, racist conspiracy theory about people of color eating neighborhood pets into an actual threat.

The Republican vice presidential candidate added fuel to the fire of the inane conspiracy on Tuesday, specifically targeting Haitian migrants—and Vice President Kamala Harris’s aid for the community—as the root cause for the imaginary problem.

“In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants,” Vance wrote on X. “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

But the utter lack of proof didn’t stop him from intensifying his target on the vulnerable population.

“Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here,” Vance continued. “That local health services have been overwhelmed. That communicable diseases—like TB and HIV—have been on the rise. That local schools have struggled to keep up with newcomers who don’t know English. That rents have risen so fast that many Springfield families can’t afford to put a roof over their head.”

Vance then shared a clip of Harris on ABC’s The View in which the vice president explained how the Biden administration had granted temporary protected status to “over 100,000 Haitian migrants” on the basis that they “need support” and “protection.”

But the MAGA Republican, who has become a political punchline for his weird and disturbing remarks since being announced as Trump’s number two pick, couldn’t empathize with the disenfranchised group.

“If you’re a reporter, or an activist, who didn’t give a shit about these suffering Americans until yesterday, I have some advice: Spare your outrage for your fellow citizens suffering under Kamala Harris’s policies,” Vance wrote. “Be outraged at yourself for letting this happen.”

Vance concluded by praising the bonkers, A.I.-generated images of Donald Trump holding kittens that have sprung out of this conspiracy.

“In short, don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing,” he wrote.

Alongside the violent rant, Vance—the husband of a second-generation immigrant—made simultaneous posts accusing the Haitians of “draining social services” and “generally causing chaos.”

The bonkers conspiracy appears to have sprung up from a Facebook post that contained no evidence of wrongdoing, according to the local newspaper, the Springfield News-Sun. Local police have not received any reports of pets being killed and eaten.

A recent report of an Ohio woman who allegedly killed and ate a cat added heat to the tall tale, though she turned out to be a U.S. citizen.

Donald Trump made an alarming promise to his conservative Christian supporters ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate. 

During a pre-debate prayer call hosted by the National Faith Advisory Board on Monday evening, Trump whined that Kamala Harris wanted to naturalize undocumented immigrants, and claimed that it would come at a steep cost to one group in particular. 

“Every day she is flooding our country with millions and millions of illegal aliens. She wants to make them citizens, she wants to have them vote,” Trump said.* “Which will destroy the voting powers of Christian conservatives forever.”

“There is no more, and there should be no more important voice than the voice of Christians,” Trump said. 

Trump is attempting to set up a false exchange: that the power of one group would diminish the power of another. And in the fascist tradition, he is using immigrants as a scapegoat. 

While Trump would like Christian conservatives to feel that their voices are the most important to him, the Republican nominee has repeatedly sidestepped some of the policies they’ve advocated, in an attempt to widen his appeal ahead of the election. 

With Trump’s pushing, the Republican Party completely abandoned its commitment to a federal abortion ban, a longtime project of the Christian right. While Trump’s current abortion policy stance still allows for the passage of the highly restrictive laws, his blatantly opportunistic shilling should not go unnoticed. To Trump, there is no voice more important than his own.

This isn’t the first time that Trump has made an unsettling comment directed at his Christian conservative base. The former president previously promised his Christian supporters that after voting for him in November, they would never need to vote again.

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” Trump said at Turning Point Action’s Believers’ Summit in July. 

When asked to explain the statement, he claimed that he was trying to motivate Christians, who rarely participate in elections—which is completely untrue.  

* This story originally misquoted the number Trump says.

The Trump campaign just lost yet another song from their shrinking catalog.

On Monday, musician Jack White announced that he was suing Donald Trump, his campaign, and Trump’s deputy director of communications, Margo Martin, for the unlicensed use of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” on a social media post of Trump boarding aircraft.

“This machine sues fascists,” White captioned an Instagram post of the legal complaint, a reference to Woody Guthrie.

The lawsuit, filed in New York, does not specify a specific amount of damages but does note that Jack and Meg White, who collectively comprise the band the White Stripes, “vehemently oppose the policies adopted and actions taken by Defendant Trump.”

Jack White promised the lawsuit last month, sharing Trump’s campaign video to his Instagram account with the text, “Don’t even think about using my music.” The original video, shared by Martin, was taken down by the time of publication.

Use of music in videos requires a separate and specific license from the one required for use at public, live events.

“If you want to use music in a video, you need a synchronization license,” U.S. intellectual property lawyer Jason Rosenblum told The Washington Post, referring to a type of license that requires direct negotiation with the publisher or musician. “If Trump’s campaign or whoever posted the video didn’t get those rights, the White Stripes should have a strong case against them.”

The roster of artists who have outright banned Trump from using their music is long and wide. Last month, Trump ticked off Swedish pop supergroup ABBA by using their music to advance his campaign without their permission. He also drew fury from the Isaac Hayes estate, Celine Dion, and Beyoncé for the unauthorized use of their music during campaign events and advertisements.

Other artists who have condemned the MAGA leader’s unauthorized use of their art for his political gain include Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, the Village People, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.