Georgia Election Workers Score Massive Win Against MAGA Website

Two Georgia election workers falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election have settled a defamation lawsuit with the far-right conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit.

After the 2020 presidential election, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were accused of committing election fraud and counting illegal ballots in a series of stories published to the website. The pair then sued the website for defamation, and The Guardian reported that the final settlement was filed on Thursday in circuit court in Missouri.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Freeman and Moss successfully sued Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for libel last year and won a judgment of $150 million.

The Gateway Pundit, along with Giuliani, repeatedly attacked Freeman and Moss even after the lies about them were debunked and the pair were found to have just been doing their jobs. The election-rigging conspiracy quickly spread among the right wing, with the likes of Sean Hannity and even Trump repeating them.

Jim Hoft, who founded The Gateway Pundit, refused to back down about the false claims, and his brother Joe, a contributor to the website, repeated the lies again at the Republican National Convention in August.

The lies led to death threats and harassment against the mother and daughter, and the two were forced to go into hiding after right-wing fanatics showed up at Freeman’s home. Moss’s son even received threats on his phone, and Freeman testified last year that she had nowhere to live.

“I was terrorized,” Freeman said during the trial against Giuliani last year. “I’d rather stay in my car and be homeless rather than put that on someone else.”

In that trial, Giuliani’s lawyer accused The Gateway Pundit of providing the basis for the false claims against Freeman and Moss. The pair also settled a lawsuit against the right-wing One America News last year, which issued an on-air apology afterward.

Thanks to Giuliani’s failed attempt to file for bankruptcy, Freeman and Moss could soon gain control over his assets. Hopefully, their victories will dissuade more right-wing personalities and organizations from throwing around false claims about next month’s election, but alas, the right isn’t exactly known for its introspection.

Donald Trump drifted in and out of coherency during an awkward, weaving speech Thursday at the Detroit Economics Club, where he ranted about tariffs and railed against government mandates on electric vehicles.

During a speech that stretched an hour and 55 minutes, Trump employed his typical “weave,” a catchall phrase the Republican nominee uses to explain scattered rambling so repetitive that it does occasionally reiterate the original point.

But while explaining his fears that Kamala Harris’s policies would cause domestic manufacturing to leave the United States, Trump seemingly got carried away by the tide of his own weave and swept out into a sea of complete nonsense.

“And, it’s so simple, I mean, you know. This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they wanted to land,” Trump said. “Or, he gets the … engines back—that was the first I realized, I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming—cylinders, no wings, no nothing—and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with a circle, boom!”

“Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?” Trump said, seemingly referring to President Joe Biden’s campaign events that took precautions for Covid-19, in an awkward non sequitur.

“He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill ’em up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. He couldn’t fill up the eight circles, I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, so beautiful to look at,” Trump continued.

Trump claimed that Biden “used to have the press stand in those circles, cause they couldn’t get the people. And then I heard we lost, no we’re never gonna let that happen again.”

“But—” he continued. “We’ve been abused by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries.”

Trump seemed to turn back to the subject at hand after being carried away by his gushing over billionaire technocrat Elon Musk and attacks against someone who is not running for president. As for his actual opponent, Trump quickly devolved into personal attacks that didn’t sound quite right either.

“I think she’s dumber than hell,” Trump sneered.

Trump then appeared to lose his train of thought as he complained about Democrats opposing the SAVE Act, a longshot Republican bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote in a presidential election—something that is already mandated by the federal government.

“Democrats don’t want voter ID, you know why because they want to cheat,” Trump said. “But they don’t wanna—I say, ohhh—they don’t wanna—when I first, I thought, I thought I was seeing things. I thought I was … like … I didn’t hear that when I first started this who—they’d say, ‘The Democrats will not approve voter ID.’ And it’s only gotten worse!”

Despite using a teleprompter, Trump often went off-script, and repeatedly seemed to get caught up in what he was saying. As the Republican nominee careened between subjects, he seemed to recall that he had talking points, but couldn’t quite nail down what they actually were.

“The word grocery—it’s a sort of simple word. It sort of means everything you eat. The stomach is speaking, it always does,” Trump said. “And I have more complaints about bacon, things going up. Double, triple, quadruple.”

Trump repeatedly got caught up over his choice of words. At another point, Trump continued to seem exceedingly insecure about his own incendiary rhetoric, as he attempted to deliver his fire-and-brimstone fearmongering about large foreign companies.*

“We allowed them to come in and raid and rape our country,” Trump said. “That’s what they did. ‘Oh, he used the word rape!’ That’s right, I used the word rape. They raped our country.”

Scattered in the drivel was plenty of misinformation. Trump falsely claimed that Harris hoped to “ban” gas-powered vehicles, even though her campaign has been a little less than clear on whether she plans to support Biden’s electric vehicle mandate (which is also not a ban by any means).

Trump did say one thing that rang true, though: “Our biggest threat to democracy is stupid people.”

* This story originally misstated what Trump was describing.

Attorneys representing Donald Trump have threatened legal repercussions against the judge overseeing the former president’s January 6 election interference trial, arguing against the scheduled release of more documents pertaining to special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page unsealed motion.

In a filing Thursday—just making the deadline to object, under seal, to the release of Smith’s redacted appendix—Trump’s team argued that there should be “no further disclosures” of Smith’s “cherry-picked and mischaracterized” evidence. If the court decides to release more information anyway, then Trump’s lawyers requested that Judge Tanya Chutkan delay doing so while the Republican presidential nominee weighs his litigation options related to her decision.

“If the Court decides to release additional information relating to the Office’s filing, in the Appendix or otherwise, President Trump respectfully requests that the Court stay that determination for a reasonable period of time so that President Trump can evaluate litigation options relating to the decision,” John Lauro and Todd Blanche wrote.

In the same filing, Trump asked Chutkan to limit the amount of evidence released ahead of the trial in consideration of the election schedule, a plea that has not swayed her decision-making in the past.

Shortly after the filing was made public, Chutkan issued a court order giving Trump’s team seven days to weigh in on the redactions, while also throwing his team’s threatening language back at them.

“For the same reasons set forth in its decision with respect to the Motion… the court determines that the Government’s proposed redactions to the Appendix are appropriate, and that Defendant’s blanket objections to further unsealing are without merit. As the court has stated previously, ‘Defendant’s concern with the political consequences of these proceedings’ is not a cognizable legal prejudice,” Chutkan wrote. “The court will grant Defendant’s request for a stay so that he can ‘evaluate litigation options’.”

It’s unclear what exactly the appendix would include, but it could offer insight into what former Vice President Mike Pence and other key witnesses shared with investigators, along with transcripts from the grand jury.

Reading between the lines of the filing, court reporters suggested that Trump’s attorneys were referring to a “writ of mandamus,” which would indicate their intention to have a higher court step in to undermine Chutkan’s authority in the case and prevent the appendix being made public.

Earlier this month, Smith’s team released an eye-opening report that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6, outlining what Smith described in the redacted document as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

The motion was broken into four separate sections: The first section outlined Smith’s case against Trump, while the second offered a roadmap to aid Chutkan in determining which actions undertaken by Trump were considered “official,” due to a July Supreme Court ruling that redefined executive protections by expanding the definition of presidential immunity.

The third section of Smith’s motion tied in how the principles will apply to Trump’s case, and the fourth section featured a conclusion requesting Chutkan rule that the actions outlined in the entirety of the document do not fall within the fresh definition of immunity.

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when they ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law.” She warned that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump might be pushing his loyal followers past their limits, according to new campaign contribution data.

On Wednesday, it was announced that Vice President Kamala Harris broke records, raising $1 billion for her campaign in less than 80 days on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, on Thursday, OpenSecrets and the Associated Press reported that Trump’s camp may be suffering from some donor fatigue.

According to new data, less than a third of Trump’s campaign contributions have come from donors who gave less than $200. Comparing his 2024 campaign through the month of June to the same period in 2020, Trump has suffered a steep 40 percent drop in small donors.

“I am sick of them asking for money,” voter Susan Brito of Florida, who gave dozens of donations in 2022 and 2023, told the AP. “I am disabled, you are sending me text, after text, after text.” Brito chose not to give to the Trump campaign this year.

In response to complaints from his base that they can’t spare the cash and plan to not donate, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt ignored the red flags and blamed the Democratic administration for a struggling economy. Meanwhile, Harris keeps finding new ways to energize her base and bring in new donors. Three-quarters of Harris’s donors in August did not contribute in the previous presidential election, according to her campaign.

Trump’s small-donor issue means that the Republican nominee will be forced to rely more and more on wealthy donors like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen to keep his campaign afloat.

Donald Trump’s call for CBS’s broadcast license to be revoked has quickly drawn a rebuke from the chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

“While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored. ​​As I’ve said before, the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage,” said Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement on Thursday.

Trump has been complaining all week about Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday. On Thursday, he escalated his attacks, calling for the network’s broadcast license to be revoked and for Harris to drop out of the presidential race because of an edited teaser clip used by the network.

“TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday morning, and then repeated the demand in remarks to the Detroit Economic Club later in the day.

The former president and convicted felon bucked a 56-year tradition by backing out of an interview with 60 Minutes, with his campaign giving conflicting excuses, including that he didn’t want to be fact-checked. The show exposed each and every one of those excuses on Sunday, giving him a brutal fact-check anyway.

Trump has long complained about news networks that slight him. After his presidential debate with Harris on ABC last month, he complained that it was rigged and called for that network’s broadcast license to be revoked. It’s pretty clear that Trump is trying not only to undermine critical coverage of himself but to intimidate news networks into giving him positive coverage. In his view, all media outlets should fawn over him like Fox News, even to the point of giving him favorable edits.

Kamala Harris’s campaign didn’t hold back Thursday after Donald Trump had yet another major meltdown about not debating the vice president.

Fox News announced Wednesday that it had sent both candidates letters inviting them to an end-of-October debate. Hours later, Trump posted a wild, all-caps rant to Truth Social, making it clear he has no intention of returning to the debate stage.

“I WON THE LAST TWO DEBATES, ONE WITH CROOKED JOE, THE OTHER WITH LYIN’ KAMALA,” Trump wrote.

“I ACCEPTED THE FOX-NEWS INVITATION TO DEBATE KAMALA ON SEPTEMBER 4TH, BUT SHE TURNED IT DOWN,” Trump ranted.

In reality, Trump has offered several excuses as to why there was no need for him to debate Harris again. Harris had previously accepted CNN’s invitation to appear in another presidential debate on October 23, but Trump claimed that it was “too late” for another presidential debate because early voting had already begun in some states.

The Republican nominee has also compared himself to a fighter with nothing left to prove, a claim he repeated in his rant Wednesday.

“THE FIRST THING A PRIZEFIGHTER DOES WHEN HE LOSES A FIGHT IS SAY THAT HE ‘DEMANDS A REMATCH.’ IT IS VERY LATE IN THE PROCESS, VOTING HAS ALREADY BEGUN—THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH! BESIDES, KAMALA STATED CLEARLY, YESTERDAY, THAT SHE WOULD NOT DO ANYTHING DIFFERENT THAN JOE BIDEN, SO THERE IS NOTHING TO DEBATE,” Trump fumed.

Trump also shoehorned another outlandish claim into his winding social media tirade: “I AM ALSO LEADING IN THE POLLS, WITH THE LEAD GETTING BIGGER BY THE DAY—AND LEADING IN ALL SWING STATES.”

A national New York Times/Siena College poll published Tuesday found that Harris held a slim lead over Trump. In swing states, Harris and Trump are in a dead heat, mostly within the margin of error, according to Emerson College Polling. Trump, of course, reportedly only checks the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports polls, which found that he had a two-point lead over Harris.

After Trump turned down Fox News’s debate offer, Harris’s campaign announced that she had accepted an invitation to do a CNN town hall on October 23.

In a statement Thursday, Harris’s campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon tore into Trump over his unwillingness to appear onstage with his opponent.

“After backing out of 60 Minutes and doing 27 straight interviews with conservative media, unfortunately it is clear Trump would rather cocoon himself in safe spaces and avoid real questions about his harmful plans and failed divisive leadership,” O’Malley said. “Trump fears another debate where Vice President Harris would hold him accountable in front of tens of millions of Americans.”

“Trump may want to hide from the voters, but Vice President Harris welcomes the opportunity to share her vision for a New Way Forward for the country. She is happy to accept CNN’s invitation for a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania.”

Georgia’s slate of pro-Trump election regulations are barreling forward, but their implementation is causing statewide problems that threaten to actually undermine the security of Georgia’s voting process.

With just 26 days until the election, finding people to actually enforce the new regulations remains one of the state’s biggest challenges, NOTUS reported Thursday.

“We actually, just yesterday, had a manager and an assistant manager quit,” Anne Dover, the election director in Cherokee County, told the outlet. “So yeah, it’s kind of challenging.”

Some of the new regulations—which passed with a 3–2 election board vote along MAGA lines and was fueled by a “wishlist” of documents from conservative county election officials—include handing county boards the authority to delay the certification of election results. The rules also mandate investigations into every vote count inconsistency, and, perhaps most troubling for the staffing problem, order all votes to be hand-counted after they’re electronically scanned.

“People don’t want to participate or even work in elections,” Cathy Hagans, the election director of Washington County, told NOTUS, which noted that finding people to hand-count ballots at the end of what will be an excruciatingly long day has become a serious concern for counties across the Peach State.

“Around here, in a little small town, it’s hard to recruit poll workers,” Hagans said.

On Wednesday, local Democrats lost their legal challenge against the swath of new “election integrity” rules, with a judge dismissing their effort to force Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to open an ethics investigation into the committee that crafted the regulations.

The new election certification rules set the stage for bedlam come November, especially considering that at least 70 election officials across 16 counties in key swing states, including Georgia, have been identified as pro-Trump election deniers.

Donald Trump praised the MAGA members of Georgia’s election board days before the August vote, describing Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”

According to the state election board’s website, the body is “entrusted with a variety of responsibilities and authority to protect all Georgians’ right to cast a ballot.”

Georgia has had the largest number of certification refusals since 2020 of anywhere in the country. The five-person board has been accused of other ethics violations, including one instance in which its Trump-friendly majority failed to give proper notice to their Democratic colleagues about a meeting that they used to advance changes to state election rules.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday got angry at a reporter who asked him about a Wall Street analyst’s estimate that Hurricane Milton could cost the state over $50 billion.

“How the hell would a Wall Street analyst be able to know? It’s been dark all day. What, you just going to know that you’re gonna do? I mean, give me a break on some of this stuff,” DeSantis said.

“I’m not saying there’s not going to be damage, there will be, [Hurricane Milton] cut across the state in a way that Helene did not,” DeSantis added.

Earlier this week, the discussion on Wall Street estimated the hurricane as having a “mid-double-digit billion dollar loss.” DeSantis downplayed the storm’s impact compared to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Ian in 2022, while noting that certain areas did suffer heavy damage.

“In terms of just right now, the morning after, if I think back to, like, Hurricane Ian, I don’t think that you’re looking at similar amount of damage to Ian, and then, with Helene, there may end up being more overall damage, there may not, I don’t know, but definitely the surge did not reach Helene levels,” DeSantis added.

Earlier this week, DeSantis refused to speak on the phone with Kamala Harris, saying such an overture “seemed political.” The vice president called out the Florida governor for engaging in “political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is to put the people first.”

DeSantis does seem to be keeping politics in mind in his response to the storm, staying away from outright praising the Biden administration’s help even as he boasts of being able to “leverage any resources available to us.” But it’s puzzling as to why he would get upset at a reporter for a legitimate question regarding the financial impact of the hurricane.

After spending days calling for CBS to release a full transcript of Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes, Donald Trump woke up bright and early Thursday with a new idea: leverage the public appearance as a reason to call for the Democratic presidential nominee’s concession in the race.

“A giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better.”

“A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal,” he continued, baselessly claiming that a network choosing to make its own edits is akin to a crime. “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!”

Attached to the post was a clip of Harris’s interview on the show compared to a teaser clip distributed by the network. The teaser clip spliced a section of another answer the vice president gave to a question related to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Between the edited and unedited version of Harris’s response to the original question, the two answers are starkly different.

But ultimately, that choice was not Harris’s.

“We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS,” an unidentified aide for the Harris campaign said in a statement to Variety.

And, at minimum, at least the vice president actually engaged in the sit-down interview with the legacy network. During its Monday night broadcast, CBS News’s Scott Pelley said that Trump backed out of his own scheduled interview with 60 Minutes at the last minute—the first time a presidential candidate had rebuffed the long-standing October tradition since 1968—revealing that the Trump campaign had “complained that we would fact-check the interview.”

“We fact-check every story,” Pelley said.

Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of major networks when he disagrees with their coverage of himself or his campaign. But that doesn’t mean his perspective on editing and censorship is buttoned up: Trump has enjoyed more than his share of selectively edited interviews on Fox, some of which have gone so far as to swap out his answers when discussing heavy topics such as serial sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The New York Times has taken the mainstream media’s sanewashing of Donald Trump to the next level, this time with an innocuous-sounding headline: “Trump’s Remarks on Migrants Illustrate His Obsession With Genes.”

The headline and corresponding article, published Wednesday evening, are actually obfuscating a far darker reality: Trump’s obsession with eugenics.

Speaking on conservative radio on Monday, Trump went on an incredibly racist rant about bloodlines while speaking about immigrants. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.”

But the paper of record minimized the true horror of that comment, summarizing that Trump was “invoking his long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”

The Times received plenty of flack online for its whitewashing of the Republican nominee’s dangerous lies about immigrants and his white supremacist rhetoric.

Several paragraphs in the Times article mentioned Trump’s remark last year about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” with the article’s author calling it “a phrase criticized by many for evoking the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis.” The author then discussed the role of the eugenics movement in politics in the past, without acknowledging its role in the present.

As Trump vows to enforce “bloody” mass deportations in a second term, what’s the point of painting his racist “bad genes” comments as benign?