MAGA’s New Outrageous Tim Walz Conspiracy Tied to Russian Disinfo Plot

Earlier this month, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was plagued by MAGA rumors that he had sexually groomed a former student of his. Now it appears that unfounded gossip was funded by a familiar source of misinformation: Russia.

Last week, an anonymous account on X, “DocNetyoutube,” claimed that he had spoken with a former student of Walz’s who had been abused by him during Walz’s tenure as a high school teacher and football coach. That same account had a history of elevating other conspiracies and, conveniently, was deactivated shortly after the accusations gained ground. It was unclear whether the account had been offlined by the account owner or if X had removed it.

Experts believe that the Russia-aligned network called Storm-1516 was behind the account, reported Wired. Storm-1516’s content relies heavily on faked primary sources, fooling American viewers into believing that fabricated documents, audio, and video support their baseless conspiracies. NBC News estimated that the prolific group—whose false narratives have lured politicians at the highest levels of government, including Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance—is responsible for at least 50 conspiracies in the last year alone.

A video circulated by another account on X elevated a deepfake of a man identifying himself as the former student, Matthew Metro. But the real Metro—who was tracked down by The Washington Post on Monday—dispelled the outlandish smear, telling the paper that he was dismayed to find out that a group had used his identity to fuel a vicious and false attack on Walz. Metro told the Post that he had attended one of the schools that Walz taught at but had never met him.

Last month, another pro-Trump misinformation superspreader was outed as a beneficiary of Russian state-controlled media. Tenet Media, which funded the work of popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern, folded under the pressure of a Justice Department investigation that found the company had been backed to the tune of millions of dollars by Russian state-controlled media.

Weeks later, another burgeoning MAGA outlet, Intelligencer—which has no apparent connection with New York magazine’s Intelligencer—was caught with ties to Russia. Some of Trump’s closest allies were tied to the outlet, including former Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiant. Nearly half of the company’s board members are former aides, surrogates, or fake electors for Trump’s previous campaigns.

The site’s financial backing did not indicate that it had received funds directly from the Kremlin. Instead, Intelligencer began as a subsidiary of a right-wing radio station in Australia that covers a host of conservative U.S. issues, including climate change denial and Covid-19 conspiracies, until George Eliason, an American journalist with experience in Ukraine, took over the website. In recent months, Intelligencer’s conspiracy-laden articles were shared by the likes of Alex Jones and former Trump aide Roger Stone.

Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans’ outlandish claims undermining election integrity could end up hurting him in the polls, according to one prominent Republican.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defended his state’s election processes during an interview with NewsNation on Sunday, after GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged Friday that there was something wrong with voting machines in Georgia’s Whitfield County. In a post on X, she had claimed that one “voter’s printed ballot had been changed from their selections made on the machine.”

Raffensberger told NewsNation that “spreading stories like that” would “really hurt our turnout on our side,” according to The Guardian. “You know, you can trust the results,” he added.

Raffensperger argued that Greene’s approach was “self-defeating”: If Republicans felt that claims of widespread voter fraud were actually true, they might be less likely to participate in an election.

It’s happened before: In 2021, according to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one in six Republicans said they were less likely to vote in the 2022 midterms because no “forensic audits” had been done on the 2020 election results.

Whitfield County has already had a record 7,500 people cast their votes, News Channel 9 reported Monday, part of the record-breaking voting surge since Georgia first opened its polls last week.

During an appearance on Face the Nation on CBS Sunday, Raffensperger said that the issue Greene was referencing had been due to voter error.

“What happened with Whitfield County was the lady thought she had pressed a certain, you know, selection, and then when she printed out the ballot, she noted that, she saw that, and so then she made them aware of it, and it got corrected,” Raffensperger said, adding that the rumor about a faulty machine was “blown out of proportion.”

Election officials say they have not encountered any issues with the voting machines.

JD Vance offered a strange defense Monday morning of Donald Trump’s recent comments calling Democrats and his other political opponents the “enemy within,” saying Trump’s words are “unfiltered” and “from the heart.”

Fox’s Bill Hemmer asked Vance what the former president means when he uses the phrase and why such language is necessary. Vance responded dismissively, claiming that Trump was just being himself.

“Donald Trump is unfiltered,” Vance told Hemmer. “I think this is one of the reasons why the campaign has gone well, is because he’s not doing a basement campaign strategy. He’s not just running on slogans. When people ask him questions, he speaks from the heart.”

Vance then claimed Trump’s comments on using the military against his enemies were actually in regard to the “rioters” protesting for racial justice during the summer of 2020.

“Why wasn’t law enforcement empowered to put down these riots, to reimpose law and order on American cities? That’s to me what President Trump is talking about here,” Vance said, claiming that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz encouraged “rioters” to attack police stations back then.

Hemmer then corrected Vance, pointing out that Trump specifically mentioned Representatives Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi by name. The Republican vice presidential candidate quickly pivoted, accusing Schiff and Pelosi of being “really part of weaponizing the Department of Justice against our country.”

“I think what Donald Trump is saying is, ‘Look, we’ve got the strongest country in the world. We’ve got the best people in the world, but we do have some broken leadership,’” Vance said, accusing Pelosi of “getting rich off of insider stock trades even as her own country has gotten poor.”

“We do have people on the left, not most people to be clear, but some people on the left who are encouraging violent responses to what we believe is going to be a Donald Trump victory in a couple of weeks,” Vance added. “That’s not okay, and I think it’s totally reasonable to point out that yes, we’ve got the strongest country in the world, but we do have some broken leaders in Washington, and it’s why we’re [winning] this race.”

Vance is clearly doing his best to spin and add some depth to Trump’s comments to make them appear reasonable, trying to sanewash what clearly is the former president characterizing his political opponents as national enemies that he plans to target if he returns to the White House. The Ohio senator also is trying to redirect the very real threat of Trump supporters resorting to violence if the former president loses in November by accusing liberals of the same thing, even though the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots have not faded from public memory.

Vance is only the latest Republican to dismiss Trump’s violent rhetoric, but others in the GOP were not able to invent such a detailed explanation. Meanwhile, ex-officials from the Trump administration, including his former secretary of defense Mark Esper, think the former president’s comments are alarming and should be taken very seriously.

Donald Trump was awarded with a “french fry certification” pin as he surveyed the damage of Hurricane Helene, in North Carolina Monday.

North Carolina Republican Chuck Edwards joined Trump at the event in Swannanoa, bestowing the Republican nominee with a fake award for his few hours pretending to work at a McDonalds Sunday.*

“I know that you perfected your skills behind the counter, a day or so ago, and it was my honor to present um, the uh french fry certification pin,” Edwards said, noting that he also owned McDonald’s franchises. The awkward ceremony was particularly dystopian given the destruction feet behind them.

Edwards previously published a list thoroughly debunking “myths” about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, many of which were largely perpetuated by Trump and other MAGA Republicans. Trump continued to criticize the efforts of FEMA and hurricane relief workers on Monday.

One reporter asked Trump if his constant slander of emergency relief efforts was actually helpful, in light of the recent arrest of an armed gunman who threatened FEMA workers. Trump told reporters, “Well, I think you have to let people know how they’re doing.

“If they were doing a great job, I think we should say that too because I think they should be rewarded.… If they’re doing a poor job, we’re supposed to not say it?

“These people are entitled to say it,” Trump said, implying that making threats against federal employees was well within their rights as Americans.

Trump continued to claim that FEMA had no money because it had been spent on “illegal migrants” and “terrorists.”

* This article originally misidentified the city where this event took place.

Governor Ron DeSantis’s top deputies directly ordered a Florida Health Department lawyer to prosecute television stations for airing political ads about protecting abortion rights in the state.

According to a sworn affidavit from John Wilson, general counsel for the Florida Department of Health, on Monday, DeSantis’s office directed him to send prewritten cease and desist letters to TV stations that aired political ads supporting Amendment 4, a ballot initiative to increase abortion access.

“I received drafts of the letters directly from Sam Elliot, Assistant General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, earlier that day,” wrote Wilson in his affidavit. “Ryan Newman, General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, and Jed Doty, Deputy General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, directed me to send them under my name and on the behalf of the Florida Department of Health.”

Wilson alleges that he was given the threatening prewritten letters to send to the stations on October 3, with no conversation about the letters beforehand. He then made the decision one week later to quit his job instead of sending more letters. “A man is nothing without his conscience,” wrote Wilson in his resignation letter.

DeSantis is part of a federal lawsuit by Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group leading the Yes on 4 campaign to expand abortion rights in the state. The lawsuit will now drop Wilson as a named defendant.

“This affidavit exposes state interference at the highest level,” said Lauren Brenzel, campaign director of Yes on 4. “It’s clear the State is hellbent on keeping Florida’s unpopular, cruel abortion ban in place.”

It’s not looking good for DeSantis and his cronies, as a federal judge last week had tough words for the villains looking to take the pro-choice ads off of the air: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mark Walker.

Donald Trump thinks the answer to the Bronx’s ailing schools is “no transgender, no operations.”

The former president visited a Bronx barbershop with Fox and Friends’ Lawrence Jones in a segment that aired on Monday, and was asked by a local what he would do to improve the school system. Trump replied, “Well, we’re moving them back from Washington, where you have people who don’t care about New York, frankly.”

Trump launched into a brief rant about how he’d cut the Department of Education, claiming “half the buildings” in D.C. belonged to the federal department and that he’d cut it to “one person and a secretary to just make sure they’re teaching English,” which he has said on the campaign trail before. But then, he went off on a disturbing tangent.

“No transgender, no operations, you know they take your kid. There are some places. Your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl, OK. Without parental consent. What is that all about? And they talk about a threat to democracy, they’re a threat,” Trump said as Jones looked on.

“Without parental consent. And first when I was told that was actually happening, I said, ‘You know it’s an exaggeration.’ No: it happens, there are areas where it happens. We’re not going to let it happen,” the former president and convicted felon added.

Trump’s rant fits right into conservative plans, as outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto, to eliminate the federal Department of Education and curtail LGBTQ+ rights. For the record, there are no schools giving free, secret sex-change operations to children.

Eliminating the Department of Education is also a right-wing fantasy, which would deprive school districts around the country of vital federal funds. A president who unilaterally tried to shut it down would run into stiff resistance from Congress as well as state governments. Trump either doesn’t know this, or he’s just repeating what the people around him, many of whom have connections to Project 2025, keep whispering into his ear.

If the intention behind overturning Roe v. Wade was to save infant lives, it failed.

A new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that infant mortality in the U.S. worsened after the Supreme Court reversed its landmark ruling in June 2022, allowing states to implement their own abortion restrictions.

The death rate for infants with severe anatomical problems was significantly higher during six months by the end of 2023 than it had been prior to the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, researchers found. During that period, researchers also found three months when the country’s overall infant mortality rate had increased.

Medical experts saw the throughline: The Dobbs decision had prevented some women from receiving critical care for pregnancies that otherwise would have resulted in abortions.

“There’s a really straightforward mechanism here,” Alison Gemmill, a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times.

“Prior to these abortion bans, people had the option to terminate if the fetus was found to have a severe congenital anomaly—we’re talking about organs being outside of the body and other things that are very severe and not compatible with life,” Gemmill said.

But, with patients situationally forced to continue the pregnancy, “those babies would die shortly after birth,” Gemmill told the Times.

Stronger abortion restrictions may be on the horizon. Donald Trump, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to encroach on abortion access, from fighting for a national abortion ban to celebrating the advancing stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as in vitro fertilization.

Meanwhile, the lack of national protections for the critical procedure has spelled disaster for women in states that have already implemented draconian laws. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that even emergency abortions violate Texas’s extreme abortion ban, despite the law’s supposed emergency abortions clause, effectively ruling that women in the Lone Star State will never be able to receive abortion care—even if their lives depend on it.

Nearly one in five Republicans say that if Trump loses the election he should declare the results invalid, and do whatever it takes to assume office, according to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute published earlier this month. An even larger number support their party using violence to advance their political aims.

If Trump loses, there are quite a few ways he could try to fight his way into the White House. Politico speculated that the Republican nominee could potentially undermine the vote certification process, convince Republican-led state legislatures to appoint alternate electors, and lobby for a GOP-led House to accept his alternate electors, essentially allowing the House to choose the president.

Meanwhile, only 12 percent of Democrats surveyed said that if Kamala Harris loses, she should call the results invalid, and seize the office.

49 percent of Americans believe that Trump would use the office of president to become dictator, while only 28 percent hold a similar concern about Harris. While disturbing, it’s not particularly surprising, considering Trump’s explicitly authoritarian plan to enact massive deportations and undermine rights and public education. There’s also that pesky promise to become a dictator on “day one.”

The survey also found that Republicans were more likely to support political violence than Democrats, with 29 percent of Republicans believing that true American patriots may resort to violence to save the country, compared with only 8 percent of Democrats agreeing with that statement.

Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, told Axios that the results were particularly disturbing. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and these answers … are keeping me up at night,” Jones said.

Vice President Kamala Harris may have better odds in the presidential election than previously predicted.

A poll published Monday by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago suggests that Harris has more than a marginal lead in favorability over the Republican presidential nominee, but is actually surging by double digits.

The nationwide poll, conducted last week, found Harris’s favorability to be significantly higher than Trump’s, with 51 percent of registered voters viewing Harris as a favorable candidate compared to just 40 percent who felt the same about Trump. Independent voters, notably, were equally split on their opinions of Harris, while the majority of independent voters—58 percent—felt negatively about Trump.

Surveyed voters also leaned toward the Democratic presidential nominee on a wide range of issues. Harris led with voters by 20 percent on election integrity, by 12 percent on middle-class taxes, by 11 percent on natural disaster relief, by five percent on the national housing crisis, and by two percent on jobs and unemployment. Trump, meanwhile, led with voters on immigration and crime, which he led Harris by eight percent and five percent, respectively.

But perhaps no Democratic stance resonated more with voters than abortion, which saw Harris lead Trump by 23 percent.

Abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans that November, resulting in major midterm losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Post-election, at least some members of the conservative party had a stunning reversal, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”

But much of the Republican party, especially the MAGA movement, has refused to give it up. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, for one, has previously likened abortion to murder, and has supported efforts to strip abortion access away from women. In 2023, the Ohio politico called for a “minimum national standard” on abortion restrictions, and his run for U.S. Senate in 2022 included language on his website that described him as “100 percent pro-life.”

Trump, meanwhile, has made abortion a key component of all three of his campaigns, repeatedly promising over the last eight years to ban the medical procedure at every available opportunity. While in office, he expressed support for a bill that would have banned abortion nationwide at 20 weeks.

Since then, he has used scare tactics to spread disinformation about the procedure, erroneously claiming that Democrats support abortions “after birth”—otherwise known as murder. And Trump’s track record includes the most egregious offense against national access—the appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Elon Musk has promised to give away $1 million to one lucky registered swing state voter every day until Election Day. Now, critics and politicians are sounding the alarms over the legality of Musk’s scheme.

At a campaign event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Musk announced his America PAC’s $1 million bribe.

“We want to try to get over a million, maybe 2 million voters in the battleground states to sign the petition in support of the First and Second Amendment.… We are going to be awarding $1 million randomly to people who have signed the petition, every day, from now until the election,” said Musk.

This is just one more escalation in Musk’s ridiculous money-sink into Donald Trump’s election campaign. Musk has nearly entirely funded the Trump-focused America PAC, pouring $75 million of his own dollars into the Republican candidate’s voter outreach efforts.

It’s a federal crime to pay people to vote or to register to vote. According to a Justice Department manual, that includes both direct payments and lottery-style giveaways. If Musk was on thin ice with his promise to pay people to refer swing voters to sign the America PAC’s petition, now he might really be in trouble as he skirts the gray zone in election law.

“Elon Musk thinks your vote can be bought,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a Democratic event on Sunday, joining the chorus of people questioning the $1 million prize.

On Sunday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called Musk’s move “deeply concerning” and suggested that law enforcement should examine the ploy. “I think it’s something that law enforcement should take a look at. I’m not the attorney general any more of Pennsylvania, I’m the governor, but it does raise serious questions.”

According to Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor, though Musk’s previous actions through the PAC “were of murky legality,” he believes this prize “clearly illegal” because the only people eligible for the lottery are registered voters in battleground states.

To be eligible for the $1 million, one must have signed the America PAC petition in “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.” They also must be a registered voter and live in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

On Monday, Musk bragged that new Republican voter registration is crushing that of Democrats.

It would be such a shame if Democrats also signed Musk’s petitions and made themselves eligible for the giveaway …