Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, having dominated the past several news cycles by flying Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard without notice—a move his critics depict as a particularly cruel attempt to “own the libs” for political gain—has announced that he’s doubling down.

“We’ve got an infrastructure in place now. There’s going to be a lot more that’s happening,” DeSantis said Friday, according to CNN.

He noted that he plans to use “every penny” of the $12 million that Florida legislators had allocated to relocate migrants. Further flights are “likely,” and he is considering sending migrant buses like those Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey have used to shuttle thousands of asylum seekers to DC, New York City, and other urban Democratic strongholds, leaving officials and nonprofit workers scrambling to accommodate the newcomers.

He might even try and collaborate with Abbott, DeSantis said.

He denied reports, however, that some migrants had been misled about where they were headed and/or what awaited them on the other end—reports that have sparked Twitter accusations of “human trafficking.”

On May 22, 1962, Victoria Bell and her 11 children, ranging in age from two to 14, arrived in Hyannis, Massachusetts, after a days-long bus ride to Cape Cod from Little Rock, Arkansas. Amis Guthridge, an attorney and the leader of the southern segregationist group, the Capital Citizens’ Council, gave Bell $60 and paid for the family’s one-way tickets north. Bell was forced to care for her children with little support after her husband left and the local government cut off her welfare. In a photo from that time, she and her sons and daughters can be seen waving in front of a sign for the Cape Cod Community College, which had been turned into temporary housing for her and other families. “I hope my children get a better chance here,” Bell told the Boston Globe. The following day, Lela Mae Williams, a mother of nine from Huttig, Arkansas, disembarked from a Greyhound bus at a stop near President John F. Kennedy’s summer home in Hyannis. She had heard about “free rides” on a Louisiana radio station and been lured by promises of housing, job prospects, and a presidential welcome at their final destination.

It was all a cruel hoax.

Bell and Williams were among almost 100 people to be shipped under false pretenses to the resort town over the spring and summer of 1962 as part of a white supremacist campaign to send Black people from the South to northern cities. Overall, some 200 people were bused to Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities in Indiana, Idaho, and New Hampshire. The political ploy was a retaliation for the Freedom Rides from the previous year, when a group of 13 Black and white civil rights activists with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) embarked on southbound buses from Washington, DC, to protest continued segregation in interstate transportation despite the Supreme Court having ruled that it was unconstitutional. What became known as the “Reverse Freedom Rides” was meant to embarrass liberal politicians fighting for civil rights and presumably expose their hypocrisy by confronting them with the demand to live up to their values and assist the Black southerners. “We want to see if Northern politicians really love the Negro or whether they love his vote,” Guthridge said. He framed the unapologetically racist campaign as being beneficent and humanitarian and then underscored its basic intent: “And we want to acquaint the North, which has been making the South a whipping boy with some Southern problems.”

To embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people, southern White Citizens Councils started their so-called "Reverse Freedom Rides," giving Black people one-way tickets to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, and better lives.https://t.co/xLpTjxG0PD pic.twitter.com/voiPBbwRuN

— JFK Library (@JFKLibrary) September 15, 2022

Back in 2018, Mother Jones reported that payments made by a shell company to an American lobbyist for an Albanian political party might have originated in Russia. Over the next four-and-a-half years, we didn’t learn much more. But in a newly declassified assessment publicized on Tuesday, US intelligence weighed in. An administration official suggested the intelligence community believes the payments we reported on were part of a vast international effort in which the Kremlin dispensed at least $300 million to politicians and parties in two dozen countries.

In 2017 Lulzim Basha, then the head of Albania’s center-right opposition party, was running for prime minister. In a pro-Western country seeking European Union membership, Basha was a relative skeptic, criticizing the anti-corruption measures the crime-plagued country would have to adopt in order to join the EU. He was also ardently pro-Trump, calling to “Make Albania Great Again” and seeking access to the new US administration.

Basha’s party, the Democratic Party of Albania, or DPA, hired a lobbyist—a former Ted Cruz aide named Nick Muzin—to help him court Trump and Republicans in Washington. Muzin got Basha meetings with a few GOP lawmakers, a Breitbart interview, and entry to a June 2017 GOP fundraiser where Basha took a picture with Trump that he quickly disseminated in Albania as evidence of his access to the US president.

Around the same time, Muzin received a $500,000 payment connected to his Albanian lobbying. The origins of that money were opaque and disputed. Muzin and Basha gave differing explanations. But evidence suggested the money came via Biniatta Trade LP, a shell company registered in Scotland by two other shell companies, which were based in Belize. Biniatta, despite efforts to obscure its origins, appeared to have Russian roots, with ties to a series of other shell companies controlled by Russian citizens, we reported. Biniatta made payments supporting Basha’s party at the same time he had a controversial meeting with Russia’s ambassador to Albania and signaled he was more amendable to Russia’s anti-western aims than was the incumbent prime minister he was challenging.

Mother Jones’ report drew attention in Albania. Critics accused Basha of working for the Russians. In 2019, Albanian prosecutors charged him with money laundering and falsifying documents in connection with the matter. The case was later suspended under murky circumstances. Basha denied accepting Russian money. And his party has insisted it paid Muzin only $25,000, offering no explanation of why someone else would pay a US lobbyist hundreds of thousands of dollars to help the DPA. (Through a spokesman, Muzin said at the time he believed Biniatta Trade was a private company owned by supporters of the DPA.)

On Thursday morning, rail companies and union leaders reached a tentative deal that will avert a strike or lockout that could have begun as soon as Friday. The question now is whether union members will accept the deal when it is put to a vote.

As I reported yesterday, the sticking point in negotiations has not been pay. Instead, workers have been fighting for sick days and increased freedom from punitive attendance policies adopted by rail companies. Engineer Ross Grooters described it to me as a fight “for the basic right to be able to be people outside of the railroad.”

In a joint statement, the leaders of the SMART Transportation Division and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which together represent about half the workforce, said the tentative agreement would provide workers with “voluntary assigned days off,” as well the ability to take unpaid time off for medical care. In another win for workers, union leaders said healthcare costs would remain unchanged under the plan. Workers would still receive $5,000 of bonus payments and a 24 percent pay increase over five years under the most recent deal.

The tentative deal will now be voted on by union members. There are no guarantees it will be approved. Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers rejected an earlier agreement on Wednesday, and authorized a strike later this month. On social media, the reaction from workers to the most recent deal has been mixed with some expressing cautious optimism and others a sense that union leaders failed them. 

It’s baffling how many pundits and politicos want to weight in on this railroad deal before the rank-and-file have been able to see the details and decide if it’s acceptable.

Just hours after federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago on August 8 to seize highly classified national security documents, Rep. Paul Gosar urged a fight to the finish. “The FBI raid on Trump’s home tells us one thing,” the far-right Arizona congressman tweeted. “Failure is not an option. We must destroy the FBI.”

Three days later, an Ohio man named Ricky Shiffer donned tactical gear, armed himself with an AR-15, and went to the FBI field office in Cincinnati. After failing to breach the facility, he fled and later died in a shootout with law enforcement. Shiffer was a frequent user of Trump’s Truth Social site, where the ex-president has kept up steady attacks on political opponents and the Justice Department and FBI. Shiffer had posted about imminent violence, telling fellow Trump supporters to be ready “to jump into civil war.”

“People, this is it,” Shiffer wrote shortly after the Mar-a-Lago news broke. A Navy veteran who claimed he was also at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he called for stocking up at gun stores with “whatever you need to be ready for combat.” He also said “patriots are heading to Palm Beach” and should kill any federal agents who try to stop them.

Was Shiffer spurred to attack the FBI by the statements from Trump and Gosar? It’s hard to know, and that’s no accident. Shiffer’s actions point to a rhetorical method experts call “stochastic terrorism,” whereby a leader vilifies a person or group in ways likely to instigate random supporters to attack those targets, while the instigator maintains a veneer of plausible deniability. Trump made this form of incitement a hallmark of his presidency, galvanizing extremists by railing against and dehumanizing his “enemies.” The country saw the devastating consequences when his supporters stormed Congress to obstruct certification of the presidential election. And now a growing number of Republicans are emulating Trump’s technique.

“While these attacks may defy specific predictability,” threat assessment experts Molly Amman and Reid Meloy wrote in a 2021 study in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, “their likelihood is greatly increased by the public demon­ization process.” Repetition and saturation through social media and news coverage further amplifies the effect, they observed.

In a letter sent to the president on Wednesday, nearly half of American governors—all Republican—voiced their opposition to Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, announced last month.

“We fundamentally oppose your plan to force American taxpayers to pay off the student loan debt of an elite few,” they write in the letter.

The main argument is that Biden’s student debt forgiveness will harm lower-income families by forcing their hard-earned dollars to go to repaying the debts of America’s wealthiest, including high-salary lawyers and doctors who hold debt from graduate degrees.

“The top 20 percent of earning households hold $3 in student debt for every $1 held by the bottom quintile, generating a lopsided reality where the wealthy benefit at the expense of the working,” the governors write in their letter. “Simply put, your plan rewards the rich and punishes the poor.”

But this argument misses the fact that Biden’s debt forgiveness project includes two different elements aimed specifically at preventing America’s wealthiest from obtaining debt forgiveness, instead restricting the program to middle- and lower-income families.

Rail workers across the country may be on the verge of going on strike for the first time in three decades—a decision that would immediately cripple supply chains and cause billions in economic losses per day. Workers could walk off the job, or companies could lock them out, as soon as Friday if a deal isn’t reached. 

The dispute is not about pay, but the day-to-day indignities of working in the industry. Rail workers often don’t have weekends, get no sick days, and say that taking the time to care for themselves and their families can lead to being fired. As engineer Ross Grooters puts it, workers are “just fighting for the basic right to be able to be people outside of the railroad.”

The White House has been scrambling to try to avoid a strike that would upend the country’s economy in the lead-up to the midterm elections, and President Joe Biden has been in touch with unions and railroad companies, Politico reports. A shutdown could disrupt shipments of everything from coal and lumber to food and the chlorine used to treat wastewater. Amtrak trains that rely on freight carriers’ tracks are already being canceled.  

Failing to reach a deal by Friday does not guarantee a strike, since both sides could agree to extend negotiations. But administration officials are developing contingency plans to try to keep essential goods moving in the event of a shutdown, an outcome that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said is “not acceptable.”

Unionized workers and rail companies have been in contract negotiations for more than two years. In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board tasked with providing recommendations on how to end the dispute. Last month, the board proposed pay increases of 24 percent over five years, additional bonuses, and one extra personal day a year. It also called for lifting a cap on workers’ health care premiums, and did not back workers’ calls for sick days and less-punitive attendance policies.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Republican-led legislatures have passed anti-protest laws drafted by an extreme right corporate lobbying group in a third of all American states since 2018, as part of a backlash against Indigenous communities and environmentalists opposing fossil fuel projects, new research has found.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) helped draft legislation criminalizing grassroots protests against pipelines, gas terminals, and other oil and gas expansion projects in 24 states under the guise of protecting critical infrastructure.

ALEC, which is funded by rightwing state lawmakers, corporate sponsors and trade groups, and wealthy ideologues, creates model legislation on a whole range of conservative issues such as gun control, abortion, education funding and environmental regulations.

The laws were passed in 17 Republican-controlled states, including Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, Kansas, West Virginia and Indiana, where protesters now face up to 10 years in prison and million-dollar fines, according to a new report from the nonprofit Climate Cabinet.

This story was published in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

As she opened her $1,600 property tax bill in February, Edith Baltazar suddenly lost her appetite for the eggs she’d prepared for lunch with her daughter. Her thoughts raced: Would their home be taken away if she couldn’t pay it?

Baltazar’s daughter wept. The family would have to make a difficult decision: the property tax or $2,000 for diabetes medication.

The taxes won.

“Sometimes you have to choose—pay your property taxes instead of paying your water bill and everything else,” said Baltazar, recalling the stressful experience in a July interview.

“I just need some space” is a disingenuous way to tell a romantic partner you’re Just Not That Into Them. As the top Michigan court ruled last week, it’s also a disingenuous way to attempt to remove from the Michigan midterm ballot an abortion-rights referendum that received 325,000 more voter signatures than the required 425,000. 

But that’s what Citizens to Support Michigan Women and Children argued last month in a complaint to Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers. The anti-abortion group alleged the proposed ballot measure text, which sought to explicitly insert into Michigan’s constitution reproductive rights up until fetal viability, lacked enough spacing between words, rendering the verbiage into “groupings of letters that are found in no dictionary and are incapable of having any meaning.”

To be clear, the amendment is at the very least legible. Restaurants and magazines probably shouldn’t employ the ballot measure’s maker to design their menus or page layouts, but it’s not the “hodgepodge of nonsensical gibberish” that Citizens to Support Michigan Women and Children made it out to be.

Part of the proposed amendment to the Michigan constitution.

AP

Dear Gov. Greg Abbott,

Was it already a year ago that you declared Texas’ “Goal Number One” was to “eliminate rape,” after a reporter asked how you could justify signing a 6-week abortion ban without rape exceptions? How’s that going for you?

Or, more specifically, how’s it going for the Texans who report an estimated 13,500 rapes to their local authorities annually, according to the FBI’s most recent crime stats? Did you know that’s a vast undercount, since 90 percent of Texas survivors never report to law enforcement, much less identify their experiences as sexual assault, given the social stigma and victim-blaming around it? 

Did you have those numbers in mind this week, when you said during a taping of Lone Star Politics that your state’s abortion laws didn’t need a rape exception, because survivors “can get the plan B pill that can prevent pregnancy from occurring in the first place”? Do you know how much you sound like Todd Akin? Do you realize that emergency contraception must be taken within 5 days, costs up to $50, and is believed to work less effectively for those with a higher body mass index? 

While we’re on that topic, how do you feel about the right to contraception, which 195 of your Republican colleagues in Congress voted against codifying on July 21? Did you know that the anti-abortion movement is explicitly targeting birth control next, by expanding the definition of abortion to include contraception? Is that where you plan to draw the line, after years of helping anti-abortion activists push through their agenda in Texas?

The US Department of Veterans Affairs will begin offering abortion services for the first time, opening up new options for veterans and other VA beneficiaries whose pregnancies resulted from rape or incest or otherwise pose a threat to their health. Under a new Biden administration interim rule that takes effect immediately, pregnant veterans and their eligible family members will be able to receive abortion counseling at VA hospitals. Those that qualify will be able to get an abortion, regardless of state laws. 

The VA is preparing to provide abortions services in “as many locations as possible,” the department announced Friday. VA doctors will have case-by-case discretion to decide, along with their patients, when a pregnancy puts a patient’s health at risk. Those who seek abortions under the rape or incest provisions won’t be required to provide a police report; self-reporting will be considered sufficient evidence.

VA secretary Denis McDonough called the policy shift a “a patient safety decision.” Fifteen states currently ban abortion in all or almost all cases, and some states—like Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma—don’t allow exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. People who want or need to end their pregnancies in those states currently must travel elsewhere or seek out abortion medications online, a legally gray area.

“We came to this decision after listening to VA health care providers and Veterans across the country, who sounded the alarm that abortion restrictions are creating a medical emergency for those we serve,” Shereef Elnahal, the VA’s under secretary for health, said in a statement. “Offering this care will save Veterans’ health and lives, and there is nothing more important than that.”

The shift in policy brings the VA in line with the Defense Department, which offers abortions to military service members in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life, according to the Washington Post. But the services are little-used: Annually, fewer than two dozen service members receive abortions at military hospitals, with others seeking care from private clinics. About 300,000 women of childbearing age currently receive health care through the VA.

Intermingled with top secret, secret, and confidential documents that federal agents seized from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month were more than three dozen empty folders marked “classified,” according to a court filing unsealed today. Still more empty folders were labeled “return to staff secretary/military aide”—a reference to the White House official responsible for the flow of documents to the president.

The disclosure of so many empty folders raises questions about whether the FBI recovered all the sensitive government documents it was seeking. According to the unsealed filing, agents found classified documents mixed in with news clippings, books, clothes, gifts, and hundreds of other government documents and photos without classification markings. 

Trump’s attorneys are trying to convince a federal judge in West Palm Beach, Florida, to appoint a “special master” to decide whether any of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were subject to executive privilege or attorney-client privilege—even though FBI says its document screeners have already reviewed them. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice and intelligence officials are reviewing the classifications of the recovered documents and starting to assess the potential risks their mishandling poses for national security, according to Politico. The DOJ is investigating Trump for potential violations of the Presidential Records Act, the Espionage Act, and obstruction of justice.

Read the list of recovered documents here.



A few hours before President Joe Biden delivered his fiery speech calling former President Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans” representatives of “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Trump went on a conservative radio show and seemingly did his best to prove Biden’s point.

Speaking to Wendy Bell, an independent talk-radio host, Trump insisted, as usual, that he won the 2020 election—the strategic “Big Lie” his advisors planned even before voting took place. He said that if he runs again and wins the presidency, he would look “very, very favorably” at full pardons, plus a government apology, for the rioters who stormed the US Capitol and attacked police officers on January 6 in their attempt to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

In a new development, Trump added that he was financially supporting some of the people prosecuted for their involvement in the mayhem.  “They were in my office actually two days ago. It’s very much on my mind. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them,” Trump said. 

Later that night, in a speech reportedly motivated by lingering claims of election fraud ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, Biden condemned the Capitol rioters in scorching, abstract language, calling on listeners to defend democracy against the threat posed by Trump and his millions of supporters. “We can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American. They’re incompatible,” Biden said in his prime-time address. “We can’t allow violence to be normalized in this country. It’s wrong. We each have to reject political violence with all the moral clarity and conviction this nation can muster now.”

Ten times during his speech, Biden singled out Trump’s supporters as “MAGA Republicans,” a group he said was “not the majority of Republicans” but a more extreme faction that threatened US democratic traditions. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution,” he said. “They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election…They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fanned the flames of political violence.” 

After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state officials in February to launch child abuse investigations targeting parents who helped their transgender kids get gender-affirming health care, a 14-year-old trans girl became so anxious about the prospect of losing access to her medications that she was pulled out of school and hospitalized for days. Some doctors and pharmacies around the state stopped offering teenagers life-saving puberty blockers and hormone treatments. A mental health provider in Austin abruptly withdrew care from a suicidal trans boy, leaving his parents to sleep on his bedroom floor night after night to ensure he didn’t kill himself. Many families fled the state.

Those are just some of the stories in a legal brief submitted to a state court last week on behalf of two LGBTQ-focused nonprofits and 13 Texas families with transgender kids. The families are begging the court to make permanent a prior temporary injunction prohibiting state officials from investigating parents under Abbott’s order. Although Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services hasn’t yet ripped any trans children in Texas from their homes and sent them to foster care, the families argue its investigations have already had tragic consequences.

Since Abbott’s directive took effect, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), one of the nonprofits cited in the brief, has received at least 60 reports from families struggling to obtain health care for trans children. Some doctors reportedly denied prescriptions for kids at the onset of puberty, hoping that it might be legally safer to offer them treatment at a later point. The nonprofit is working with 27 families in two metro areas who could not obtain puberty blockers, reversible prescriptions that give trans kids a chance to explore their gender identity as they grow older while temporarily delaying the puberty changes in their body that could make their gender dysphoria worse. Equality Texas, the other nonprofit in the brief, says kids have been turned away by doctors or denied prescriptions at pharmacies in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and the city of Garland.

Families say they’re also afraid to get their trans children other types of health care, worried that the kids’ gender identity and medical history might become known to the hospital and be shared with state authorities. According to the brief, when one trans kid went to a hospital for emergency psychiatric treatment, hospital staffers reported the mother to state officials, who accused her of child abuse. In another case, a trans child almost slept in a hallway at a mental health facility because the facility, citing legal risks, didn’t want to admit the kid to a ward. TENT intervened.

“As a result of losing healthcare,” the families in the brief saw their kids experience “a variety of debilitating symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and thoughts of self-harm.” The 14-year-old girl I mentioned, identified as A.P., was so “paralyzed with anxiety” that she was pulled out of eighth grade and had to finish the academic year at home. A nonbinary teen identified as C was devastated when their school cited the governor’s order as a reason to rescind approval of a learning unit about nonbinary gender identities, which the teen had hoped would help bullies at school become more understanding. A 9-year-old started crying when their parents told them to no longer talk publicly about being trans. “The child has since expressed fear of being…put up for adoption, sharing the heartbreaking worry that ‘nobody would adopt me because I am trans,'” the brief says.

Donald Trump’s plan to exact revenge on Big Tech—and make billions by launching his own social media empire and taking it public—was always going to be a long shot. And while it’s not yet dead, the obstacles are mounting.

For starters, Trump Media & Technology Group is reportedly not making payments to vendors. Last week, Fox Business reported that RightForge, an internet hosting company that markets itself as friendly to conservative customers who can’t find hosting elsewhere, has not been paid since March. That’s no small matter; RightForge is reportedly providing much of the technical underpinning of the TruthSocial platform—and the company is apparently owed as much as $1.6 million. A representative for TMTG did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones, but it would not be altogether surprising if TruthSocial is facing a cash crunch. Making money running a social media business is, at best, a dicey proposition. Twitter, which has more than 230 million users, managed to lose $270 million last quarter. TruthSocial has perhaps 2 million active users (Trump himself has 3.9 million total followers).

But the plan was never to have TruthSocial pull itself up by its bootstraps, making its way on whatever revenue it could scrape together. From the beginning—the nascent media business was announced last September—Trump’s goal has been to take the whole operation to the stock market, where (theoretically) huge sums of money can be raised from investors. But Trump’s toxic post-January 6 reputation has made that more difficult; in the wake of the insurrection, a number of financial institutions cut ties with him, closing his bank accounts and swearing off any more lending. With no big banks to back an IPO, Trump turned to something called a SPAC—a special purpose acquisition company, or a blank-check company—to take TMTG public. The idea is to merge his company with a company that is already public, but has no business to speak of. That would short-circuit the need to have a lengthy IPO. But it also offers a lot of opportunities for the deal to run into trouble, which is what appears to be happening now.

Last September, Trump announced TMTG would merge with Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a SPAC company that had gone public and was looking for a partner. After the proposed deal was revealed, DWAC’s share price rocketed above $97. It has since fallen below $30, where it currently sits. The deal, which caused such excitement initially, was supposed to happen quickly. Like most SPACs, DWAC has rules in its organizing charter that make it clear that the company’s founders have to find a merger partner expeditiously, or else give back the money they raised from investors. The deadline for DWAC to make its merger with TMTG happen is Sept. 8. 

DWAC”s founders have asked investors to approve an extension of that deadline—and on Sept. 6, shareholders will be able to vote to give the company another year to complete the deal. There is no guarantee that investors will approve the deadline extension—although most would likely lose money if the company was forced to shutter itself and return the funds it had raised in its IPO.

Representative-elect Mary Peltola just made history. With a 51-49 upset victory over ex-governor Sarah Palin, confirmed Wednesday by the state’s Division of Elections, Peltola has won Alaska’s sole seat in the House of Representatives—making the former state legislator and fisheries manager the first Alaska Native person elected to Congress. She succeeds longtime GOP Rep. Don Young, a family friend whose death in office earlier this year triggered a special election. In March, when Young died, Peltola was a fairly obscure ex-politician vying with more than 50 challengers to finish his term. By August, polls pegged her as a clear favorite over the Trump-endorsed Palin, whose celebrity kept her at the top of early polls.

Peltola’s win was more than one kind of first. She also becomes the first Alaskan to win a ranked-choice election, a system that sends votes to second-choice candidates when voters’ favorites are knocked out. She joins a tiny club: Alaska is just the second state to adopt the system, which supporters call a “bulwark against extremism,” and this race was the state’s first to use it.

That change came into play when prominent independent Al Gross withdrew from the race unexpectedly—after landing one of four spots in the general election. Gross, Democrats’ favorite in Alaska’s 2020 Senate race, wouldn’t commit to caucusing with the Democratic Party. But his largely centrist voters broke for Peltola, and his withdrawal left a lopsided ballot, splitting conservative voters between two Republican candidates.

Peltola’s biggest challenge might have been Palin’s unmatched celebrity. Although Palin hasn’t held office in Alaska since 2009, when she abruptly resigned her governorship, she’s still Alaska’s best-known politician on the national stage. And Palin’s been a vocal player in the Trump movement, winning the ex-president’s consistent backing—Trump went as far as campaigning for her hours after the FBI’s August raid of his Mar-a-Lago home.

Alaskans, in any case, were keen to participate. State officials announced that they’d counted nearly 200,000 ballots in the open primary, the third-highest primary turnout in state history. There’s any number of reasons that could be: Palin’s notoriety likely drew both supporters and opponents, and the governorship is also on the ballot, with Republican incumbent Mike Dunleavy facing strong Democratic and independent challengers. GOP senior Sen. Lisa Murkowski is up for re-election as well—after landing a place on Trump’s enemies list by voting to convict him for his role in the January 6th attacks on the US Capitol. (Murkowski and her Trump-backed primary opponent, Kelly Tshibaka, both advanced to November’s general election.) The state has also kept the process remarkably accessible, with many voters able to vote early both by mail and in person, a key consideration for Alaskans in distant and rural areas.

We know what Donald Trump did: He absconded from the White House with classified and top secret documents that belonged to the US government; he mishandled these highly sensitive records in his Mar-a-Largo lair (see this photo); he resisted the efforts of the government to retrieve these records; he employed a legal team that falsely certified that all classified material had been returned; and his actions prompted the Justice Department to investigate whether he and his crew obstructed justice or violated other federal laws, including the Espionage Act. 

The big question is why. Why did FPOTUS, as he has been dubbed in Justice of Department court filings, run off with the most classified of documents, including records based on confidential human sources? It seems clear that this was no accident. Had it been inadvertent, Trump and his aides would have quickly responded to requests from the National Archives to return the goods, and they would have sent back all the requested material, not merely a portion. And if they had errantly not returned the full complement of super-secret papers, they presumably would have snapped-to and FedExed the rest back once informed by the Archives and the FBI that the former guy still improperly possessed hush-hush documents from his reign. 

Though one can never discount incompetence in the course of such matters, the known evidence suggests Trump really, really wanted to keep these papers. In its legal filings following the FBI raid on Trump’s club, though, the Justice Department has not presented its view of Trump’s motives. But that hasn’t stopped a frenzy of speculation on the internet. Nor should it. Given that Trump ran for president in 2016 charging that Hillary Clinton had harmed national security by using a personal server for her email when she was secretary of state and vowing that he would “enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information,” this scandal is yet the latest sign of the brazen hypocrisy and blatant corruption at the root of his MAGA demagoguery and its embrace by the Republican Party. This affair warrants full examination, and that includes the reasons for Trump’s apparent flouting of the law. So let’s look at a few possible explanations. 

The Double-Agent Theory. The most outlandish notion is that Trump hung on to these papers because he wanted to sell or give these secrets to another government. The Russians? The Saudis? He’s either an operative in cahoots with a foreign power or an operator who wants to cash in. Though Trump has a record of slipping classified information to Moscow, it’s difficult to imagine him plotting to sell secrets. That would entail a fair bit of organizing and hard work. It’s not easy being a spy. And there are less troubling ways for FPOTUS to make a bundle these days. Trump has been pocketing money from the Saudis for hosting golf tournaments. (Jared Kushner’s private equity fund banked a whopping $2 billion from a fund controlled by Mohammad bin Salman, the murderous Saudi leader). Trump may want to share top US government secrets with certain overseas governments because he feels an affinity for them or their leaders. (See Vladimir Putin.) But assuming he read these documents—or was briefed on them and paid attention—he could pass along the information without having to possess the records themselves. 

They’re Mine! Throughout his presidency, Trump demonstrated that he’s a big believer in that old French saying, l’etat est moi. He was not the custodian of the US government and the servant of the national interest; he was the government and his interests were the government’s interests. In this warped view, all these records belong to him and exist for his benefit. He has exclusivity and can control how they are used. Maybe he believes some of these records could help him prove one of the scads of untrue conspiracy theories he has promoted over the years. Perhaps he wants to use them for a memoir. Or to show them off to his pals in the Mar-a-Lago buffet line? Or one day place them in an exhibit in his presidential museum? (Will he charge his MAGA followers an entrance fee?) Why should anyone else possess his love letters with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un? Spite is a large part of Trump’s psychological algorithm. It’s not a stretch to envision Trump, scorned by the voters and fired from the presidency, defiantly hanging on to documents he was not allowed to keep and shooting the bird at the (Deep State!) bureaucrats and intelligence community he despised. Mine, mine, mine.

Most Americans are unfamiliar with the unique experience of hoarding classified documents. But thanks to Donald Trump’s apparent habit of doing exactly that, we now have photographic evidence of what that looks like—or at least how the former president did it at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

The Justice Department, in a late-night filing on Tuesday, included a photo of just some of the documents seized at Trump’s Palm Beach club. The image—described in the filing as a “redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the “45 office”— shows several documents clearly and boldly labeled “Top Secret SCI.” Other documents appear to be obscured in order to conceal their content. To the right is a box these items were apparently stored in; it also included a framed Time magazine cover featuring Trump. All of this rests upon what this writer finds to be ugly, embarrassingly outdated carpeting. Meanwhile, Trump seems upset that the photo makes him look messy.

But beyond the photo, the most damning allegation in the DOJ’s filing is the assertion that government documents had “likely” been concealed and that federal investigators had “multiple sources of evidence” indicating that Trump aides had failed to turn over all the requested documents. The filing was a response to Trump’s latest demand to appoint an independent special master to review the seized material. The DOJ opposes that request, arguing that it would be inappropriate and significantly harmful to “important governmental interests, including national security interests.”

This is not a good look. Alas, the same Republicans who spent years screaming about some emails have registered the following shoulder shrug:

That TIME Magazine cover was huge threat to national security. https://t.co/yy0AOmxMEh

When Albert Diaz, then 41, took his seat in the Social Security Administration’s hearing room in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in October 2011, he had to lower himself onto his left buttock to avoid stabbing pain in his right leg. His dominant arm, the right one, was locked in a brace to keep it from curling in toward his body. He shook uncontrollably, a side effect of an electrical stimulation device implanted in his spinal cord to manage relentless pain. Three years earlier, Diaz had fallen backward three stories down an elevator shaft while working as a maintenance director in a luxury apartment building. Since the accident, his family of nine had relied largely on his wife’s teaching salary. His application for federal disability benefits was denied, and after waiting a year for a hearing, he’d come to appeal that decision before an administrative law judge (ALJ).

During the half-hour hearing, the judge asked him whether he attended church or belonged to any clubs, what TV shows he liked, and if he had any hobbies. They talked about his pain and how his family has to help him bathe, get dressed, and shave. Following his testimony, a vocational expert spent a few minutes testifying about what someone in Diaz’s condition could do for work. The conversation went like this: First, the judge asked the expert to imagine a hypothetical person of Diaz’s age, education, and work experience. Now, she said, imagine that this person can do light work, but the light work is limited. “There would be a bilateral lower extremity push/pull limitation,” she clarified, “occasional climbing, balancing and stooping but never on ladders, never kneeling, crouching or crawling. There would be a bilateral, overhead reach limitation, a need to avoid vibration and hazards.”

The judge then asked the vocational expert whether there were any jobs, anywhere in the economy, suited to such a person. Considering only the factors the judge had described, the expert answered that the person could be a “greeter/host,” and indicated that there were about two or three hundred such jobs in northeastern Pennsylvania. Or maybe a “price marker”—who attaches price labels to merchandise—1,100 to 1,200 jobs.

Two months later, the judge denied the claim, citing her belief that Diaz was able to do things like “perform occasional climbing, balancing, and stooping”—which is to say, she thought he could still work. In the nearly eight years it would take him to successfully appeal that denial, Diaz lost his house.

With a bite out of every paycheck, workers pay into the federal system of Social Security Disability Insurance just in case something happens that makes them unemployable. (A parallel program, Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, provides payments to low-income people with disabilities). Of the roughly two million disability claims the SSA receives each year, two-thirds are initially denied. Those who appeal get their claims reconsidered, and if they’re denied again, which most are, they go before an ALJ. It’s the claimant’s best chance for a reversal—last year, slightly more than half of such claims were approved.