Crude is trading near $100 a barrel. Diesel just cracked $6 a gallon for the first time in American history. Costco is rationing motor oil and its price has nearly doubled overnight. And Trump’s own answer, when asked when relief is coming, was to tell Americans not to expect it until after they’ve already voted in November.

Costco has begun rationing motor oil and sharply raising its price as a combination of war-driven crude shortages and Middle East shipping disruptions send oil markets into their worst stretch in years, just weeks before the midterm elections.

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What’s Actually Happening at Costco

Ten quarts of Costco’s Kirkland Signature full-synthetic motor oil used to cost $30, with no limit on how much you could buy. That oil now costs $57.99, nearly double, and Costco has started limiting purchases to two containers per customer per week.

The mechanism behind the price spike is straightforward once you understand how oil refining actually works: motor oil comes from the exact same barrel of crude as gasoline and diesel. With crude oil trading around $100 a barrel, refineries make significantly more money turning that crude into fuel than into the motor oil sitting on Costco’s shelves. Motor oil production has also gotten more expensive on its own terms, as modern engines demand more sophisticated oil chemistry, more rigorous testing, and licensing fees automakers charge to put their branding on the box.

Why Oil Markets Are Spiraling

This isn’t happening in isolation. It’s the direct result of the ongoing US and Israeli war with Iran and the resulting fight over control of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical oil shipping chokepoints. That conflict alone has been driving prices upward for months.

Now it’s getting worse on multiple fronts simultaneously. Satellite imagery has shown smoke near Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, according to Reuters, a pipeline the kingdom relies on specifically to reroute its crude exports around Hormuz when that strait becomes too dangerous to use. If that pipeline goes down too, there’s no easy backup left.

At the same time, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi forces have reached the island of Perim in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, according to NPR, another critical Middle Eastern shipping lane that, if disrupted, would send further shockwaves through global oil supply chains. Between Hormuz, the Saudi pipeline, and now Bab el-Mandeb, nearly every major route oil has to reach global markets through the Middle East is under some form of active threat at the same time.

Diesel Just Hit a Record High

The consequences are already visible at the pump. Diesel prices have cracked $6 per gallon for the first time in American history, sitting at $6.06 according to AAA, an 8-cent jump in a single day and a 21-cent increase over the past week alone. That’s not a slow drift upward. That’s a price spiraling in real time, with diesel underpinning the cost of trucking, shipping, and virtually every physical good that reaches store shelves in the country.

Trump’s Own Answer: Don’t Expect Relief Until After You’ve Voted

Here’s the line that should define this story. Asked directly about when gas and oil prices might come down, President Trump said they won’t, not until after the midterm elections in early November.

That’s not a prediction forced out of him by hostile questioning. That’s the president’s own stated expectation, delivered in advance, that the pain at the pump and on store shelves will persist specifically through the exact window when voters are deciding whether to keep his party in power. Whatever the underlying geopolitical causes, actual wars, actual shipping disruptions, the administration’s own timeline for relief conveniently begins the moment ballots are already cast.

The Bottom Line

Crude near $100 a barrel. Diesel at a record $6.06 a gallon and climbing daily. Costco rationing motor oil at nearly double its previous price. Multiple critical Middle Eastern oil shipping routes under simultaneous threat. And the president himself telling Americans not to expect relief until the midterms are already over. Whether that timeline reflects genuine market realities or political convenience, it’s Trump’s own words setting the expectation, not reporters speculating on his behalf.

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Kip Talley runs the day-to-day office of Mike Collins, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee now facing Sen. Jon Ossoff in November. Slate has reviewed the group chat he was part of: roughly 30 people, including white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes and neo-Nazi figurehead Richard Spencer. Inside that chat, Talley wasn’t a silent member. He was actively working the room, telling everyone he was using his government contacts to spring a Holocaust denier from federal custody.

The chief of staff for Rep. Mike Collins, now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia after winning the June 16 runoff, was an active participant in a group chat that included two of the most notorious white nationalist figures in American politics, according to messages reviewed directly by Slate.

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Who Was Actually in This Chat

The group chat, titled “Research Group—Johnson ‘28?,” was organized by Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a notorious internet troll and Holocaust denier, and included roughly 30 members. Among them: Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist livestreamer known for Holocaust denial and open racism, and Richard Spencer, the figure credited with popularizing the term “alt-right” and who led the “Jews will not replace us” chant at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Kip Talley, then Collins’s deputy chief of staff before his January promotion to chief of staff, wasn’t a passive lurker. He was an active participant, using his position and government contacts on behalf of the chat’s own organizer.

What Talley Actually Did Inside the Chat

While Johnson sat in federal custody from November 2025 to February 2026, Talley told the group: “I’m going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention.” He followed up with something more specific: “I’m reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ. Trying to get him out.”

Talley described repeatedly checking in with jail officials and the U.S. Marshals Service on Johnson’s behalf, scheduling a phone call with him, arranging funds for his prison commissary account, and telling the group he’d “read a bunch of your messages” to Johnson and had built “a relationship with the officer and the U.S. Marshal so I should be able to call once a week now.” He left the group chat on May 2, after the effort to free Johnson had already run its course.

That’s not incidental membership in a group someone else set up. That’s a sitting congressional chief of staff actively coordinating with a chat full of prominent white nationalists, deploying institutional access, contacts at federal law enforcement agencies, on behalf of the very person who organized the group.

Talley’s Defense Doesn’t Address the Company He Was Keeping

Talley gave Slate a statement focused narrowly on his intentions, not on his membership in the chat itself: “I acted solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care. I was simply trying to help a suffering inmate connect with counsel. I did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat.”

Notice what that statement doesn’t do: it doesn’t explain why a senior congressional staffer was in a group chat with Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer in the first place, doesn’t dispute that he was, and doesn’t reconcile “I did not... coordinate with anyone else in the group chat” with his own message telling that same group he was “reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ” on their organizer’s behalf. Collins’s office declined to comment on the record.

This Isn’t Collins’s First Brush With This World Either

This is the third staffing controversy to hit Collins’s operation in recent memory. His previous chief of staff, Brandon Phillips, was fired after mocking the wife of a rival strategist for being an alleged rape victim, and remains under a House Ethics Committee investigation over unrelated allegations. Separately, William Paul, Collins’s 2025 digital director, confronted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) at a Capitol Hill bar with a barrage of antisemitic insults. Collins’s own social media history has, per reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Jewish Insider, included antisemitic and racist tropes of his own.

The Race This Is Happening In

Collins secured the Republican nomination on June 16, defeating former football coach Derek Dooley 55.5% to 44.5% after a late Trump endorsement, an outcome that also handed Trump a rare primary win in a race where Gov. Brian Kemp had backed Dooley. Collins now faces Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November, in a race widely viewed as one of the most competitive and expensive Senate contests in the country, and one Democrats need to hold if they hope to retake the chamber.

The chief of staff running the day-to-day operations of Georgia’s Republican Senate campaign spent months in a group chat alongside Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, two of the most prominent white nationalist figures in the country, organized by a Holocaust denier, and wasn’t a bystander in it. He was actively using his access to federal law enforcement contacts to help free that same Holocaust denier from custody. Collins’s office won’t comment on the record, and Collins is now the official nominee heading into a general election against Jon Ossoff this November.

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Mike Collins made a campaign video blasting the Biden administration for letting “unvetted” and “unchecked” people into the country. What he didn’t mention: a man facing multiple felony charges, including using a computer to solicit a child, was on his own trucking company’s payroll the entire time those charges were pending.

Georgia Senate candidate Rep. Mike Collins (R) is facing new scrutiny over his own trucking company’s hiring record, according to Sources Say News, after records showed a former employee facing serious felony charges remained on staff for years while the case was pending.

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What the Records Show

Walter Stargell, a former employee at Collins’s trucking company, was charged in 2018 with multiple felonies, including using a computer to seduce, solicit, or lure a child to commit an illegal act. According to records cited by Sources Say News, Stargell was still working for Collins’s company as recently as 2022, meaning the charges sat pending against him for roughly four years while he remained employed there. He was ultimately convicted in 2023.

A spokesperson for Collins responded to the outlet’s questions by saying, “this individual passed a third-party background check before his brief employment and was not convicted of the mentioned crime until well after his employment had ended.” That statement addresses the conviction timeline but doesn’t dispute that the felony charges themselves, not just the eventual conviction, were already on record and pending during at least part of Stargell’s employment.

Why the Timing Matters for Collins Specifically

This isn’t landing as an abstract personnel issue. Collins has built a substantial part of his political brand around border security and vetting rhetoric, including a video calling out the Biden administration for allowing “unvetted” and “unchecked” people into the country. Critics quoted by Sources Say News argue that framing sits uneasily next to a felony solicitation charge sitting unresolved for years on his own company’s payroll, essentially asking why the same standard of scrutiny Collins demands of federal immigration policy apparently wasn’t applied inside his own business.

What’s Still Unclear

Sources Say News’s reporting, drawn from a newsletter format, doesn’t specify exactly when in 2018 Stargell was hired relative to when charges were filed, nor does it detail what the “third-party background check” actually screened for or when it was conducted relative to the charges becoming public record. Those details would matter for assessing whether this reflects a hiring failure, a monitoring failure once charges were filed, or something the background check simply wasn’t designed to catch. Collins’s campaign has not, as of this reporting, provided further specifics beyond the single statement given to Sources Say News.

The Bottom Line

A man facing multiple felony charges, including soliciting a child online, remained employed at Mike Collins’s trucking company for roughly four years while those charges were pending, only leaving before his eventual 2023 conviction. Collins has centered his Senate campaign on demanding stricter vetting of who enters the country. His own company’s employment record during this period raises the obvious question of whether that same standard was ever applied at home.

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Twenty-five years after the attacks, an invitation-only Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral brought together the city’s uniformed services, victims’ families, and its top political leaders, Democrats and a former president among them. Trump wasn’t there. He was in Dallas, delivering the closing keynote of his party’s midterm convention on the same night.

Former President Joe Biden, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Gov. Kathy Hochul attended a 9/11 memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the evening of September 10, marking the eve of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. President Trump did not attend. That same evening, he was in Dallas delivering the closing keynote address of the Republican Party’s midterm convention.

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What Actually Happened at St. Patrick’s

The Mass, celebrated by Archbishop Ronald Hicks for the families of the dead, uniformed services personnel, and the city’s civic leaders, was invitation-only and closed to the press, though the Archdiocese of New York carried it on a livestream. Biden’s arrival was unannounced and drew what one attendee described as loud applause, a sound rarely heard inside the cathedral. He took his place beside Hochul and Mamdani, the three trading words before the procession and again at the sign of peace. Biden reportedly stayed for nearly an hour afterward, speaking individually with surviving family members and first responders.

Notably, the archbishop’s invitation to Mamdani stood despite a monthlong public campaign by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League demanding the mayor stay home. That protest changed nothing. Mamdani walked through the cathedral’s bronze doors regardless.

Where Trump Was Instead

Trump’s convention ran September 9-10 in Dallas, and by design, his closing keynote address fell on the night of September 10, the same evening as the Mass at St. Patrick’s. Trump used that speech to frame the upcoming midterms as a choice between his economic agenda and a return to Democratic policies, addressing thousands of supporters gathered at the American Airlines Center.

The scheduling wasn’t incidental to the anniversary either. Reporting from late August had already confirmed Trump planned to skip New York’s actual Ground Zero ceremony on September 11 itself, opting instead to mark the day at the Pentagon. Sources told CNN Trump specifically wanted to deliver a speech, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has barred politicians from speaking at the Ground Zero site since 2012 to keep the ceremony nonpartisan. Rather than attend and stand silently while families read the names of the dead, Trump chose the Pentagon for September 11, and his own convention stage for the night before.

Vice President JD Vance is attending the Ground Zero ceremony on September 11 in Trump’s place, alongside four former presidents.

This marks a break from Trump’s own past practice. He attended the New York ceremony as a candidate in 2016 and again in 2024. But on this milestone 25th anniversary specifically, the eve of the anniversary found him not at a memorial service but at a campaign event, timed by his own party to close the night before the country’s most solemn annual observance.

The Contrast Landed Publicly

France 24 described the day’s New York commemorations as “marked by US President Donald Trump’s absence,” while noting the ceremony also drew “right-wing outrage” over the attendance of Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor. That framing puts Trump’s choices across these two days in sharp relief: the night before the anniversary, New York’s Catholic community held a solemn Mass drawing Democratic leadership and a former president together in shared remembrance, while Trump closed out a partisan campaign convention in Texas.

The Bottom Line

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of September 11, an invitation-only memorial Mass in Manhattan brought together the city’s Democratic leadership and a former Democratic president in a shared moment of remembrance. Trump spent that same evening delivering a campaign keynote in Dallas, before heading to the Pentagon the following day rather than to the city where nearly 3,000 of the day’s victims actually died.

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A Lancaster County, Pennsylvania coroner has confirmed that measles caused the death of one of two infants whose deaths were reported amid the state’s growing measles outbreak, according to the Associated Press, even as the CDC’s own website continues to carry a disclaimer declining to officially count either death.

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The Two Infants

Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni released details on both deaths Wednesday, in response to a state right-to-know law request filed by WPMT-TV, Fox 43.

Mary Stoltzfus was 6 weeks old when she died at her home on August 18. She had been born with a condition called Amish lethal microcephaly, a genetic defect causing an unusually small head and underdeveloped brain; children with the condition typically live six months or less, leaving her highly vulnerable to infection. “A measles infection killed her,” Diamantoni told the Associated Press directly. His office did not perform an autopsy on her, since the cause of death was determined by the doctors who had been caring for her.

Ivan Miller died on August 14, shortly after birth, of a ruptured spleen. Diamantoni’s office did perform an autopsy on him, and it’s important to be precise here: the coroner attributed his death to the ruptured spleen itself, not to measles. Exactly how and when that rupture occurred remains under investigation. Neither infant was old enough to have been vaccinated.

The CDC Won’t Say Whether Either Death Counts

Diamantoni said he reported his conclusions to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of this reporting, the CDC has not said whether it will count either death as measles-associated, and its website still carries a disclaimer about them.

That disclaimer has itself been unstable. At one point, the CDC’s measles webpage noted two measles-associated deaths, then was changed to say the agency wasn’t counting the two deaths until it reviewed additional information. As of its most recent update, the page reads only that the CDC “will update its reporting as additional information becomes available and relevant reviews are completed,” and still doesn’t reflect either Pennsylvania death, despite a county coroner having now directly and publicly attributed one of them to measles.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged Diamantoni’s conclusion that one death was measles-related in a social media post last week, a rare instance of the federal government’s own vaccine-skeptic health secretary confirming a measles death while the CDC’s official tracking page continues to withhold that same confirmation.

The Outbreak Keeps Growing

Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak, its largest since the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, continues to expand. State officials said Wednesday there are now more than 620 confirmed cases across 37 counties this year. Both individuals whose deaths were reported in Lancaster County were unvaccinated, according to the state health department.

The underlying vulnerability driving outbreaks like this one traces back to declining vaccination rates. The CDC recommends two doses of the MMR vaccine, one dose is about 93% effective against measles, two doses roughly 97%. But national coverage has been slipping: during the 2025-2026 school year, only 92.4% of kindergartners received the MMR vaccine, marking the third straight year of declining coverage and a drop from the 95.2% seen before the COVID-19 pandemic. Herd immunity against measles generally requires coverage above 95%, meaning the country has now spent several consecutive years below the threshold needed to reliably prevent outbreaks like Pennsylvania’s from taking hold.

Acting Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Debra Bogen urged residents to get vaccinated: “We want to ensure every Pennsylvanian has the information they need to protect themselves, their loved ones and their communities. As a physician, I want to make sure that people understand that the MMR vaccine is safe and provides the best protection we have against measles.”

Why the Timing Matters Internationally

This isn’t just a domestic health story. In November, international health officials are scheduled to meet to determine whether the United States and Mexico have lost their official measles-free status, a designation the U.S. earned in 2000 specifically for eliminating sustained domestic transmission of the virus. A sustained, expanding outbreak like Pennsylvania’s, paired with a federal health agency that appears reluctant to formally confirm a measles death a county coroner has already attributed directly to the virus, doesn’t help the case that the elimination status has been maintained.

The Bottom Line

A Pennsylvania county coroner has done what the CDC’s own tracking page still won’t: directly and publicly confirm that measles killed a 6-week-old infant. The second infant’s death, from a ruptured spleen, remains under investigation and hasn’t been attributed to measles by the coroner himself. Both deaths occurred amid an outbreak that has now spread to 37 counties and counting in a state and a country, where vaccination rates have fallen below the threshold needed to prevent exactly this kind of spread.

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Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is escalating a confrontation with FBI leadership, claiming on camera that a senior FBI official connected to Director Kash Patel threatened one of his staffers with a criminal fraud investigation during a dispute tied to a whistleblower in the unsolved January 6 pipe-bomb case. The allegation surfaced in late November 2025, at the exact moment Massie was locked in his most intense public confrontation yet with Patel personally over the Epstein files.

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Massie and Patel Clashing

This wasn’t a vague, simmering tension. On September 17, 2025, Massie confronted Patel directly during a roughly five-hour House Judiciary Committee hearing, challenging Patel’s sworn claim to the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was “no credible information” Epstein had trafficked women to anyone besides himself. Massie pushed back hard, noting that Epstein’s alleged victims had given FBI interviews detailing allegations against at least 20 men, a purported list Patel had personally demanded be made public back in 2024, before he became FBI director, when he told podcast host Benny Johnson: “Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are!”

By December, Massie was publicly accusing Patel of “troubling deflection” after Patel wouldn’t commit to a firm timeline for releasing FD-302 witness interview forms, files Massie believed contained previously unreleased names tied to the case. And on November 12, just weeks before the pipe-bomb staff-threat allegation became public, Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna had successfully forced a discharge petition past its 218-signature threshold, compelling a House floor vote to release the full trove of DOJ Epstein files over the objections of GOP leadership. Newly sworn-in Rep. Adelita Grijalva provided the deciding signature minutes after taking her oath of office.

In short: at the exact moment Massie says a Patel staffer threatened one of his own aides with a fraud investigation, Massie was in direct, sworn, on-the-record conflict with Patel himself over Epstein, having just won a rare procedural victory that publicly embarrassed the FBI director and forced the administration’s hand.

A Republican Against His Party

Massie’s rhetoric heading into this period wasn’t restrained. Earlier in the fall, he’d accused members of his own party of “protecting pedophiles to prevent embarrassing revelations about wealthy Republican donors,” while noting, “I do believe that Trump is not implicated.” He framed the fight in broader terms too, telling reporters the Epstein files had become “an obsession” for the MAGA base specifically because they symbolized “a separate set of rules for the wealthy and well-connected,” a promise Massie said Trump voters felt they’d been sent back to the White House to address.

That combination, a Republican congressman publicly accusing his own party’s law enforcement leadership of a cover-up protecting the powerful, while simultaneously forcing procedural votes that embarrassed the administration, is the backdrop against which the alleged staff threat took place.

The Pipe-Bomb Dispute

Separate from the Epstein fight, pressure had been building after a protected FBI whistleblower came forward alleging the January 6 pipe-bomb investigation, one of the most prominent unsolved cases connected to that day, was mishandled inside the Washington Field Office. According to the whistleblower’s attorney, agents were blocked from pursuing a key person of interest and were reassigned after getting close to identifying a suspect.

The attorney later sent a follow-up letter to Massie and Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) warning that FBI leadership had scheduled a large internal meeting that looked, to the whistleblower, like a “mole hunt” meant to identify them. Massie publicly released that letter, calling the situation “deeply alarming” and “possibly retaliatory.”

A Meeting With Bongino

In an interview on Free the People, Massie said FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino privately told him the bureau planned to “round up everybody that was involved in this investigation” and bring them into “one big room.” Bongino did not say he was searching for the whistleblower, but Massie said his “spidey sense went off,” especially after receiving the attorney’s warning letter just hours later. “I almost said, ‘You better not be trying to find the whistleblower,’” Massie recalled.

Massie’s Central Claim

Massie then made the more serious allegation. He said that amid this dispute, a member of Kash Patel’s staff directly threatened members of his own congressional staff. “One of Kash Patel’s staff threatened my staff with a criminal investigation if we didn’t straighten up and play ball,” Massie said. “They said one of my staff would be investigated for fraud.”

Massie said the message was delivered to more than one staffer, with language implying that if his office kept “playing hardball,” the FBI could target a specific aide. He characterized this as illegal retaliation and said he immediately told Bongino, who responded: “I’ll take care of that.” Massie added that the staffer who allegedly made the threat later sent what he described as a “non-apology” text reading, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

Where Things Stand

FBI leadership, including Bongino, pushed back on Massie’s public statements, describing his account as “mischaracterized” and insisting the bureau isn’t targeting whistleblowers or congressional staff. Patel’s office has not publicly commented on the specific threat Massie described, and did not respond to at least one separate press inquiry from Newsweek, tied to the Epstein dispute around the same period.

Two separate, high-stakes fights between Massie and the FBI’s leadership were unfolding in parallel in late 2025: a public, sworn-testimony battle over Epstein files that Massie was actively winning through the discharge petition, and a quieter, more personal dispute in which Massie alleges his own staff was directly threatened with prosecution. Whether the two are connected in any material way beyond timing hasn’t been established by either side. What’s clear is that by the time this alleged threat surfaced, Massie’s relationship with Patel’s FBI had already deteriorated into open, public conflict over one of the highest-profile investigations in the country, and this was the moment a second, more personal front opened up alongside it.

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Col. Nathan McCormack, the Levant and Egypt branch chief at the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J5 planning directorate, was removed from the Joint Staff and made the subject of a Pentagon investigation on June 17, 2025, just hours after JNS reported that he had long posted anti-Israel statements on a semi-anonymous public social media account.

The response from the Pentagon was fast. JNS’s initial story broke the existence of the account and its contents. Within the same news cycle, a Joint Staff official confirmed to JNS that the department was already reviewing the matter and had begun the process of removing McCormack from his post. This turnaround left little daylight between the report and the institutional response.

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What a Pentagon Official Told JNS

A Joint Staff official told JNS the Pentagon was “aware of the situation” and “looking into the matter” within hours of the initial report going live. Asked directly about the account’s content, the official didn’t hedge: “The information on the X account does not reflect the position of the Joint Staff or the Department of Defense.”

The official then laid out what would actually happen to McCormack: “The individual is being returned to his service while the matter is being investigated.” Pressed on what that meant in plain terms, the official clarified: “He will no longer be on the joint staff while the matter is being investigated.” That’s a specific personnel action, sending him back to the Army, the branch he came from, rather than a court-martial or termination, at least based on what’s been said publicly so far.

The Pentagon also described its process: “We went through and looked at the hyperlinks and the content, so we were able to see the content, and we’re essentially assigning an investigating officer to look into the matter,” the official said, adding, “Our global alliances and partnerships are vital to our national security, enhancing our collective defense, deterrence and operational reach.” The account itself was disabled around the same time, shortly before the Pentagon confirmed the investigation, though JNS’s reporting doesn’t specify whether McCormack deactivated it himself.

What McCormack’s Posts Said

JNS’s report identifies several specific statements from the archived posts that formed the basis of its story. McCormack referred to “Netanyahu and his Judeo-supremacist cronies,” a phrase that goes into overtly inflammatory territory. He also wrote that Washington had “overwhelmingly” enabled Israel’s “bad behavior,” framing decades of U.S. foreign policy as complicity rather than routine alliance management.

Separately, McCormack argued that pro-Israel activists in the United States prioritize “support for Israel over our actual foreign interests.” Elsewhere, McCormack had described Israel as America's "worst ally," writing that the relationship, and the enmity in the region it produced, wasn't worth what the United States got in return.

How Colleagues Reacted

JNS spoke with a Defense Department contractor who had personally interacted with McCormack in a professional capacity. That contractor didn’t mince words in assessing what the posts meant for someone in his specific role: “This is the kind of bitter oversharing I’d expect from someone who doesn’t know better. But at his level and under his own name and likeness? It’s mind-boggling.”

That reaction points to two issues layered on top of each other. First, that the posts themselves were viewed internally as inflammatory rather than measured criticism. Second, and arguably more significant to how the Pentagon ultimately responded, that McCormack made these statements under his real identity while holding a specific, sensitive advisory role on the exact country he was criticizing. The contractor’s framing suggests it was that combination, not the political content on its own, that struck people close to the situation as remarkable enough to flag.

Who McCormack Is

McCormack’s role as Levant and Egypt branch chief placed him within the J5 directorate, the part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff responsible for advising the Chairman on military strategy, planning, and policy, including preparing senior leadership for engagement with partner nations such as Israel. It’s a role built around managing and interpreting a bilateral relationship at a strategic level, not simply holding personal views about it.

Photos accompanying JNS’s report document McCormack’s earlier military career: as a U.S. Army captain from Dallas, Texas, he’s shown in December 2008 meeting with a local sheikh in Al Butoma, Iraq, as part of counterinsurgency and local governance efforts during that stage of the Iraq War, alongside his party coordinator at the time. That earlier posting suggests a career built substantially around exactly the kind of on-the-ground diplomatic and cultural liaison work his later Pentagon role would have called on him to manage at a higher level.

Where Things Stand

As of JNS’s report, McCormack had been reassigned away from the Joint Staff and returned to his Army service branch while the Pentagon’s investigation proceeds. No timeline for how long that investigation might take, and no indication of what disciplinary outcome, if any, might ultimately follow, had been announced by the Pentagon at the time of publication. The case remains open, with McCormack’s account disabled and his advisory role on Israel-related matters vacated in the meantime.

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Alejandro Betancourt was a target of a federal money-laundering investigation tied to over $1 billion embezzled from Venezuela’s state oil company. Then he helped the Trump administration take down Nicolas Maduro. Now the Pentagon owns 35% of his oil company, Switzerland mysteriously dropped its extradition request against him, and a US official says he faces “no active legal problems” at all.

The billionaire who helped broker the Trump administration’s sweeping long-term oil deal with Venezuela was, until recently, a target of U.S. money-laundering investigations involving funds embezzled from the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Now, after assisting U.S. authorities ahead of the capture of Nicolas Maduro, Alejandro Betancourt is Washington’s key partner in an unusual oil agreement with Caracas.

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What the Deal Actually Gives Away

The scale of this arrangement is enormous. According to last week’s announcement, the U.S. gains access to about one-fifth of Venezuela’s crude reserves for decades. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a 35% stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, Betancourt’s own company and a known crude producer in Venezuela. The State Department separately gets the right to buy 20% of NABEP’s oil at cost, plus preferential access to the remaining 80% of output.

In January, Betancourt helped broker a related oil trading agreement that has already led to the export of more than 135 million barrels of crude and fuel to the United States, Europe, India, and the Caribbean, according to vessel monitoring data. This isn’t a hypothetical future arrangement. It’s already moving oil at massive scale, run through the company of a man the U.S. government was investigating for laundering embezzled state funds.

Who Betancourt Is

Betancourt is a prominent member of the so-called “Bolichicos,” a younger generation of Venezuelan business people who amassed fortunes during Hugo Chavez’s administration. His company Derwick Associates won roughly $2 billion in Venezuelan government contracts to build power plants during the country’s electricity crisis in the 2010s, some without competitive bidding, despite having little construction experience. Government data later showed many of those plants operated at a fraction of their intended capacity, or not at all, while Venezuela’s power grid continued suffering widespread blackouts. Betancourt and Derwick have repeatedly denied wrongdoing, saying the facilities were completed and that later failures were the result of mismanagement by state authorities.

That track record is the backdrop against which the U.S. money-laundering investigation unfolded. Before it was paused, six sources told Reuters Betancourt had been identified as an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged scheme by former Venezuelan energy officials and their associates to launder more than $1 billion misappropriated from PDVSA. Ten people have been indicted in that case since 2018. Separately, Spanish authorities opened their own money-laundering investigation into Betancourt last year, involving allegations of $4 billion embezzled from PDVSA, according to Spanish newspaper El País. Reuters could not determine whether that investigation is still active.

A Paused US Investigation and a Stranger Swiss One

Florida prosecutors paused their money-laundering investigation into Betancourt earlier this year, according to eight people familiar with the matter. After that pause, U.S. officials reportedly pressured the Swiss government to ease its own inquiries into Betancourt, according to four separate sources. Switzerland then withdrew its extradition request for Betancourt from the United Kingdom in May, even while insisting its criminal case against him was still proceeding. The Zurich Public Prosecutor’s Office would only say the withdrawal was “because of particular aspects of UK extradition law, which we cannot discuss in detail,” while declining to say whether U.S. pressure played a role.

Mark Pieth, a Swiss legal scholar and anti-corruption expert, called the sequence of events exactly what it looks like: “You would not do that if the case is continuing.” The UK’s Home Office declined to comment entirely.

An anonymous U.S. official told Reuters that most of Betancourt’s legal challenges are “nearly a decade old” and claimed he currently faces “no active legal problems” inside the United States, going on to describe him as the best partner available to boost Venezuela’s oil output. That’s the U.S. government’s own justification for the arrangement: not that the allegations were false, but that they’re old enough, and he’s useful enough, to move past.

What He Reportedly Did to Earn This

Four sources familiar with U.S. policy in Venezuela told Reuters that Betancourt was key to U.S. strategy and planning in the lead-up to the January 3 military operation that removed Maduro from power and flew him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges, which Maduro denies. In the months before that operation, sources say Betancourt supplied actionable intelligence to U.S. and Swiss authorities, alongside his long-standing ties to high-ranking officials from past Venezuelan administrations.

Once he was free to leave the UK, Betancourt traveled to Venezuela in late June and again in July, both times departing from West Palm Beach, Florida, according to flight manifests reviewed by Reuters. His lawyer, Chouraqui, declined to comment on the travel specifically, but defended Betancourt broadly, telling Reuters by email that authorities across multiple jurisdictions have extensively examined the allegations against him and brought no charges.

The Bottom Line

A man who was, by multiple governments’ own accounts, a serious money-laundering target tied to more than a billion dollars in embezzled Venezuelan state funds has turned that same set of connections into a central role in one of the most significant U.S.-Venezuela oil arrangements in decades, one that hands the Pentagon a 35% ownership stake in his own company. Two separate international investigations into him have quietly stalled or reversed course in the exact window this deal came together. The U.S. government’s position isn’t that Betancourt did nothing wrong. It’s that whatever he did, it’s outweighed by what Washington wants from him now.

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Nearly 23,000 Elmo teethers just got recalled because their eyes can pop off and choke a baby. Four families already reported it happening. This is the same consumer safety agency the Trump administration tried to fire its own commissioners from, slash by 14%, and hand over to RFK Jr.’s health department, all while it’s supposed to be catching hazards like this before they reach your baby’s crib.

Skip Hop Inc. recalled its Baby Sesame Street Elmo Silicone Teethers on September 3, after the Consumer Product Safety Commission found the toy’s black eyes can detach when frozen, creating a choking hazard serious enough that the CPSC’s own recall notice lists “risk of serious injury or death.”

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What Actually Got Recalled

The recall covers about 22,660 units sold in the U.S., plus another 3,177 in Canada, sold at Carter’s retail stores and online at carters.com and skiphop.com from January 2025 through March 2026 for about $12 each. The teether is shaped like Elmo’s face, red, orange, and white, with the black eyes being the failure point, and comes packaged with a textured key and a fabric crayon box.

Skip Hop has received four consumer reports of the eyes detaching. No injuries have been reported yet, which is the only reason this story is a recall notice and not a tragedy. Parents are being told to stop using the teether immediately and can get a refund via gift card usable at Carter’s, Skip Hop, OshKosh B’gosh, or Little Planet stores.

The product was manufactured in China and imported by The William Carter Company of Atlanta, distributed by Skip Hop Inc. of New York.

This Is the Agency Trump Tried to Gut While It Was Doing Exactly This Kind of Work

Here’s what makes this recall land differently than an ordinary product safety notice. In May 2025, the Trump administration, acting through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, fired three of the CPSC’s five commissioners, all Biden appointees, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, Mary T. Boyle, and Richard Trumka Jr., hours after they’d blocked DOGE staffers from entering CPSC headquarters to carry out layoffs.

The firings came directly on the heels of those same three commissioners opposing DOGE-directed staff cuts and the reclassification of more than 70 CPSC employees, including safety engineers and hazard analysts, the exact category of staff responsible for identifying hazards like a teether’s eyes coming loose before it reaches store shelves. Hoehn-Saric warned at the time: “These terminations will inevitably result in emergency room visits or deaths that could and should have been avoided.”

Trumka didn’t mince words either, framing his firing as retaliation, coming “immediately” after he’d worked to “protect the American people from harm” and to stop “the illegal firing of scores of public servants who do lifesaving work.”

The Supreme Court Let It Happen

A federal judge initially ruled the firings unlawful and ordered the commissioners reinstated, finding they’d “suffered irreparable harm.” That reinstatement didn’t last. In July 2025, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling in a 6-3 decision, clearing the way for Trump to permanently remove all three commissioners, gutting the agency’s bipartisan structure down to a skeleton crew.

By August 2025, a fourth commissioner, Douglas Dziak, resigned outright, leaving acting Chairman Peter Feldman, a Trump appointee, as the sole remaining commissioner running the entire agency alone.

Then Came the Plan to Eliminate the Agency Altogether

While the fired commissioners were briefly reinstated, the two remaining commissioners went ahead and released a 2026 budget request proposing to cut CPSC’s funding by 10.5% and its staffing by 14%, and, more dramatically, to fold the entire agency into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, replacing the five-commissioner structure with a single political appointee, an Assistant Secretary for Consumer Product Safety.

The Consumer Federation of America condemned the proposal outright, accusing the CPSC’s own leadership of trying to “eliminate itself” and “gut its own safety mandate.” Daniel Greene of the National Consumers League put it plainly: “The CPSC’s budget request puts partisanship before product safety.”

Five U.S. senators, led by John Hickenlooper, warned at the time that gutting the commission “compromises the ability of the federal government to apply data-driven product safety rules to protect Americans nationwide, away from political influence,” noting the CPSC had helped recall 153 million consumer products the year prior alone.

The Agency Is Barely Running

To be clear about what this recall shows: the CPSC caught this hazard and got Skip Hop to act before anyone was seriously hurt. Some legal analysts have noted the commission’s enforcement pace hasn’t collapsed entirely; it issued hundreds of recalls even through 2025’s disruption. But that’s happening with a gutted commissioner structure, a single Trump-appointed acting chair running an agency built for five, proposed staff cuts of 14%, and a live proposal to eliminate the commission’s independent structure, all while the agency continues fielding hazard reports on products already sitting in nurseries across the country.

This recall is what the system catching a problem looks like right now, while the administration overseeing it has spent the past year actively trying to shrink and dismantle the very structure responsible for catching it.

Nearly 23,000 Elmo teethers are being pulled from shelves because their eyes can come off in a baby’s mouth, a hazard serious enough that the government’s own recall notice cites the risk of death. The commission that caught it is running with a fraction of its intended leadership, after the Trump administration fired its Democratic commissioners for resisting staff cuts, got the Supreme Court’s blessing to keep them fired, and proposed folding the entire agency into RFK Jr.’s department while slashing its budget. Parents can get a refund for the teether. There’s no refund on offer for what happens if the agency meant to catch the next hazard doesn’t have the staff left to do it.

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Oklahoma inmates were dialing hundreds of political calls a day, pushing messages about “creepy” people around children and warnings about transgender ideology, all funded by a Virginia super PAC that paid nearly $600,000 to the company running the calls. The inmates got $2 an hour. Some of them didn’t even know what MAGA meant.

Oklahoma prison inmates have been working in call centers placing political calls and insurance telemarketing calls on behalf of outside companies, earning $2 an hour while a Virginia-based super PAC paid nearly $600,000 to the vendor for calls supporting conservative candidates during Oklahoma’s primary election season.

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What the Inmates Actually Described

Steve Wilbanks, incarcerated at James Crabtree Correctional Center in Helena, spoke to reporters about six weeks after he stopped working in the call center. “I had good numbers,” he said. “I was a producer.”

Contracts obtained through an open records request confirm a company called HBW Leads partnered with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to establish call centers at four state prisons since January: James Crabtree in Helena, Mabel Bassett in McLoud, Lexington Correctional in Lexington, and Joseph Harp, also in Lexington. The contracts explicitly authorize “telemarketing and political polling activity.” HBW Leads pays the Department of Corrections $10 per inmate hour worked. The inmates themselves get $2 of that, plus occasional bonuses for generating leads. The remaining $8 goes to Oklahoma Correctional Industries as overhead.

Three of the four inmates interviewed requested anonymity, fearing retribution. One put it bluntly: “They definitely know what they’re doing is a no-no.”

These Weren’t Polls. Inmates Say They Were Campaign Ads.

One inmate described calls that resembled push-polling, where the caller pretends to be conducting a neutral survey but is actually trying to steer the listener’s vote, a tactic polling and marketing organizations have widely condemned.

Wilbanks said the calls carried disclosures naming Make Liberty Win, a Virginia-based super PAC focused on electing conservative lawmakers, as the funder. “They weren’t surveys at all, they were campaigning,” he said. “They just had one question at the end of the call: ‘Do we have your vote for such and such?’”

Multiple inmates said they felt uneasy delivering explicitly partisan messaging. Some had been incarcerated long enough that they didn’t recognize political terminology at all. One wasn’t sure what MAGA or a “Trump Republican” even meant. “We were talking about the swamp and everything like that,” Wilbanks said. “I don’t even know what a swamp is. I’ve been in prison too long to catch up on some of these terms.”

The Department of Corrections declined multiple interview requests. In a written statement, an agency spokesperson said the calls described by inmates, including direct candidate advocacy, still fall within the contract’s definition of “political polling,” and said the agency regularly reviews call center materials for compliance with its own policies.

The Money Trail Leads to a Trump-Endorsed Candidate’s Rival’s Loss

HBW Leads, originally founded in Oregon, was acquired in 2020 by Toledo-based Double A Solutions. In January 2025, the company launched a subsidiary called Visible Trends, specifically built for live political campaign calling, sharing the same Ohio office address as its parent.

Federal Election Commission records show Make Liberty Win has paid Visible Trends almost $600,000 since March for political calling services, primarily for state legislative races. Some of that money also went toward calls supporting Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who lost his own primary in May, despite the super PAC’s stated mission to “go directly to the voters’ doorsteps, cellphones, and mailboxes to mobilize them to oust RINOs and socialist Democrats alike.”

Barrett Young, Make Liberty Win’s executive director, said the organization had no idea Visible Trends was using prison labor, and said the super PAC has since terminated the contract, citing poor performance. Its final payment to Visible Trends was dated June 29.

Without being prompted, inmates rattled off the names of Oklahoma candidates they’d made calls for: Gentner Drummond, Mike Mazzei, Jon Echols, Chip Keating, and Justin “J.J.” Humphrey. “I only did a few Drummond, and a few J.J. Humphrey,” one inmate said. “Mostly it was Mazzei, because he was Trump-endorsed, I guess.”

None of those candidates, and no outside group, reported paying Visible Trends for this work to the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, though separate reporting has found some political organizations skirting the state’s disclosure requirements entirely.

800 Calls a Day, and a Quota to Hit

Wilbanks described the James Crabtree center as fairly standard as far as call centers go: roughly 120 cubicles, computers, dialing systems. Shifts ran from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., later extended to 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Inmates made as many as 800 calls a day, with roughly 500 connecting and maybe 20 of those getting passed along to a waiting insurance agent.

On insurance calls, inmates could see the customer’s name, address, phone number, and current insurer on screen, and stood to earn a $2 bonus for getting a customer’s birthday and email address too. On political calls, they could see only names and phone numbers. Inmates said they could face penalties for missing quotas.

When a reporter reached Visible Trends to ask about the inmates’ claims, a representative said “no comment” and hung up. HBW Leads didn’t respond to messages seeking comment at all.

Wilbanks eventually left the job, saying it became monotonous, but some of what he was asked to say stuck with him. “It was stuff like you don’t want to have your kids around creepy such and such, or they believe in transgender ideas not protecting your children,” he said. “It’s like, whoa. That threw me for a loop there.”

Not every inmate framed the work negatively. One said they didn’t feel coerced into taking the job at all: “It’s just better money. It’s the best money on the yard,” a comment that underscores just how limited the economic alternatives are behind bars, where $2 an hour genuinely counts as the top-paying option available.

The Bottom Line

A conservative super PAC spent close to $600,000 funneling political messaging through a company that quietly used Oklahoma prison labor to deliver it, paying incarcerated people $2 an hour to advocate for candidates some of them had never heard of, using talking points about “creepy” people and transgender ideology that unsettled even the inmates reciting them. No campaign has disclosed paying for this work. The Department of Corrections says it’s all within the rules. And this isn’t even the first time an Oklahoma prison call center scandal has made headlines; it’s just the latest one.

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Thomas Ross beat Louise Secker by just 33 votes in a Missouri House primary. According to federal prosecutors, that margin wasn’t close enough. He allegedly asked his own campaign manager to plant cocaine and Adderall in her purse or car. When the manager suggested calling in an anonymous tip once the drugs were planted, Ross’s reported response was simple: “If you can pull it off... pull it off.”

Thomas Christopher Ross, 37, a Republican candidate for the Missouri House, was charged with conspiring to distribute a controlled substance after federal prosecutors say he orchestrated a plot to plant cocaine and Adderall on his primary opponent.

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How the Plot Fell Apart

According to the affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint, the FBI was contacted by the Joplin Police Department on July 30, 2026, regarding what was initially described as a “public corruption” matter. Ross’s former campaign manager, identified in court filings only as C.S., told police that Ross had asked him to plant drugs on Ross’s opponent, Louise Secker, identified as L.S.

C.S. handed investigators a black nylon glove he said Ross had given him. Inside was a small plastic bag containing white powder and a pink and white capsule. A Nartec Inc. cocaine test kit turned blue on contact with the powder, indicating a positive match for cocaine. The capsule was identified as Amphetamine and Dextroamphetamine 20 mg extended-release, commonly known as Adderall, a Schedule II controlled substance. Investigators believe Ross used a capsule from his own Adderall prescription in the alleged plot.

C.S. told investigators he and Ross had exchanged text messages in which Ross asked him to place the bag of drugs inside Secker’s purse or vehicle while Ross was out of state on vacation.

The FBI Wired Up the Meeting

Once the former campaign manager came forward, the FBI didn’t just take his word for it. Agents gave him a recording device to wear to a meeting with Ross on July 31, 2026, held at Ross’s residence in Joplin and lasting well over an hour.

According to the recording, C.S. told Ross he still had “the bag and addies” if Ross wanted him to “try.” Ross allegedly agreed. C.S. noted that Secker had been carrying a small purse, and suggested they could call in an anonymous tip claiming Secker had drugs in her car once the planted evidence was in place. According to prosecutors, Ross’s reply was: “If you can pull it off... pull it off.”

That’s not an ambiguous statement caught out of context. That’s a recorded conversation, obtained by federal agents, in which a Republican candidate for state office allegedly green-lit a plan to have controlled substances planted on his political rival and then reported to police anonymously.

The Margin That Apparently Wasn’t Enough

Ross defeated Secker by just 33 votes in the Republican primary for Missouri House District 161 last month. He’s now facing a general election for the seat, according to court records, a race he won at the ballot box by the narrowest of margins before allegedly trying to eliminate his opponent through an entirely different means beforehand.

Ross made his initial appearance in a Springfield, Missouri courtroom on Thursday. A detention hearing has been set for the following Wednesday.

His Own Party Wants Him Out

This isn’t a case where Ross’s fellow Republicans are rallying to his defense. Peter Kinder, chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, called the allegations “serious and deeply troubling” and publicly demanded Ross withdraw from the general election “immediately.”

“Being the Republican nominee for public office carries with it a responsibility to the voters, the community, and the principles our party represents,” Kinder said in a statement. “The people of the 161st District deserve a nominee who can devote his full attention to earning their trust and representing their interests in Jefferson City.”

Ross’s campaign has not responded to multiple requests for comment from reporters covering the case.

The Bottom Line

A Republican candidate who won his primary by a razor-thin 33 votes now stands accused, on FBI recording, of asking his own campaign manager to plant cocaine and Adderall on the woman he narrowly defeated, then have her anonymously reported to police for it. Even his own party’s state chairman is calling on him to drop out. As with any defendant, Ross is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court.

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55 people got sick from E. coli and Salmonella in contaminated sprouts. Four are hospitalized. And now the company that supplied the tainted seeds is simply refusing to recall them, ignoring the FDA’s request entirely. This is what happens after the Trump administration cut thousands of jobs from the exact agency responsible for catching this before it spreads.

The FDA and CDC are investigating a multistate outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Salmonella tied to alfalfa sprouts, an outbreak that has sickened 55 people across 15 states and hospitalized four, and that has now exposed a seed supplier simply ignoring the federal government’s recall recommendation altogether.

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What’s Actually Happening

Everything Sprouts, LLC, of Minneapolis, recalled its alfalfa sprouts on August 22 after FDA and CDC traceback investigations identified them as a source of illness. Of the people investigators interviewed, 76% reported eating alfalfa sprouts before getting sick. The company expanded its recall on August 28 to include Robust Radish Sprout Mix as well, after FDA flagged potential cross-contamination.

Here’s where it gets worse. FDA’s investigation found at least one additional sprout grower who received the same contaminated lot of alfalfa seeds from a common seed supplier. FDA recommended that supplier voluntarily recall the implicated seed lot and notify its downstream customers. As of the agency’s most recent update on August 31, the supplier has done none of that: it has not issued a recall, has not notified customers, and has not instructed anyone who received the contaminated seeds to pull their products.

In plain terms: the federal government identified a specific contaminated seed lot spreading E. coli and Salmonella across multiple states, asked the responsible supplier to fix it, and that supplier has simply ignored the request while the outbreak continues.

This Isn’t Happening in a Vacuum

This sprout outbreak is landing in the middle of what public health reporters are now openly calling a crisis-level summer for American food safety. Jalapeños, frozen berries, beef, and now sprouts have all triggered major recalls this year, according to Stateline’s reporting, alongside a record-shattering cyclosporiasis outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce that has sickened more than 17,000 confirmed people since May, with nearly 12,000 more suspected cases on top of that.

That surge in outbreaks has followed one of the most aggressive rounds of federal public health staffing cuts in recent memory, cuts made under the Trump administration specifically at the agencies responsible for catching exactly this kind of contamination before it spreads.

The Numbers Behind the Cuts

According to Food Navigator’s analysis of federal employment data, the FDA lost 3,859 employees in 2025 and another 473 so far in 2026, a substantial hit to an agency that now employs just 16,602 people total. The Trump administration also cut 2,889 jobs from the CDC, the agency responsible for tracking outbreaks like this one, and 913 positions from the Food Safety Inspection Service.

Even before these cuts, the FDA was already falling short. The agency hasn’t met its congressionally mandated inspection targets since 2018, according to a Government Accountability Office report cited by the San Francisco Chronicle, and the number of food manufacturing facilities the FDA actually inspects has collapsed from 10,641 in 2011 to roughly 4,500 a decade later. The agency had only 432 investigators handling both domestic and foreign inspections in 2024, before the Trump administration cut another 3,500 FDA jobs specifically to reduce federal spending.

Michigan’s chief medical executive, Natasha Bagdasarian, put the stakes bluntly: “We are starting to see the consequences of an underfunded public health system in 2026. Currently it’s Cyclospora. Eventually, we are going to lose the ability to detect something else.”

Foreign Inspections Have Collapsed Too

It’s not just domestic oversight that’s suffered. ProPublica’s investigation, reported by SeafoodSource, found that FDA foreign food facility inspections have plummeted under the Trump administration, with monthly inspection numbers falling by nearly half. Consumer Reports Food Policy Director Brian Ronholm didn’t mince words: “Basic regulatory oversight functions have been decimated.”

The FDA has also suspended a quality control program for its own pathogen and contaminant testing labs, and scaled back its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network to track just two pathogens: Salmonella and E. coli, the exact two pathogens behind this current sprout outbreak. The agency separately delayed its long-planned Food Traceability Rule, which would have made it easier to trace contaminated food back to its source, pushing compliance from January 2026 all the way to mid-2028.

The White House’s Response: Deny, Deny, Deny

Asked about the connection between these cuts and the summer’s wave of outbreaks, White House spokesperson Allison Schuster told Stateline flatly: “The Trump Administration has never cut FDA food inspectors or other frontline personnel for domestic disease response. President Trump’s top priority is the health and safety of the American people, and the federal government remains capable of robustly addressing any future outbreaks.”

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard offered a similar denial to reporters, claiming “FDA investigators were not affected by staffing changes or force reductions,” and pointing to a proposed $33 million increase for food safety activities in the FY 2027 budget.

Those denials sit uneasily next to the agency’s own documented employment numbers, and next to a food safety expert with 25 years at the FDA warning that the damage isn’t easily reversible: “Even if things were to go back to normal tomorrow, the loss in future capacity will take years to undo.”

Fifty-five people are sick, four are hospitalized, and a seed supplier responsible for spreading contaminated product across state lines is simply refusing to comply with the FDA’s recall recommendation, all while the agency tasked with enforcing that recommendation is operating with thousands fewer staff than it had before the Trump administration’s cuts. The administration says none of this is connected. The agency’s own numbers, and a summer that’s already produced a record-shattering lettuce outbreak sickening tens of thousands, tell a different story.

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Washington passed a law requiring clergy to report child abuse, even when they learn about it in confession. Catholic bishops sued to block it. Trump’s Justice Department jumped in to help them. A federal judge just ruled in their favor. Priests in Washington can now legally stay silent about child abuse they hear about in a confessional booth.

A federal judge ruled that Catholic priests in Washington state cannot be required to report child abuse or neglect they learn about through confession, after the Trump administration intervened specifically to help block the law.

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What the Law Actually Required

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat and a practicing Catholic, signed Senate Bill 5375 into law in May 2025. The law added clergy members of all faiths, priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams alike, to the state’s list of mandatory reporters, meaning they’d face a gross misdemeanor charge if they learned about child abuse or neglect and failed to report it to the state or law enforcement.

The bill’s sponsor, Democratic state Sen. Noel Frame, said she was motivated by reports that Jehovah’s Witness congregations had covered up child sexual abuse for years. This wasn’t a bill written to single out Catholics. It applied identically across every religious denomination in the state. Frame, herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, said plainly: “Whether you’re from a red state or a blue state, keeping kids safe from abuse should be a non-partisan issue.”

Only six other states had similar clergy-reporting laws that reached this far, according to a 2019 federal review.

Catholic Bishops Sued, and Trump’s DOJ Jumped In to Help

Three Roman Catholic bishops in Washington sued the state, arguing the law forced priests to choose between their faith’s sacred seal of confession and the threat of criminal prosecution. Yakima Bishop Joseph Tyson told local television that clergy were prepared to go to jail rather than break the confessional seal.

Then, in June 2025, the Trump administration’s Justice Department formally intervened on the bishops’ side, describing a religiously neutral child-safety law as “anti-Catholic.” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, wrote that the law “unconstitutionally forces Catholic priests in Washington to choose between their obligations to the Catholic Church and their penitents,” and declared that “the Justice Department will not sit idly by when states mount attacks on the free exercise of religion.”

Notice the framing. The Trump administration cast a law requiring adults to report child abuse as an attack on religious freedom, rather than describing what the law actually does: closing a loophole that has historically let abuse go unreported for decades.

The Governor Who Signed the Law Pushed Back Directly

Ferguson, the Catholic governor who signed the bill, didn’t hold back when his own church sued him over it. He said he was “disappointed my Church is filing a federal lawsuit to protect individuals who abuse kids.”

Jean Hill, executive director of the Washington State Catholic Conference, offered a softer but still pointed response: “Preventing abuse and upholding the sacred seal of confession are not mutually exclusive; we can and must do both.” Mary Dispenza, a former nun and survivor of clergy sexual abuse, went further, arguing the seal of confession is a church practice rather than a divine mandate, one that has historically allowed abuse to continue unchecked.

The Judge Sided With the Church and the Trump Administration

U.S. District Judge David Estudillo granted a preliminary injunction, ruling the priests were “likely to succeed” in their lawsuit and blocking the confession-related portion of the law just days before it was set to take effect on July 27. The DOJ, notably, had pushed for something broader than what the bishops themselves sought: while the Church’s lawsuit targeted only the confession provision, the Justice Department argued for striking down the entire law and restoring blanket immunity for all clergy from mandatory reporting.

Following continued legal pressure from both the DOJ and the bishops, Washington ultimately agreed to water down the law entirely, dropping the requirement that faith leaders report abuse admissions made specifically during confession or other private religious settings.

Part of a Broader Pattern

This isn’t an isolated legal fight for the Trump administration on child abuse policy. Earlier in 2025, the administration stripped federal funding from a program that provides legal advocates for victims of child sex trafficking, and dissolved a Justice Department unit that had played a key role in combating child exploitation cases.

Taken together, a pattern emerges: an administration that has actively worked to weaken both the funding infrastructure meant to help child abuse and trafficking victims, and now, a state law specifically designed to close a reporting gap that let known cases of abuse go unaddressed for years.

Washington passed a religiously neutral law requiring clergy of every faith to report child abuse. Catholic bishops sued to carve out an exception for confession. The Trump administration didn’t just decline to defend the law; it actively intervened to help kill it, and asked a court to go even further than the bishops themselves had requested. A federal judge agreed, and the state ultimately caved. Priests in Washington can now legally hear a confession describing child abuse and say nothing to anyone.

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Rep. Max Miller stands accused of holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head, pouring scalding water on her, and fracturing their 2-year-old daughter’s collarbone. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s response: he’ll still endorse him for reelection, and it’s not his job to get involved in his members’ “domestic events.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has continued to back Rep. Max Miller for reelection despite an ongoing House Ethics Committee investigation into domestic abuse allegations, including a claim that Miller fractured his 2-year-old daughter’s collarbone.

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What Miller Is Actually Accused Of

Miller, an Ohio Republican and former Trump aide, is in the middle of a child custody battle with his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, daughter of Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno. In court filings, Moreno has accused Miller of holding a gun to her head, throwing scalding hot water on her, and breaking their young daughter’s collarbone.

The House Ethics Committee opened a formal investigation into the abuse allegations, along with separate allegations of drug use. Miller has denied the accusations, describing the hot water incident as “horseplay,” and has said he won’t end his reelection campaign. He announced he would file his own request for an ethics investigation into himself, writing on X: “I have absolutely nothing to hide. We will be providing the committee everything they need.”

Separately, in the course of trying to publicly clear his name, Miller shared material involving his daughter that Moreno and multiple outlets have described as constituting child sexual abuse material. Miller has disputed that characterization, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper the material had already surfaced as part of a Child Protective Services investigation and that reporting on it was “being taken very much out of context.” That underlying dispute is itself now part of what the Ethics Committee is examining.

Johnson’s Response, Twice Now

Asked directly by CNN’s Manu Raju whether he’d still endorse Miller for reelection given the allegations, Johnson didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he said. “He has been a great member of Congress. He has some issues in his personal life he’s working through. The House Ethics Committee is looking into that and any implications it may have.” Johnson added his standard line: “We have to let due process play out.”

Weeks later, in an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Johnson went further in downplaying his own role. “There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time,” Johnson said. “It’s not my business to get engaged in it.” He added, “I think Max is taking them seriously. I think our colleagues are.”

That’s the Speaker of the House, the top-ranked elected Republican in the country, describing an active criminal-adjacent allegation involving a toddler’s fractured bone as a “domestic event” outside his purview.

Even Miller’s Own In-Laws Have Turned on Him

This isn’t a case where the allegations are coming from a purely partisan source Republicans can easily dismiss. Moreno’s father is Sen. Bernie Moreno, a sitting Republican senator and Trump ally. Sen. Moreno has publicly sided with his daughter, saying Miller “needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake,” and has called for his former son-in-law to resign and drop his reelection bid entirely.

When Republicans’ own party apparatus, up to and including a sitting GOP senator, is calling for a member’s resignation over these allegations, Johnson’s continued endorsement stands out even more starkly.

The Double Standard Question Johnson Couldn’t Answer

Reporters have directly pressed Johnson on why Democrats moved quickly to remove Senate nominee Graham Platner from the ballot in Maine over past controversy, while Republicans have taken no comparable action against Miller. Johnson’s answer, according to Truthout’s reporting, pointed to differences in “the GOP law[suit process]” rather than addressing the substance of the comparison, an answer that sidesteps the question of why one party’s candidate faced swift consequences while the other’s has faced none.

The Bottom Line

A sitting member of Congress stands accused, in his own ex-wife’s court filings, of holding a gun to her head, pouring boiling water on her, and fracturing their toddler daughter’s collarbone, allegations serious enough that even his father-in-law, a Republican U.S. senator, has called for his resignation. The Speaker of the House has responded by continuing to endorse him for reelection and describing the entire situation as a “domestic event” that isn’t his business to weigh in on.

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Republicans in Tarrant County want fewer places for 2 million Texans to vote this November, in the exact election where their own candidate, Ken Paxton, is locked in a dead heat with James Talarico. The NAACP and ACLU say the cuts will hit minority voters hardest. Local Republican officials insist it’s just about saving money. Democrats aren’t buying it.

Republican-led officials in Tarrant County, Texas, are pushing a plan to reduce the number of polling locations available this November, drawing sharp protests from Democrats and voting rights groups who say the cuts could disenfranchise voters in one of the country’s most closely watched midterm elections.

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What Republicans Are Actually Proposing

The proposal, set for a vote Tuesday, would cut the number of Election Day polling sites across Tarrant County, Texas’s third-largest county, home to more than 2 million people and covering Fort Worth, a county Republicans have overseen through their local election administration. County officials frame it as a cost-saving move, eliminating what they describe as low-turnout locations while still leaving voters with more than 200 places to cast ballots.

Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig said the reductions target sites that “serve few people,” and officials said sites near bus stops that meet federal accessibility requirements were prioritized to stay open, with the average distance between remaining Election Day sites coming out to about 1.5 miles.

That framing hasn’t satisfied critics, who point out that Republicans deciding which polling sites are worth keeping is exactly the kind of decision that quietly shapes who finds it easy to vote and who doesn’t, without ever needing an outright ban to accomplish it.

Voting Rights Groups Are Calling This Out by Name

On Friday, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union joined other voting rights organizations in a formal letter urging Tarrant County to reject the plan, warning the closures would land hardest in neighborhoods with high concentrations of minority voters. About a third of Tarrant County’s residents are Hispanic, and roughly 19.2% are Black, according to Census data, populations Republican-drawn maps and Republican-run election policy in Texas have already faced repeated legal challenges over in recent years.

Tarrant County adopted countywide voting back in 2019, meaning voters can cast a ballot at any polling site in the county rather than being tied to one specific precinct. But the county didn’t move to reduce its number of polling locations until now, timing that critics find impossible to separate from the stakes of this particular election, a Senate race Republicans are increasingly worried about losing.

Talarico Is Calling This What It Is

Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, the party’s Senate nominee, publicly urged the county to reject the proposal at a news conference Sunday, framing it in stark terms: “The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able vote easily.”

That’s not rhetoric pulled from nowhere. Talarico has already lived through a version of this exact playbook once this cycle. During the Democratic Senate primary earlier this year, a state judge ordered Dallas County polls to stay open two extra hours after “mass confusion” broke out when Republicans opted out of a joint countywide voting agreement, leading to hundreds of voters reportedly being turned away from precincts. Ken Paxton’s own campaign personally intervened at the time, asking the Texas Supreme Court to immediately block that extension, which it did, ordering election officials to separate out any ballots cast during the extra window Republicans had fought to eliminate.

Talarico’s Democratic primary rival at the time, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, said flatly of that episode: “I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised.” Now, months later, it’s Republicans in a different county pursuing a different mechanism, fewer polling sites instead of shorter hours, but aimed at the same outcome heading into the same race.

Paxton’s Campaign Won’t Answer for It

Spokespeople for Paxton did not respond to emails seeking comment on the Tarrant County proposal. Texas law leaves polling-site decisions up to each of the state’s 254 counties individually, which means there’s no single Republican state mandate forcing this specific cut, but it also means Republican officials at the local level are making this choice entirely on their own, with no one above them requiring it and no one in Paxton’s campaign willing to say a word about it.

Why the Timing Matters So Much

This isn’t unfolding in a low-stakes race. Talarico and Paxton are locked in one of the tightest Senate contests in the country. A recent Emerson College poll found the race sharply age-divided, with voters under 50 breaking for Talarico by 15 points and voters over 50 favoring Paxton by 11, results consistent with other surveys showing the race within the margin of error.

In a contest this close, in a state where Republicans have run the levers of election administration for years, a reduction in polling access isn’t a minor bureaucratic decision. It’s the kind of change that can shape who actually shows up to vote and who gets quietly filtered out along the way, right when Republicans need every advantage they can get.

Tarrant County’s Republican-run election administration says cutting polling sites is about efficiency, not politics. Voting rights groups, the NAACP, the ACLU, and Talarico’s own campaign say the timing, right before the closest Senate race Texas Republicans have faced in years, and the pattern, cuts concentrated in areas with large minority populations, tell a very different story. The vote on the proposal was scheduled for Tuesday, with the outcome set to shape how easily more than 2 million Tarrant County residents can cast a ballot this November, in an election Republicans increasingly can’t afford to leave to chance.

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A Florida grand jury just confirmed that $10 million meant to help poor children get health insurance was diverted to a charity run by Ron DeSantis’s own wife, then funneled straight into a political fight against legal weed. Ashley Moody’s office knew about the scheme while it happened. DeSantis then rewarded her with a Senate seat. Now Florida voters are being asked to hand her a full six-year term.

A Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration had “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, but declined to file criminal charges, citing a lack of evidence identifying who specifically was responsible.

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The Money Was Supposed to Help Poor Kids Get Health Insurance

The Leon County grand jury completed its report in January, investigating Hope Florida, the charity started in 2021 by Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis. Hope Florida’s stated mission is helping financially struggling families connect with churches and aid groups to keep them off publicly funded assistance programs.

Instead, according to the grand jury’s findings, $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement, money specifically intended to help poor children get health insurance, was routed to the charity and then moved again into political action committees. Those PACs used the money to campaign against a 2024 statewide ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana for adults in Florida. DeSantis opposed that measure. It ultimately fell just short of the 60% supermajority it needed to pass.

In plain terms: money meant for sick kids on Medicaid ended up funding a political campaign the governor personally wanted to win, and the people who ran that scheme are now the top elected officials in the state.

“We Can’t Prove Who Is Responsible”

The grand jury’s own language leaves little ambiguity about what happened, even without naming a name to charge. “Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally,” the report concluded.

The reason wasn’t a lack of evidence that a crime occurred. It was that no one involved would take responsibility or claimed no memory of who authorized sending the money to the charity in the first place. “We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution,” the grand jury wrote. “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again.”

That’s a grand jury explicitly stating the money was stolen for political use, while acknowledging the investigation hit a wall because everyone at the top developed selective amnesia at exactly the right moment.

Senator Ashley Moody Knew

The report didn’t leave every name out of it. It found that James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff at the time, “was in a position of authority over those involved in settling,” and that his own political committee, Keep Florida Clean PAC, was the prime recipient of the diverted $10 million.

But it’s Ashley Moody whose role deserves the closest look right now. The grand jury found that Moody’s office, when she was serving as Florida’s Attorney General, knew about the plans to divert Medicaid settlement money meant for poor children into a political fight over marijuana legalization. She didn’t stop it. She didn’t flag it publicly. Weeks after leaving the Attorney General’s office, DeSantis handpicked her for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, a direct appointment with no election required.

Now Moody isn’t just occupying that seat quietly. She just won her party’s primary for the special election to keep it for a full six-year term, and she’s running a deliberately low-key campaign that Politico itself has described as designed to avoid the kind of scrutiny her Hope Florida role invites. She faces Democrat Alex Vindman in November.

When confronted about her role, Moody’s response was to distance herself with a technicality rather than deny knowledge. In a post on X, she said her office was only one of several agencies that signed off on the initial settlement and claimed she “had no knowledge of how funds would be spent” by Hope Florida or anyone else involved. That’s a carefully worded denial. It says she didn’t know the specific destination of the funds. It does not deny that her own office knew a diversion scheme was underway, which is exactly what the grand jury found.

Uthmeier, for his part, went on offense instead of answering questions, suggesting at a news conference that Democrats were behind the leak of the sealed report and calling renewed public attention on its findings “a politically motivated hoax.” He’s also seeking reelection to the office Moody vacated.

DeSantis’s Response: Don’t Question the Findings

DeSantis himself, when asked about the report obtained and published by CBS News Miami, did not dispute that it was real. He insisted no laws were broken, but made clear his priority was identifying whoever leaked the sealed documents, promising they would face “consequences.”

Notice what’s missing from that response: any actual explanation of who ordered $10 million in Medicaid settlement money redirected to his wife’s charity and then into his own preferred political campaign. DeSantis addressed the leak. He did not address the theft, and neither has the woman he promoted to the U.S. Senate immediately after it happened.

Democrats Want the Case Reopened

David Jolly, the Democratic nominee for Florida governor, has called for the grand jury investigation to be reopened rather than closed with no accountability. Jolly faces Republican Byron Donalds in November. DeSantis, under Florida’s term limits, cannot seek a third term as governor, but the network of officials who benefited from this scheme, Uthmeier and Moody among them, are both on the ballot asking voters for full terms of their own.

A Florida grand jury has confirmed that $10 million meant to help low-income children get health insurance was diverted through the governor’s wife’s charity and used to fight a ballot initiative the governor personally opposed, while Ashley Moody’s own office knew what was happening and said nothing. She was rewarded with a Senate seat for it. Now she’s asking Florida voters to give her six more years, running a campaign that’s kept this exact story as quiet as possible.

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Six percent of all registered voters in Texas, more than 1.2 million people, currently have suspended voter registrations. Many of them have no idea. This is happening in a state handing its voter rolls over to the Trump administration, three months before a Senate race where the Democrat is currently leading the sitting Republican Attorney General.

More than 1.2 million Texas voters, roughly 6 percent of the state’s 18 million registered voters, currently have suspended voter registrations heading into November’s midterms, and many of them likely don’t know it.

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What “Suspense” Means, and Why It Matters

A suspended registration doesn’t outright cancel someone’s right to vote. It typically means the county doesn’t have a current address on file, usually because a mailed voter registration card or jury summons came back undeliverable. Suspended voters can still cast a ballot, but it comes with extra friction: if a voter shows up on Election Day still on the suspense list, they have to fill out a “statement of residence” form, and if they’ve moved to a new county, they’ll either have to vote in their old one or be handed a provisional ballot instead of a regular one.

That’s friction that falls disproportionately on people who’ve moved recently, renters, students, and lower-income voters most likely to relocate between election cycles, exactly the groups most likely to get quietly filtered out of a process most Americans assume is automatic.

The Numbers, County by County

The suspensions aren’t evenly spread across the state. Local totals cited by the Dallas Morning News include more than 129,000 suspended voters in Dallas County alone, more than 73,000 in Tarrant County, and nearly 56,000 each in Collin and Denton counties. These are some of the state’s largest and most politically competitive counties, exactly where a close statewide race could be decided by turnout at the margins.

To be fair to the state’s side of this: a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s office told Fox 26 that this number “isn’t atypical” ahead of an election, given how large the state’s voter rolls are, and voters remain on the suspense list for up to four years, or two full election cycles, before being removed from the rolls entirely.

The Deadline Is October 5, and Time Is Already Short

Voters have until October 5 to fix their registration and get off the suspense list before Election Day. They can check their status and update their address directly through the Texas Secretary of State’s website, at a county election office, or by mail, and will need a current driver’s license or ID, Social Security number, and their Voter Unique Identifier Number from their registration card.

The problem is straightforward: with a number this large, the message that action is even needed may simply never reach many of the 1.2 million people affected in time, especially anyone who hasn’t actually moved and is on the list purely because of a clerical mail issue outside their control.

Why the Timing Couldn’t Be Worse

This isn’t landing in a low-stakes cycle. Texas’s Senate race is currently a toss-up, with Democratic state Senator James Talarico holding a narrow polling edge over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. In a race that close, a suspended-registration problem affecting over a million people isn’t a footnote. It’s the kind of number that can single-handedly decide who represents Texas in the Senate for the next six years.

The timing carries an added layer of concern given that Texas is currently cooperating with the Trump administration’s push to gain access to state voter rolls nationwide, a federal effort that has raised its own separate questions about voter privacy and the potential for political interference in how states manage their registration lists.

The Bottom Line

More than 1.2 million Texans currently have suspended voter registrations heading into a Senate race that could come down to a razor-thin margin, and many of them have no idea their status has changed. The state says the number is routine. Whether that’s true or not, the deadline to fix it is October 5, and the affected voters skew toward exactly the populations, renters, movers, and lower-income residents, who are least likely to hear about the problem before it’s too late to matter.

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Michael Fultz was Brevard County’s Deputy of the Year in 2025. The same day he received that award, his ex-girlfriend filed a complaint that triggered an internal investigation. What investigators found: a Nazi salute photo, racial slurs in text messages, and confirmed proof that Fultz used a taxpayer-funded surveillance system to track her movements after denying he’d done it.

Brevard County Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Fultz resigned from the force after an internal investigation detailed allegations of sexual misconduct, racism, and abuse, including his use of Flock automated license plate readers to stalk his ex-girlfriend.

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How the Investigation Started

Fultz was hired by Brevard County in 2024 and named the department’s Deputy of the Year in 2025. On the same day as that award ceremony, his ex-girlfriend sent the sheriff’s office a formal letter of complaint detailing a long list of concerns about his behavior. That letter was enough to trigger a full internal investigation, one that ultimately ran 43 pages and uncovered far more than the initial complaint likely anticipated.

The Flock Stalking Investigation

The investigation’s central finding involved Fultz’s misuse of Flock, a license-plate-reading surveillance system used by law enforcement nationwide. Investigators found that Fultz had used Flock to track his ex-girlfriend’s vehicle and had bragged to her about doing it.

When questioned directly, Fultz told investigators he remembered the conversation with his ex but denied checking her vehicle registration to spy on her or out of revenge. Investigators didn’t take his word for it. They audited the actual Flock logs and confirmed that Fultz had, in fact, tracked her movements. When running a Flock search, users are required to log a reason for the query. Fultz’s justification for searching his ex’s plate: simply “investigation.”

Investigators also determined Fultz had accessed Flock while off-duty, using his agency-issued cellphone rather than his laptop. Fultz offered a shifting set of explanations, at one point suggesting he might have just been demonstrating how the system worked to her, and separately claiming he already had her location through Snapchat, so tracking her through Flock “wouldn’t have benefitted him.” Investigators’ own data contradicted the underlying denial regardless of his explanation for it.

What Else the Investigation Found

Fultz’s misuse of Flock was just one part of a far broader set of findings. According to the investigation, Fultz had posed for photos giving a Nazi salute after shaving his mustache to resemble Adolf Hitler. His ex-girlfriend also provided photographic evidence of Fultz holding a firearm, identified in the investigation as an agency-issued Walther, to her head and inserting it into her mouth during a sexual encounter. She told investigators the act was consensual at the time but that she came to see it as inappropriate for a sheriff’s deputy. The investigation notes that the encounter occurred after Fultz had shot and killed a knife-wielding man who charged him in April 2025, an incident Brevard County confirmed separately at the time.

The investigation also documented Fultz’s frequent use of racial slurs in text messages with his ex, which he attributed to growing up in a foster home with Black parents and siblings, telling investigators the language “became normal to use,” and separately citing the card game Cards Against Humanity as a source of what he called “edgy humor.”

Beyond that, investigators found Fultz had been pulled over for speeding on his motorcycle and covering his license plate on at least four separate occasions, including one stop clocked at 111 mph, and that he walked away from each stop after identifying himself as law enforcement. After being directly ordered to keep his motorcycle’s plate visible, investigators say he drove out of the sheriff’s office parking lot without a plate attached within 30 minutes, an incident captured on video. Fultz told investigators the speeding and plate-covering were for content on his motorcycle-themed social media accounts, and that he sometimes used AI to generate images for those posts.

He Was Allowed to Resign

Despite the scope of the findings, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office allowed Fultz to resign rather than face formal termination. The investigation’s own conclusion states plainly: “Although termination is warranted for your egregious misconduct, due to the fact you are no longer employed by the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, this Administrative Investigation is closed and referred to file.” In practice, resigning let the case close without the formal record a termination would have created.

The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office provided a copy of the investigation but did not respond to a request for comment on the findings.

Part of a National Pattern of Flock Abuse by Police

Fultz’s case adds to a growing list of law enforcement officers losing their jobs, and sometimes facing arrest, for misusing Flock’s surveillance capabilities. An officer in South Carolina was arrested this July after misusing the system. The town of Greer, South Carolina, suspended its entire Flock contract after discovering two of its own officers had used it to stalk their exes. Another South Carolina officer was fired after an audit found she’d used Flock 166 separate times to track an ex-partner.

What sets Fultz apart, notably, is that he actually told the woman he was surveilling that he was using the system to do it. Investigators note that most victims of this kind of law enforcement stalking don’t discover it’s happening until it’s gone on for months or years.

A deputy honored as his department’s best of the year was, by his own department’s investigation, using government surveillance tools to track an ex-partner, posing for Nazi salute photos, and using his service weapon in ways his own internal report described as inappropriate for law enforcement. He wasn’t fired for any of it. He was allowed to walk away, and the case was quietly closed.

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A former staffer for Rep. Mike Collins posted a swastika made out of a gay slur and shared an AI-generated image of himself in Ku Klux Klan robes. Jon Ossoff responded within hours: “Yet another connection between Congressman Mike Collins and white nationalism, between Congressman Collins and neo-Nazi ideology... Yet another week, yet another scandal.”

A former staffer for Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), who is challenging Sen. Jon Ossoff in November’s critical Senate race, shared images in June and July on his X account of a swastika and one that depicts himself in Ku Klux Klan robes.

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Ossoff’s Response, Same Day

Ossoff addressed the story directly the morning it broke. “What did we learn this morning in the Washington Post?” he said, pointing to the newspaper’s reporting. “Yet another connection between Congressman Mike Collins and white nationalism, between Congressman Collins and neo-Nazi ideology... Disgraceful and disqualifying. Yet another week, yet another scandal for” Collins’s campaign.

That’s Ossoff reacting to this specific story, within hours of it publishing, and folding it directly into the broader case he’s been building against Collins for months.

The former intern, 24-year-old Preston Parra, who describes himself as a “twink fascist,” told the Washington Post the KKK image was made using Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool and insisted his posts were “satirical.” In July, he posted another image that arranged a slang term for young, slim gay men into the shape of a swastika, an especially loaded juxtaposition given that gay men were among those tortured and killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Parra denied being a white supremacist, but he also posted “white power” in June and July, and made his views fairly explicit when he told the Post: “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world.” On his own consulting website, Parra quoted Collins praising the quality of his work product, saying, “You can grade it by the amount of people that are watching it and pushing it back out.” Parra also separately posted his support for Collins’s campaign, writing, “let’s get that man elected.”

Parra downplayed any responsibility Collins might bear, telling reporters, “What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” Collins’s campaign did not answer the Post’s detailed questions about Parra, instead issuing a statement calling antisemitism “abhorrent” and pivoting to accuse Ossoff, who is Jewish, of failing to sufficiently condemn antisemitism on the left.

This Is the Third Incident, Not the First

Georgia Republicans are increasingly saying this is becoming a pattern rather than a series of coincidences. Just weeks earlier, CNN’s KFile reported extensively on Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, married to Collins’s daughter Summer. CNN found Scheer had built a social media following promoting White nationalist ideology, sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories, and circulating Nazi imagery, including polling his followers on a video titled “why Gen-Z doesn’t hate Hitler.” Scheer has appeared in family photos on Collins’s own campaign website, attended Collins’s Senate primary victory party, and voter records show him registered at a Collins-owned property adjacent to the congressman’s own estate.

When CNN pressed Collins on the relationship at a press conference in late July, he abruptly ended the event rather than answer, saying only, “You know, we’ve fully addressed that,” before cutting the press conference short: “Listen, thank you. I appreciate y’all’s time.”

Separately, ex-aide William Paul, son of Sen. Rand Paul, hurled antisemitic insults at Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) at a bar in May, and Collins also replaced his chief of staff, Kip Talley, in July after Slate reported Talley had participated in a group chat that included white supremacists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.

Ossoff Has Been Building This Case for Weeks

Today’s comment wasn’t a one-off. After CNN’s Scheer reporting, Ossoff said Collins was “unfit for any office,” calling him “a known bigot and antisemite” and adding, “This is a man who represents a dark past that Georgia has moved on through and beyond.”

At a rally in Atlanta, Ossoff went further: “Mike Collins needs to release every email, every text, every call, every single communication between those white supremacists and himself or his chief of staff or anyone in his office.” He described Collins as “a known bigot under federal investigation for the illegal misuse of tax dollars, surrounded by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, widely known for his poor character and low integrity.”

Earlier this month, Ossoff held a virtual press conference specifically demanding Collins answer whether his business had paid Scheer for work: “It’s been more than a month since CNN reported that Congressman Mike Collins has had a neo-Nazi propagandist producing vile neo-Nazi propaganda from Mike Collins’ home.”

Republicans Are Starting to Break Ranks Too

One Georgia conservative, quoted by Raw Story, said flatly: “We do not need a senator that thinks he’s a media influencer on X and has no integrity.” Atlanta radio host Shelley Wynter announced he’s endorsing Ossoff instead, citing “the meanness and mean-spiritedness” of Collins’s campaign. Several Georgia Republicans told the Washington Post they increasingly see a pattern they fear could cost the party the race.

Collins also remains under a House Ethics Committee review over alleged misuse of government funds, which a watchdog report has recommended pursuing via subpoena. Collins has dismissed that probe as a “nothingburger.”

Why This Race Matters So Much

Collins is running against Ossoff in a contest widely seen as pivotal to Senate control, where Republicans currently hold a narrow 53-47 edge. Collins won the GOP nomination with Trump’s endorsement, and Georgia is now one of a small handful of states that could determine which party controls the chamber next year.

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