Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. A quick favor: if you’re watching this on Substack, help us out by clicking the ❤️ and hitting restack. That’s what helps us get these stories in front of the people who really need them.
Today, FBI agents are confiding that they fear the Justice Department may order them to seize voting machines on Election Day. Donald Trump has created an exclusive new workspace for his intensely devoted 35 year-old staffer Natalie Harp inside his private dining room by the Oval Office. Democrats are putting together legislation to close what they’re calling the “Elon Musk loophole,” which has allowed the world’s wealthiest man to pour a staggering $446 million into the midterms. And a group has announced a massive leak exposing the names, job titles and personal contact information of more than 41,000 employees and contractors at the Department of Homeland Security, including undercover ICE agents. Let’s get into it.
As you’ll read below, Elon Musk — the world’s first trillionaire — is in the spotlight for pouring nearly half a billion dollars into Republican campaign coffers while simultaneously profiting from billions of dollars in federal contracts. This is the same man whose social media platform is actively preventing Raw America’s stories from reaching our followers because we criticize him.
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With the midterms now just five days away, seven unnamed sources within the federal government told MS NOW that some FBI agents are concerned they’ll be given illegal or unethical orders to interfere with the election. This could include the seizure of voting machines or ballots, or other dubious orders that could throw election results into chaos. That’s an even more remarkable statement when considering rank-and-file FBI agents have typically leaned conservative.
They don’t have to look far to have a point of reference. In January of this year, Kash Patel’s FBI seized 2020 ballots from an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, using a warrant built largely on voter fraud claims that have been loudly and repeatedly debunked. Then in March of this year, the FBI took voting records and equipment from Arizona’s Republican-led review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, which houses Phoenix. Neither one of those raids led to a single criminal charge.
Federal law already prevents armed federal agents from entering polling places. An 1865 statute keeps them away in all but the most extreme circumstances. But agents are worried that Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department could get around that with warrants based on flimsy allegations, which would allow armed agents to legally obtain ballots or voting machines and break the tightly regulated chain of custody that protects against election tampering.
Former supervisory FBI agent Rob D’Amico told the network that he and others fear the FBI could become “the administration’s arm into seizing voting machines or issuing warrants on questionable probable cause.” He added that agents will need to be people of high moral character who are able to discern right from wrong, rather than ones who blindly follow orders.
The DOJ’s top officials aren’t assuaging those concerns. When Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut asked Kash Patel last month whether it would be illegal to send armed agents to polling places, Patel would only say, “I don’t know that we can’t legally do it.” Blanche has also notably not ruled out trying to prevent states from certifying results, given his pending lawsuit in Alaska.
For 40 years, DOJ policy barred investigations into election fraud until after the voting process concluded, specifically so the federal government wouldn’t cast a shadow over the polls. The Trump administration has tossed that tradition aside.
States are gearing up for a fight. One Democratic attorney general petitioned the federal court for a chance to respond before any warrants get signed for ballots or voting equipment. Election officials have also planned for scenarios like federal raids of polling places. New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James recently reminded Empire State voters that armed federal officers are explicitly banned from voting precincts.
The FBI has already has to learn this lesson the hard way. After the Church Committee exposed in 1975 how J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau spied on and sabotaged Americans for political purposes, Both Congress and the DOJ built the same rules that kept agents out of our elections for the next 50 years. Now, those rules are being torn up by the very same people who swore an oath to uphold them.
While Donald Trump’s party braces for a potentially brutal Tuesday night, the president has been focused on finding a new spot for his fiercely devoted young female aide. According to The New York Times, Trump’s assistant Natalie Harp now has her own area right inside Trump’s private dining room adjacent to the Oval Office. She’ll now be working there when she isn’t seated behind the president at the Resolute Desk.
Harp is known by her nickname “human printer” for her pattern of printing out copies of flattering right-wing news articles and memes and handing them to the president. The Times is also reporting that most of the dining room is covered in printouts, which is likely Harp’s handiwork. The paper also reported that Trump is increasingly surrounded by a small group of doting staffers.
This week, Harp got an upgrade to her position in the motorcade, now riding in the back of the presidential limousine with Trump instead of in a separate vehicle. Last year, Trump gifted Harp and two other young female staffers $45,000, supposedly as a holiday bonus. And in letters she wrote to him in 2023, Harp called herself “unworthy” of Trump’s attention and even told him, “You are all that matters to me.”
George Washington packed his first cabinet with men who couldn’t stand each other;s company, including Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, because he understood that a president who only hears from yes-men stops hearing from the rest of the country. A man cloistered inside a small room full of flattering printouts and constant praise isn’t being served, but managed. The rest of us end up paying the price for whatever comes out of that room.
Next up, there’s a new plan to tackle Elon Musk’s election spending. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia of California — who would chair the House Oversight Committee if Democrats take back the House — are now seeking to close what they refer to as the “Elon Musk loophole.”
Federal law already prevents government contractors from donating to the campaigns of candidates running for federal office. But because SpaceX and Tesla count as separate legal entities, Musk himself can spend his money however he likes. And so far, he’s already given an eye-popping $446 million to Republicans and Republican-affiliated groups in the 2026 cycle alone, cementing his status as the GOP’s single largest donor. This is all while his companies have been awarded tens of billions of dollars in federal contracts.
Van Hollen’s bill, which he’ll officially introduce in November, would extend that federal contractor ban to corporate executives, top shareholders and affiliated corporations. He said Musk’s spending was akin to “rank corruption” and calculated the South African-born Tesla and SpaceX CEO has already made roughly $20 billion in profits from taxpayer-funded contracts.
Nearly half of Musk’s spending has gone to Texas, including approximately $190 million into a super PAC aimed at bolstering Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s floundering campaign against Democratic state representative James Talarico. Paxton’s Democratic opponent has accused Musk of trying to buy a Senate seat outright.
The bill won’t pass the Republican-controlled lame-duck Congress, and Trump wouldn’t sign it. However, Van Hollen observed out that federal courts have already upheld limits on donations from contractors, which means this path wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment in the same way that overturning the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision likely would. Ever since five Supreme Court justices opened the floodgates 16 years ago, billionaires have treated our elections like an investment portfolio.
Congress banned corporate money in federal elections back in 1907 by passing the Tillman Act, because even Teddy Roosevelt’s Republicans understood that a government that was for sale to the companies it did business with was no longer a government by and for the American people. A foreign-born CEO whose companies make tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers while he spends $446 million picking the politicians who will award those contracts is the exact kind of corruption the Tillman Act was written to prevent.
Finally, a group that calls itself the Department of Peace has leaked records on more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees and contractors, along with seven agencies under the DHS umbrella, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The pro-government transparency nonprofit organization Distributed Denial of Secrets published the archive, which has been called “Icepick,” on Wednesday night.
WIRED reports that the “Icepick” files include everything from emails and cell phone numbers to office addresses, as well as references to various undercover operations, wiretap programs and surveillance tools like Palantir’s Falcon platform. Roughly 1,300 ICE enforcement accounts were created after Trump signed Republicans’ so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law in July of last year. Dozens more belong to local sheriff’s offices that have been deputized to conduct immigration enforcement.
DHS says it’s working to address a potential breach, while multiple national security experts fear that foreign adversaries could exploit the data for the next several months at minimum.
The leak is hitting right as DHS has been exposed for hunting down and spying on critics. This includes efforts to unmask anonymous social media users and even prosecuting ICE protesters for posting identifying information about ICE agents. Adam Steinbaugh of the civil liberties group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) observed that many of the names and job titles in the “Icepick” archive amount to “information that would be on a business card,” which the government can’t criminalize.
Researcher Maia Arson Crimew, who built a searchable database for the “Icepick” data, said Americans shouldn’t let the government frighten them out of looking into how it operates.
The Supreme Court settled this 25 years ago in the Bartnicki v. Vopper decision, when it held that publishing true information on matters of public import is protected by the First Amendment. That even includes if someone broke the law to obtain it. The Court rightly knew that a you have the right to know what your government is doing in your name with your tax dollars. Masked armed secret police have never been part of the American experiment. A federal agency that wants to mask its own agents while unmasking critics has already told you which side it’s on.
The billionaire-owned outlets don’t want you to know about FBI agents worried about being given illegal orders or about Democrats’ efforts to cut off the flow of Elon Musk’s money to Republican campaigns. We can cover those stories because we don’t answer to a right-wing oligarch. We answer to you.
I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. Make sure to tap the ❤️ and hit the restack button if you haven’t already, so we can make sure we get these stories in front of the most people.