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Today, Virginia’s attorney general is suggesting he may prosecute the Trump administration over allegedly misrepresenting themselves to look at sensitive voter data. A longtime Republican leader in a deep-red rural state is now telling voters to cast their ballots for a Democrat instead of Trump’s endorsed U.S. Senate candidate. The president is quietly opening up public lands to build new data centers in half a dozen states. And the FBI just issued a memo warning ICE agents that women might be posing as conservatives to catfish them and unmask them to the public.
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Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones just sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding answers about a damning whistleblower complaint. According to the whistleblower, DHS employees accessed Virginia’s voter database under false pretenses to look for non-citizens supposedly registered to vote.
But Virginia’s system is specifically meant for voters to check their own registration status. That’s it. State law requires anyone using the tool to agree under penalty of prosecution that they’re only looking up their own records. Handing that data over to federal agents without a court order is a direct violation of state election law in Virginia.
That same whistleblower complaint includes training transcripts from a session held for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) staffers last month. Workers say they were pulled off their normal assignments and trained for less than two hours before being ordered to start running federally supplied lists through state voter databases.
CIS agents were expected to process 40 names a day, meaning each person working an eight-hour shift only had about 12 minutes to investigate a voter’s citizenship status. That’s 12 minutes to decide whether to decide whether someone has the right to vote. Naturally, advocacy groups fear many naturalized U.S. citizens were improperly removed from the rolls under this rushed process.
This is all part of the conspiracy theory of supposed widespread non-citizen voting that Trump keeps pushing. The administration maintains that non-citizen voting is a serious threat, even though researchers say it’s extremely rare. The Justice Department has sued thirty states along with Washington D.C. in an effort to force them to hand over detailed voter rolls. So far, the administration has yet to win a single case, including in courts overseen by judges Trump himself appointed.
Jones is now demanding Mullin’s DHS preserve every piece of evidence tied to the operation. That includes access logs, internal correspondence and training materials. Whether Mullin’s agency actually cooperates remains to be seen. But if Virginia does decide to press charges, it would mark one of the first real legal tests of how far this administration can push federal agencies to intrude on state election systems.
The framers had just fought a war against a king, which is why Article I, Section 4 ensures elections are run by the states and lets only Congress, never the president, override them. When a president’s agents slip into a state’s voter system under false pretenses, they’re testing whether that firewall still stands. Every state in the union has a stake in what comes next.
Republican Bill Graves served as Kansas secretary of state for eight years before going on to serve two terms as governor. He’s about as Republican as it gets, and is considered an elder statesman in the Sunflower State’s Republican Party. And now he’s doubling down on his endorsement of Democrat Adam Hamilton, a pastor challenging incumbent U.S. Senator Roger Marshall.
Graves is acknowledging how abnormal his endorsement is, given that Kansas hasn’t elected a Democratic U.S. senator since 1932. But he recently told CNN that party loyalty shouldn’t override common sense, saying “it’s OK to vote Democrat in this Senate race.”
The former governor initially laid out the reason for his endorsement in an op-ed for the Kansas City Star. In that piece, he accused Marshall of turning his back on Kansas while praising Hamilton for showing genuine compassion toward the most vulnerable.
Marshall’s campaign has also been hit with new scrutiny after the New York Times reported that before he was elected to Congress, Marshall — a former OB-GYN — sued more than 700 of his own patients over unpaid medical bills. 81 of those patients ended up being arrested as a result of Marshall’s litigiousness.
Despite all of this, flipping a Republican seat in deep-red Kansas is still going to be a heavy lift for Democrats. Cook Political Report currently rates the race as “likely Republican,” though it recently downgraded its assessment of the race from “solid Republican” earlier this summer. Several other pollsters put the race within a single point, meaning the race is effectively a toss-up.
Trump won Kansas by a comfortable 16-point margin in 2024. But his approval numbers have since dropped to abysmal levels, and Democrats are now enjoying a seven-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot heading into the midterms. Whether that leads to a major upset in Kansas is unknown, but the fact that a former Republican governor is now publicly campaigning against his own party’s general election nominee is a significant development.
Kansas has seen something similar in the past. In 1924, William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia editor and a career Republican, broke with his party and ran for governor as an independent because his own party’s nominee wouldn’t stand up to the Ku Klux Klan. Even though he lost that race, the Klan was eventually run out of Kansas within a few years because he’d shown people that conscience is more important than party loyalty.
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The Washington Sun is now reporting that Donald Trump’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is currently reviewing data center construction proposals covering at least 17,600 acres across half a dozen states —Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. At least 12 separate projects are currently on the table, and many of them hav yet to be publicly revealed before today.
The most striking part is how the government has strained to keep this whole project under wraps. Several local officials told reporters they had no idea the fBLM was even considering these proposals in their communities. That’s raised concern among advocates like Aaron Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities, who insisted the public is being deliberately left out of decisions affecting their public land.
Some of these projects are significant in their scope. Valar Atomics, a nuclear startup, has proposed a 10,200 acre data center that would be built with small nuclear reactors near Green River, Utah. They also have a separate project in Utah currently in the works called the Raceway Gigasite.
In Idaho, a company called Rhea Data wants to build a data center complex spanning four million square feet just south of Boise, complete with its own power plant run on natural gas. Lisa Young of the Sierra Club’s Idaho chapter said these facilities could have an “apocalyptic” impact on the region’s energy and water resources.
It’s genuinely unprecedented for the federal government to even consider building data centers on public land. Federal lands has historically been meant for livestock grazing, mining and energy production, but never for data centers. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) specifically requires a public comment period so residents have a chance to weigh in before major projects move forward. However, the Trump administration has been busy rolling back several NEPA regulations aimed at curbing public input on federal land development projects.
Only one of those data centers has been approved. That project is in Nevada, though it’s currently on hold due to a pending legal challenge. Whether the other data centers get official approve depends entirely on whether the public organizes in time to stop them.
When Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act 50 years ago, it declared that these lands stay in public hands and that the public gets a voice in how they’re used. Cutting backroom deals for server farms before residents even know they’re being considered betrays that promise, and that’s how a commons that belongs to all of us quietly becomes an asset for a small handful of billionaires.
It’s now being reported that earlier this year, the FBI’s Chicago field office circulated an internal memo warning that a small group of women could be creating fake dating profiles to trick U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into revealing themselves. The memo described the profiles as leaning into a conservative-oriented “traditional wife” aesthetic, apparently meant to appeal specifically to ICE agents.
According to the memo, the goal was to unmask agents and publish their personal information online. Once an agent agreed to meet one of the women in person, the plan allegedly involved publicly naming and shaming them as a means of discouraging further ICE raids.
The memo was revealed following a public records request by the government transparency nonprofit group Property of the People. It was released after MAGA influencer Chaya Raichik claimed online that groups of TikTok users were organizing an effort to out ICE agents. There’s no clear evidence confirming the accuracy of her claims.
Ryan Shapiro, who runs Property of the People, criticized the FBI memo as “absurd,” pointing out that taxpayer dollars were spent investigating the possibility that ICE agents could potentially get embarrassed while looking for women on dating apps.
ICE has apparently been quietly firing its initial wave of new agents who were hired during its massive recruitment push this winter. The agency was apparently laying off agents it failed to properly vet, citing performance issues and other red flags that should have been caught before those agents were ever hired.
In 1958 the Supreme Court ruled in NAACP v. Alabama that hostile state governments couldn’t force private citizens to hand over group membership lists, because in a free society people are supposed to have clear-cut privacy rights. The armed agents of the state are the ones who are supposed to answer to the public with their faces and their names. The Trump administration has that relationship totally backwards.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Once again, please take a moment to click the ❤️ and hit restack so we can break through the algorithm and reach the readers who need to hear these stories the most. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. Have a great weekend.