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Tonight, Donald Trump’s Justice Department is launching criminal investigations into California election officials with just five more days to go before the midterms. The U.S. Army is now rehearsing the digging of temporary mass graves on battlefields for the first time since the Korean War. High-ranking Democrats in the House of Representatives are now demanding records of Trump’s conversations with AI chatbots like Elon Musk’s Grok. And Vivek Ramaswamy is suddenly pulling the controversial attack ad off the air that led to voters across Ohio turning on him.
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Donald Trump’s Justice Department is now siccing its resources on the people who run elections in the biggest state in the country. Two sources with direct knowledge told Bloomberg that the DOJ’s leadership has directed federal prosecutors in California to obtain grand jury subpoenas of state and local officials over their roles in administering what the Justice Department argues is illegal voting. Prosecutors in Los Angeles and at least one other district were expected to begin the probes on Thursday.
The DOJ’s Los Angeles office is run by U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, a longtime Trump ally who’s reportedly been clamoring to investigate election officials, including California’s secretary of state. It remains unknown which officials will ultimately be targeted by the subpoenas, and what charges they’ll be pursuing. As Raw America reported this week, a federal judge disqualified Essayli, saying he was “unlawfully serving” in his role as an acting prosecutor without being officially confirmed by the Senate.
The pressure from the deputy attorney general’s office to launch the investigations came right after a federal judge show down the DOJ’s attempt to force California to set aside up to 20,000 ballots under the baseless accusation that they were cast by non-citizens, with the judge adding the move was a threat to democracy. DOJ leadership has since suggested California elections officials could be criminally liable for aiding and abetting crimes if they don’t review the mail-in ballots that DOJ wants set aside.
Some of California’s four federal judicial districts have officially lodged their objections to any attempt to interfere with the November 3rd election. Anyone who receives a federal subpoena can file a motion to quash it, which would likely spark litigation lasting well past the midterms. While in the 1960s we saw the Justice Department send lawyers into the South to protect voters, this effort appears more interested in intimidating the people who are counting the votes.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is practicing something it hasn’t done in a war effort since Korea: burying its own troops in mass temporary graves on the battlefield.
Newsweek is reporting that soldiers from the 3rd Corps Sustainment Command and the 20th Engineer Brigade stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina — along with military chaplains and other religious support staff — have been deploying bulldozers and excavators to see how quickly they could bury large numbers of dead bodies while keeping remains intact for eventual identification and relocation. A standard battlefield plot has five trenches capable of holding 100 bodies. Crews filled each trench in roughly 75 minutes. The Army says with eight bulldozers and four excavators, they could temporarily bury up to 2,400 soldiers in a single day.
America didn’t dig mass graves this in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the remains of troops killed in action were usually flown home quickly. The Army stated the reason for changing that approach is particularly eye-opening: in a high-casualty war, mortuary teams don’t have the ability to individually bury every dead soldier or observe each troop’s religious traditions, especially in the middle of intense fighting.
Sergeant 1st Class Delbert Ruede of the 3rd Corps Sustainment Command said if the United States went to war tomorrow, the Army “would be making this up as we went along.” He added that the drills are allowing troops to have a field-tested way to treat their fallen comrades with respect.
While the Army is practicing mass burials, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the Trump administration is weighing a significant escalation in Iran as soon as next week. That escalation would happen in spite of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth firing Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, who was head of strategy, plans and policy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No immediate reason was given for his firing.
The Korean War cost nearly 37,000 American lives. When the Pentagon is planning for losses at that scale, Congress should be publicly asking the Trump administration if it has plans to put large numbers of troops in harm’s way.
Speaking of asking questions, the Democrats who would be chairing the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees if Democrats take back the majority in the House next Tuesday now want to know what Donald Trump has been asking AI chatbots.
Congressmen Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California sent a five-page letter to the White House this week after it was reported that both Trump and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spent hours asking Musk’s Grok chatbot about the president’s legacy. According to TIME magazine, Trump asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured President Nicolás Maduro. Grok responded that residents would celebrate. Around a month later, the U.S. kidnapped Maduro after a late-night raid, and Trump reportedly praised Musk’s chatbot as ingenious.
Raskin and Garcia noted in their letter that the president consulted Grok “but not Congress” on Venezuela, deliberately circumventing Congress’s constitutional war powers and depending on a “highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone” technology to make sensitive foreign policy decisions. They’re now arguing that any prompts Trump or his staff sent to chatbots like Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or other generative AI tools are the property of the United States and should legally be turned over for preservation.
Their letter also points to how the Pentagon relied on faulty AI to launch an attack in Minab, Iran earlier this year that killed 123 schoolchildren. They also pointed to Grok’s troubling history of allowing users to generate child sexual abuse material.
After the Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act in 1978, so a president’s official discussions would become public property. If a chatbot is helping a president decide who lives and who dies, the American people have every right to read the official transcripts.
Billionaire Republican Vivek Ramaswamy has now officially pulled the ugliest ad of the Ohio’s gubernatorial race — and perhaps of the entire 2026 midterm cycle — off of the airwaves, saying the ad simply ran its course.
The ad featured the testimony of Donna Arthur — the estranged mother of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton — accusing her own daughter of lying about both Ramaswamy and her own upbringing. But the ad omitted important context: Acton hasn’t spoken to her mother since 1978, because she took her stepfather’s side after he was accused of and criminally charged with sexually abusing her when she was 12. Arthur lost custody of her children, and stayed married to Acton’s rapist until he died, while he was still on the run from the law.
Despite the ugly backstory, Ramaswamy decided the smart move was to put a the estranged mother of a woman who survived childhood sexual abuse on television. Despite the initial backlash, his campaign doubled down on the ad, spending $4 million on plastering it all over Ohio’s biggest media markets.
The backlash was swift, and it came from both sides of the political aisle. Two-term Republican Governor Mike DeWine was among the Republicans who demanded Ramaswamy pull the ad, though at the time he refused to do so. Even Donald Trump defended the ad at his rally in Chillicothe, Ohio on Wednesday night, telling the room full of MAGA supporters that Ramaswamy was treated unfairly. He of course blamed the “fake news” for the backlash to the ad.
But the first polls released after the ad circulated showed Ohio voters were quickly turning on Ramaswamy. As Raw America reported yesterday, Brenda Malcolm — an independent voter from Columbus — told pollsters that Ramaswamy’s ad “just totally ticked me off.” Acton led in one post-ad poll by a four-point margin.
Ramaswamy said Thursday during a campaign event that the ad had run to completion and that his campaign had since produced four other spots. He notably didn’t offer any apology or acknowledgment any harm. The Republican candidate added that he would prefer for the campaign’s final stretch to be about policy rather than ads. That’s a pretty significant thing to hear from the candidate who briefly tried to make the race into a referendum on whether his opponent lied about being assaulted as a child. Ohio voters noticed, and they didn’t like it. That’s the clearest explanation for why the ad is off the air.
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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks again for reading, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. And if you haven’t yet, please make sure to click the ❤️ and restack this newsletter so we can reach the people who really need these stories.