Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
The whistleblower who exposed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead. Trump told the crowd at a rally in Ohio that the midterms would bring a “big surprise.” A Shasta County election official who lost his primary responded by padlocking the ballots. And a Republican senator was bombarded with Venmo requests after Trump leaked his phone number.
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Another person with information about Jeffrey Epstein’s associates has died under mysterious circumstances.
The man who warned Congress about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s communication with Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead. Simon Andriesz was 57 and had been living in Cornwall, England, where The Banker reports he died by suicide last week.
Andriesz was confirmed dead by Andy Agathangelou, founder of a financial transparency group that had hosted Andriesz at events. The Banker said the cause of death was suicide, but no other outlet has independently confirmed that. The Commerce Department and FBI did not respond to requests for comment.
Andriesz was the one who turned over a 2018 email chain to House Oversight Committee lawmakers in which Lutnick and Epstein discussed Adfin, a digital advertising firm both had invested in. He found the chain by hunting through the Justice Department’s release of millions of Epstein files for “HWL,” Lutnick’s initials.
Lutnick told a New York Post podcast that he met Epstein in 2005 but ended the relationship shortly thereafter, disturbed by what he saw during a tour of Epstein’s Manhattan townhome. The email chain shows the two men kept in friendly contact until at least 2018, a full decade after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor.
This could be anything from another $100,000 watch drop to the National Guard.
Trump traveled to Vandalia, Ohio on Saturday to rally for Senator Jon Husted, who is facing a competitive challenge from Democratic former Senator Sherrod Brown. During the event, Trump told the crowd that the November midterms would bring a “big surprise.”
Trump didn’t explain what he meant by that. The comment came weeks after he refused to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act or declaring a national emergency around the midterms, telling Time magazine, “I’m not committing to anything.”
Ohio is the seat Republicans need most to hold the Senate, and they’re currently losing it by nearly double digits. A Fox News poll shows Democrat Sherrod Brown ahead of appointed Senator Jon Husted by eight points, with 31 percent of non-MAGA Republicans crossing party lines to vote for him.
Brown lost his Senate seat to Republican Bernie Moreno two years ago and is looking for a comeback. Husted has never won a Senate race, but was appointed to fill the vacancy left by JD Vance when he became vice president.
The sniff test is no longer a metaphor in California.
FBI agents visited Shasta County last week after Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis said ballots from the June primary appeared, felt, and smelled suspicious as workers were counting them. Curtis just happened to be on the ballot in that same election and lost.
After his defeat, Curtis locked up stacks of ballots in a room at the Shasta County elections office, where he had installed a new lock and seal. He said he did this expecting the FBI would eventually arrive.
Curtis, a longtime conspiracy theorist and election denier, has used his time in office to accuse his predecessors of stuffing ballot boxes. It’s a strange accusation to make in rural Shasta County, a hyper-conservative area that routinely gives Trump about two-thirds of its vote.
A federal grand jury has subpoenaed Curtis, ordering him to bring the seized ballots to Sacramento. The Shasta County Board of Supervisors also formally censured him in August after county investigations found credible allegations of misconduct with election employees.
Curtis’ replacement begins in January. His final official act will be to oversee the November election.
Of all the reasons to leak a senator’s phone number, the clock going back has got to be the funniest one.
Early Saturday, Trump posted Sen. Tom Cotton’s personal phone number on Truth Social, attempting to pressure the Arkansas Republican to vote for the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent.
The House passed the bill in July, but has stalled in the Senate as Cotton and other Republicans refuse to support it. Trump told his followers to call Cotton and tell him to vote yes.
A Washington Sun reporter later found that the same number Trump had published was linked to Cotton’s personal Venmo account. Social media users quickly began sending Cotton requests for payment in ludicrous amounts, with some posting screenshots of his refusals.
One user asked for $1,000 to make up for the recent increase in gas prices. Another requested the $5,000 that Trump has been promising voters on the campaign trail as a reason to vote Republican in November.
The Venmo account linked to Cotton’s number was no longer available as of Sunday.
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** Federal Judge Rules Flock Surveillance Cameras Violate the Fourth Amendment.** A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by using Flock license plate reader technology to pull up weeks of a driver’s travel history without a warrant. U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill ordered the suppression of evidence obtained in the search, warning that the camera network risks creating a nationwide “dragnet” of mass surveillance. Hill said the case demonstrated why courts may need to revisit how older Fourth Amendment precedents apply as surveillance technology advances. The ruling could influence similar cases across the country.
California Becomes First State to Tax Private ICE Detention Companies. On September 29, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1633, making California the first state to tax for-profit companies that run federal immigration detention centers. The law taxes 25 percent of the gross receipts of private detention operators, and the revenue will go to a new Due Process for All Fund to pay for legal services for people in immigration detention and their families. The tax takes effect July 1, 2028, and will likely be immediately challenged in court by private prison operators CoreCivic and GEO Group. The mortality rate in federal immigration detention during Trump’s second term was the highest in over a decade, with more than 50 people dying in ICE custody.
** Federal Judge Orders Texas to Air Condition All Prisons by End of 2029.** U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman has ruled that extreme heat in Texas penitentiaries without air conditioning violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and ordered the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to install air conditioning in all state prisons by Dec. 31, 2029. As of Sept. 1, only about a third of the state’s 104 facilities were fully air-conditioned, leaving nearly 90,000 incarcerated people without climate control. At least nine people have died from extreme heat in Texas prisons since 2023, and the judge said the number is likely an underestimate. Pitman wrote that financial concerns will not be considered a legitimate reason for failure to comply with his order.
** Savannah Turned 160,000 Cubic Yards of Harbor Mud Into an 8-Acre Island. **The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removed 160,000 cubic yards of mud from Savannah Harbor and used it to create an eight-acre island off the coast of Georgia. Shorebirds arrived almost immediately, and during the first nesting season built over 300 nests. Species that have colonized the island include least tern, gull-billed tern, black skimmer and black-necked stilt, all of which need flat, bare, elevated ground that is disappearing along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts due to rising sea levels and development. In 2007, the Corps built Brunswick Bird Island from dredge spoil, which now hosts about 8,000 nesting pairs of seabirds.