Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
A Florida man who pleaded guilty to hacking election systems has apparently landed a job at Donald Trump’s Justice Department, just as the DOJ announces plans to send an army of “election observers” to polling places. American cattle ranchers are furious at Trump’s new plan to flood the market with cheap imported beef, warning it could “crash” their industry. A new report shows nearly 100 people who have received presidential pardons from Trump have already been arrested again, while Trump’s pardons wiped out almost $2 billion owed to fraud victims. And Trump’s 2024 campaign staffers were apparently wondering whether the president was spanking his intensely devoted blonde staffer more than 40 years his junior.
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David Michael Levin was arrested back in 2016 after Florida investigators caught him breaking into the state’s official election websites. He used a hacking technique to obtain official usernames and passwords, then logged in with administrator-level access after using a real election official’s stolen credentials. He later bragged about it on YouTube. Levin’s three felony charges were reduced to misdemeanors as part of a plea deal, in which he served 20 days in jail.
Now it looks like Levin has a new job in Donald Trump’s Justice Department, though he has so far refrained from announcing who is employer is on social media. Photos and video reviewed by Democracy Docket show him inside the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, which is leading the administration’s push to grab sensitive voter data from all 50 states. He was even spotted next to a senior DOJ voting office lawyer at a polling place during Minnesota’s primary this month.
An election judge had to walk over and check their credentials after a dispute about how close they were standing to the precinct.
The DOJ hasn’t confirmed Levin’s employment, and it won’t say whether anyone knew about his criminal past before he was hired. But these revelations are coming to light right as Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon — who leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — announced plans this week to send an army of 1,000 “election monitors” to polling places across the country this fall. If Levin is truly part of the DOJ, that’s a big indicator of who the Justice Department is hiring and what kind of work they’re doing.
On Friday, Trump posted his “Great American Beef Plan” on his Truth Social platform, announcing the U.S. will be importing up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef with exemptions from all tariffs, while guaranteeing it would be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is coming out hard against the plan. Its president, Colin Woodall, put out a statement condemning the Trump administration’s decision to flood the market with subsidized, below-market beef, saying that isn’t how to rebuild the American cattle herd. He pointed out that August is precisely when ranchers across the U.S. are making decisions about their herds for the upcoming year, and cutting prices right now could force ranchers to scale back operations right as they’re trying to bounce back from years of drought and high costs.
Woodall went on to say say the White House’s plan could “crash” the cattle industry, throwing plans for herd expansion into chaos while abandoning long-term stability for short-term gains.
Beef prices have soared over the last two years, and ranchers are accusing Trump of swooping in to make it look like he’s fixing a problem that he’s actually about to make a lot worse for the people who are actually responsible for raising America’s cattle.
Jon Ponder was a convicted bank robber who, after being pardoned at the end of Trump’s first term, started a nonprofit helping people coming out of prison, and became one of Trump’s favorite redemption stories.
But this week, Ponder was arrested and charged with 20 counts, including sexual assault, after several incarcerated women accused him of using his position to coerce them into having sex with him. He’d already been banned from state prison property earlier this year. Police say Ponder didn’t answer his door on seven separate occasions. When they eventually got inside, police found methamphetamine in Ponder’s home.
Ponder’s example is just one of many. A Lawfare analysis found at least 97 January 6 rioters have since been arrested, charged or convicted of separate crimes since they were pardoned on the first day of Trump’s second term. One man who broke into the Capitol was sentenced to life in prison this year for molesting two children. Another was sentenced to four years for possessing more than 110,000 images of child sexual abuse material.
Trump’s pardons have also caused significant financial harm for many Americans. A new report from House Judiciary Democrats found Trump’s pardons have let white-collar criminals offr the hook for an estimated $1.7 billion in fines, forfeitures, and restitution owed to their victims. One former CEO got pardoned after he and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to Trump’s various campaign committees. His $700 million court-ordered restitution for investors he defrauded went away with that pardon. Two California fraudsters had $50 million in restitution to victims and $30 million in forfeiture wiped out in one fell swoop. Executives at the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX also had $130 million dollars in fines erased with the stroke of Trump’s pardon pen.
The pattern is hard to miss when looking at this administration’s approach to white-collar crime across other agencies. The Trump Treasury Department just announced it’s erasing the government’s shell-company ownership registry, which is the same database law enforcement uses to track money laundering operations. The pardons are simply part of an overall agenda that enables white-collar crime and grifting at an industrial scale.
Trump biographer Michael Wolff recently dropped a major bombshell: Trump’s 2024 campaign staff apparently used to ask each other whether “the boss,” meaning Trump, had been “spanking Natalie.” That’s a reference to 35 year-old Trump aide Natalie Harp, who has dominated headlines this week after Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia mentioned her by name at a campaign rally last weekend.
Wolff said on his podcast that 2024 Trump campaign staff were aware of what he called the “strangeness of her submissiveness” to Trump, so much so that it made everyone else around Trump look less deferential by comparison and kicked off a sort of submissiveness contest among other staffers.
The bestselling author also previously released the full text of letters Harp wrote to Trump during a 2023 golf trip to Scotland and Ireland that he said he obtained from 2024 Trump campaign staff. In one letter, Harp apologized for possibly upsetting him and called Trump her “guardian and protector in this life.” In another, she thanked him for making her unplug from her phone, and expressed a desire for them to spend more time together that wasn’t work-related.
Harp is currently paid $150,000 a year as Trump’s executive assistant. She’s also a gatekeeper for foreign leaders who want to talk to the president, and controls much of what he reads and responds to, while simultaneously refusing for more than a year to get the basic security clearance required for White House staff. Former Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod called that a “deadly serious” problem, arguing that there are significant questions about how someone so unstable managed to get the power to manage the information reaching the most powerful man in the world.
Think about why you had to come to Raw America to hear about half of these stories. It goes without saying that the pro-Trump billionaires who control America’s biggest legacy media outlets wouldn’t spend a second of airtime talking about allegations that he supposedly spanked a female aide more than half his age, or that nearly 100 people he’s pardoned have since gone on to commit heinous crimes while their victims are denied justice. You’ll only get that kind of coverage from a news outlet that doesn’t answer to a billionaire owner or a corporate parent.
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I’m British Chris with Raw America. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. Have a great weekend.
Here are a few stories you may have missed:
Erik Slavin, the editor-in-chief of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, confirmed Friday that he was fired after giving an interview in which he spoke out against censorship from the Pentagon. The paper has a long history of editorial independence despite being partially funded by the Department of Defense. Slavin said he was let go “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” His firing comes on the heels of longtime Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer announcing his retirement this week after decades at the publication.Editor of ‘Stars and Stripes’ Fired for Speaking Out Against Censorship.In a Friday decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay allowing construction of President Donald Trump’s $400 million ballroom to continue while litigation over the project plays out. A lower court order halting construction was set to take effect today. Roberts’ two-sentence order does not take a position on the legality of the project or whether it would ultimately grant Trump’s appeal of a previous decision in favor of plaintiffs suing to stop the ballroom from being built. Trump argued the underground portion of the ballroom was a “military complex,” with White House lawyers arguing that section was nearly two-thirds of the way toward completion.Supreme Court Allows Construction of Trump’s Ballroom to Continue.Gene Ludwig, who is chairman of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) recently released an analysis finding that approximately 25 percent of all American workers are “functionally unemployed.” LISEP defines functionally unemployed workers as not only the jobless, but those who are working only part-time not by choice and earning poverty wages of less than $26,000 before taxes. Ludwig has argued that the official unemployment rate — which currently sits at 4.1 percent — doesn’t paint a fully accurate picture of the labor market.Roughly 1 in 4 American Workers Are ‘Functionally Unemployed’ According to New Analysis.Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC has yet to spend any of its estimated $400 million war chest on any of the marquee Senate races up for grabs in the fall midterm elections, which has caused consternation among several top Republican donors. According to Politico, GOP donors are particularly upset with the president over Trump’s lack of urgency in the Texas U.S. Senate race, where Democrat James Talarico has been leading Republican Ken Paxton in recent polls and significantly out-raising him. Republican donors say Trump has the responsibility to take the lead on securing Texas, adding that they would prefer to focus their resources on races in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina.GOP Donors Furious at Trump for Putting Texas Senate Race in Jeopardy.