Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
An alleged FBI letter names Trump as being involved in the sale of young women to Jeffrey Epstein and a Saudi trafficking ring. The DOJ hired a man who went to jail for hacking election websites to help monitor elections. ICE arrested the father of a U.S. Navy sailor while his son was serving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. And the Postal Service is pushing through a rule designed to restrict mail voting, despite two federal courts blocking it.
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Trump has been bragging about his business deals with the Saudis for years, but this is probably not the one he had in mind.
A handwritten letter allegedly submitted to the FBI reportedly names Trump as being involved in the sale of young women to Jeffrey Epstein and a Saudi trafficking network. The letter, posted by the DOJ potentially without the intended redactions, contains a passage in which the writer claims to have testimony placing Trump in that role.
A separate handwritten note alleges that Trump asked whether a young woman was pregnant and whether she was using drugs, and complained about losing money when women became pregnant. The note also reportedly references whether a baby could be sold and states that “the Saudis like the religious ones.”
Judge Emmet Sullivan, overseeing a lawsuit brought by journalist Katie Phang, has repeatedly ordered the DOJ to explain why it cannot redact the handwritten interview notes and release them publicly. The DOJ claimed the notes could not be produced because of “technical limitations,” which is a strange way to admit no one in the government knows what a Sharpie is.
The DOJ’s new election monitor has firsthand knowledge of election security vulnerabilities. Because he is the one who exploited them.
A lawyer who served jail time for hacking Florida election websites is now working alongside DOJ officials tasked with monitoring elections. David Levin was seen with a department attorney outside a Minneapolis polling place during the state’s primary, part of a nationwide operation that plans to send 1,000 monitors to polls this November.
In 2016, Levin was arrested after using a cyberattack to extract login credentials from the Lee County Supervisor of Elections website. He then used those credentials to access the site as an administrator. Levin initially faced three felony charges but pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, served 20 days in jail, and received two years of probation. At his plea hearing, he called it a “silly political stunt.”
Levin later became an attorney and built an online presence as “Dave the Lawyer,” spewing right-wing political commentary and unsuccessfully running for local office in Florida. He is believed to have joined the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division when Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon swore in more than 100 new attorneys and staff in July.
The department has not confirmed his employment or whether he was officially serving as an election monitor in Minnesota. His Facebook profile picture in front of a DOJ flag suggests he wasn’t there for the tour.
Luis Manuel Aviles had lived in Key West, Florida, for 19 years, working as a handyman with a permit to be in the United States. He left his house one morning to take his car to a mechanic and was arrested by immigration authorities before he got there.
At the time, his son Joshua was nine months into a Navy deployment aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, a vessel that had been at sea so long it set a U.S. military record and raised concerns about supply shortages and deteriorating mental health among its crew.
As the Trump administration rolls back immigration protections for military families, dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty troops have been detained and at least six have been deported. One soldier’s wife spent more than a month in federal immigration detention and was only pulled off a deportation flight to Brazil after the AP reported on her case.
One of the military’s most heavily advertised immigration benefits is “military parole-in-place,” which allows the spouses, parents, and children of active-duty service members to obtain legal immigration status. And the Navy wonders why it can’t hit its recruitment numbers.
The agency that cannot reliably deliver a package in under five days now wants to build a federal voter surveillance database.
The United States Postal Service announced late on a Friday night that it intends to move forward with a final rule designed to restrict how mail voting is administered, despite two federal court injunctions blocking it from taking effect before the midterm elections.
Under the new rule, the Postal Service would require states to submit data on every voter who requests a mail ballot into a system called the “Federal Ballot Mail Portal.” It would then compile that data into what it is calling “Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists” and hand it over to federal law enforcement.
States would also be forced to redesign their ballot envelopes to include a new logo and an Intelligent Mail barcode system. The Postal Service says it will reject mail ballots from any state that refuses.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani had blocked the rule after finding that Trump’s executive order was likely unconstitutional, as it imposes on states’ authority to run their own elections. The Postal Service apparently does not accept judicial orders without the new barcode.
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Judge Strikes Down Trump Visa Ban Affecting 75 Countries. A federal judge in Manhattan has declared the Trump administration’s ban on immigration visas for people from 75 countries to be “patently unlawful.” Judge Jeannette Vargas wrote that federal immigration law explicitly prevents the secretary of state from influencing how consular officers decide on visas. The ban, an executive order Trump signed in January, applied to countries throughout Latin America, the Balkans, South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. The State Department fallaciously claims that applicants from those nations are at high risk of becoming criminals, but immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. The State Department should know this, seeing as it publishes the data.
** TikTok Settles Children’s Privacy Lawsuit for $400 Million.** TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have agreed to pay $400 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice that accused the platform of allowing millions of children under the age of 13 to use the app and collecting their personal information without their parents’ permission. TikTok will pay $300 million upfront and another $100 million when a 2019 case is closed — when the company was called Musical.ly. The Justice Department said it was one of the largest recoveries ever won under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The case was originally filed under the Biden administration in 2024, a fact not mentioned in the victory lap.
** Judge Tosses Trump Lawsuit Against Michigan Sanctuary County.** A federal judge has tossed out a Trump administration lawsuit against Washtenaw County, Michigan, in an 86-page opinion that said the federal government can’t force local officials to help ICE. The Constitution “imparts much authority on the federal government,” but not the power to force counties to implement the president’s deportation program, said Judge F. Kay Behm. The decision is a blow to the administration’s crusade to ban sanctuary cities, though trying to make Ann Arbor more conservative was always going to be an uphill battle.
** California Senate Votes 38-0 to Close Child Marriage Loophole.** The California state Senate has approved Assembly Bill 1267, which would prohibit child marriage. California is currently one of only three states in the country without a minimum age for marriage, allowing a child of any age to be legally married with a parent’s consent. Unchained At Last says that between 2000 and 2021 in California approximately 35,000 minors were married, most of them girls married to adult men. Courtney Stodden, who married a 51-year-old actor at 16, went to Sacramento to lobby for the bill. If signed into law by Governor Newsom, California would become only the 18th state to ban child marriage.