The Albany Times Union, conceivably the most biased newspaper in the country, wants North Country New York voters to believe a Democrat is about to flip New York’s 21st Congressional District currently held by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

Their evidence is a Siena Research Institute survey, released October 9, that has Democrat Blake Gendebien leading Republican Anthony Constantino 46 to 42, with independent Christopher Schmidt at 5 and 8 percent undecided. Read the ballot Siena actually tested, and the sample underneath it, and the lead dissolves. This is not a measurement of the election on November 3. It is a measurement of an election that will not be held. Schmidt is a write-in candidate not on the ballot!

The certified November ballot in NY-21 has two names: Anthony Constantino and Blake Gendebien. Schmidt failed to qualify for a line. A federal judge dismissed his challenge to the state’s signature requirement in August, and he is running as a write-in. Siena read his name to respondents anyway and parked 5 percent of the vote with him. There is another liberal write-in in the race who was not named. This is the second media poll of the contest to test a ballot that does not exist. A survey that invents a candidate, then treats his supporters as if they had somewhere to go on Election Day, is not polling the race. It is diluting it. 

The Sienna Institute conduct of this poll is both unprofessional and methodologically flawed and they know it

The rest of the sample does not describe this district. Elise Stefanik, who carried NY-21 62 to 38 and whose favorable rating in district polling has run between 56 and 62, comes in at roughly 50 percent favorable in Siena’s numbers, 50–44 in the published release. Bruce Blakeman republican candidate for Governorleads Democrat incumbentKathy Hochul by 15 points. Hochul lost this district by 23 points in 2022, and every poll the Constantino campaign has taken here has Blakeman ahead by 20 or more. President Trump is at 52 percent unfavorable in a district he carried by double digits. A survey can be internally consistent and still be wrong about the place it claims to represent. When the anchors of the district — the outgoing congresswoman, the president, the top of the ticket — all come in softer than the election returns and the other available polling, the congressional horse race sitting on top of those numbers is not credible.

The refusals make it worse. In any serious poll, refusals are not folded into the result as if they were evenly distributed non-answers. Here, 10 percent of Republicans and 9 percent of independents refused to answer, against 2 percent of Democrats. That imbalance does not stay in a footnote. It changes the weighted distribution of the sample. Siena’s own crosstabs already show Gendebien consolidating Democrats at 85–10 while Constantino is held to 65–21 among Republicans. Strip out a phantom write-in and a lopsided refusal rate, and the four-point Democratic lead is a rounding error inside a margin of error of 4.6 points on 496 likely voters interviewed from September 30 to October 6.

Follow the money, which does not lie the way a ballot test can. If NY-21 were actually a four-point race a month out, national Democrats would be spending as if it were. They are not. Gendebien reported roughly $500,000 in the bank on October 1, a poor number this late, and a candidate who has lost cash on hand over the past year while carrying a heavy bill load. His campaign is on television and little else. Constantino’s side is taking the rest of the advertising and tying Gendebien to Hochul. On fundraising calls, Gendebien’s own callers have been telling donors he has been losing ground and is down in the campaign’s latest internal poll. Campaigns do not beg that way when their private numbers match the public ones.

Siena has been here before. Its October 2020 poll of the old NY-22, taken September 27 to October 4 among 383 likely voters, had Anthony Brindisi leading Claudia Tenney 48 to 39. It was the only public poll of the race. Tenney won. The institute’s statewide record is no better. A pollster that misses a congressional race by nine points in the same media market does not get the benefit of the doubt when it misses the ballot, the refusals, and the fundamentals in the district next door.

None of this means the race is over, or that Constantino can ignore turnout in a midterm. It means the survey the Albany and Plattsburgh press is treating as a snapshot of NY-21 does not describe the election voters will cast. Two names are on the ballot. The district still prefers Republicans for Congress, 50 to 45 even in this sample, and prefers the Republican for governor by 15. Anthony Constantino is winning the race that exists. Siena polled a different one.

Gavin Newsom signed a 25% tax on private detention operators on September 29, 2026, and called it protection from President Trump’s “Orwellian” immigration tactics. It is a press release. The bill does not name ICE. In California, the operators it taxes are the ones running ICE facilities. Fox News reported that all eight ICE detention centers in the state are privately run. The tax also covers a state or local private detention contract. It does not take effect until July 1, 2028. Newsom will be gone. The next governor inherits the bill, and the fight.

Assembly Bill 1633, by Matt Haney of San Francisco, takes 25% of an operator’s California-source gross income starting July 1, 2028. The bill defines that income as gross income derived from or attributable to this state. Operators already pay the 8.84% corporate tax on net income. This is an extra levy on the gross. The legislative counsel’s digest says the tax is 25% of gross income “for the prior fiscal year.” Section 53002(a) imposes it on gross income “for that fiscal year.” Section 53006 makes the tax due on or before July 31 after the prior fiscal year closes. The digest and the due date point to the year just ended. The imposition line does not. The bill never resolves the difference. Newsom is term-limited and not on the 2026 ballot. His second term ends when the next governor is sworn in on January 4, 2027. The tax does not start until about 18 months after he is gone.

The check does not go to the high-speed rail line voters were promised in 2008, the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles system that was supposed to open in 2020. It does not go to roads, schools, or to the homeless. HUD’s 2025 count put California at 181,934 people, closer to a quarter of the national total of 745,652 than the 30% figure often cited. Fourteen of the state’s 44 continuums of care did not do a new unsheltered count, and HUD carried forward 2024 figures for those places. None of it fixes a project he already lost, the cities, or a power bill.

California’s average retail electricity price in 2025 was 27.63 cents a kilowatt-hour, more than double the national average of 13.63 cents, second only to Hawaii, and the largest absolute inflation-adjusted increase of any state since 2018, a 29.9% rise, according to an Institute for Energy Research analysis of EIA data. 

Through June 2026, the Center for Jobs ranked California first among the contiguous states for residential, commercial, and industrial rates. Industrial power ran 21.64 cents, about 160% above the rest of the country.

Commercial and industrial customers paid an estimated $21.5 billion more than ratepayers elsewhere for the same electricity. That is the renewable mandate, the transmission buildout, the cap-and-trade charge, and the permitting stack, passed through to the meter.

Refinery capacity shrank. In-state oil and gas production shrank. Gasoline stayed among the highest in the country. A factory does not need a speech to understand the math. It leaves. Instead, the signed law puts the money in a Due Process for All Fund for immigration-related services, the legal help and family services the backers said the tax was for. The fund is spent only upon appropriation by the Legislature. The companion bill that would also have created that fund, AB 2465, was vetoed on September 30, 2026. AB 1633 creates the fund on its own. This, all while the lost contracts keep dangling.

San Francisco was the signing. Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco are the record: tents, open drug use, closed storefronts, and smash-and-grabs. His administration spent years calling that a housing strategy. This exemption does not sweep an encampment, reopen a pharmacy, or put an officer on a corner.

The Federal Railroad Administration terminated about $4 billion in high-speed rail grants on July 16, 2025, Obama- and Biden-era awards, after a review cited missed deadlines, change orders, and no viable path. California sued, then filed to drop the case on December 23, 2025. The court entered the dismissal on January 7, 2026. Reuters reported that the Transportation Department cancelled another $175 million that August. The Authority still aims the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment at 2033. The review said there is no viable path to that date.

The Authority’s own 2026 business plan puts an optimized Phase 1 at about $126.1 billion and a re-estimate of the full prior Phase 1 scope at about $231.3 billion.

The Department of Energy cancelled California clean-energy awards in October 2025. An SFGATE tally put the state share above $3.1 billion across 79 grants, the most of any state, including $1.2 billion for the ARCHES hydrogen hub. Politico put the state grid award at about $631 million.

Attorney General Rob Bonta said in May 2025 that California’s exposure on federal public-health grants was more than $972 million. A federal court then preliminarily blocked those terminations while the case went forward. The Department of Education ended about $350 million in fiscal 2025 grants for minority-serving programs. California, with 167 Hispanic-Serving campuses, took the largest hit: at least $20 million at community colleges and about $43 million at Cal State.

The tax fails to backfill the rail money, the energy awards, or the education grants. He signed a tax due in July 2028 and, in the same September 29 package, signed a shock-glove ban, more oversight, and a  ban on using state parking lots to stage immigration arrests. Those are companion bills, not provisions of AB 1633. Hans von Spakovsky of Advancing American Freedom told Fox the likely result is not fewer detainees. It is warehouses and office space, because the purpose-built centers got priced out of the contract.

None of this closes a facility, lays track, reopens a store, helps the homeless, or gives residents a refund on their power bill. It tells a contractor what California has already told the companies that left: the state will take a quarter of the California-source gross for a job it will not do. Newsom’s statement called the package transparency, accountability, and oversight.

Some already treat him as a 2028 candidate. The tribute fixes none of the record he would run on. A presidential bid would ask the country to overlook the state he governed and did not fix.

The framing that Cruz uses to describe one of the greatest Presidents in American history reveals his deep disdain for the country he claims to represent.

During the testimony of former Special Counsel Jack Smith before the Senate late last week, odious Texas Senator Ted Cruz launched an untrue and baseless attack on my mentor, and one of my personal heroes, President Richard Nixon.

Cruz said, “Well, let me say congratulations. Because you have succeeded where Richard Nixon failed, which is weaponizing the Department of Justice and the federal government to go after your political opponents. Congratulations, you are stepping into the shoes of John Mitchell.”

Cruz compared Smith to Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, then said Smith’s abuse was “far greater than John Mitchell,” accused him of being “conscripted as a foot soldier for the DNC,” and called the conduct “the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice.”

The framing that Cruz uses to describe one of the greatest Presidents in American history reveals his deep disdain for the country he claims to represent.

Nixon was not a political marauder seeking revenge on his opponents, nor was he in a position where spying on his opponents was even a necessary act.

When you’re talking about Richard Nixon, you’re talking about potentially the most popular President in the history of the United States, based on election results.

Nixon’s first win in 1968 was narrow. His second was one of the largest landslides in modern presidential history. His job approval was solid, not extraordinary, until the Vietnam settlement briefly pushed it near 70 percent in early 1973.

In 1968 he beat Hubert Humphrey by a hair. Nixon took about 43.4 percent of the popular vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, with George Wallace at 13.5 percent.

The electoral vote was 301–191–46. It was a plurality win in a three-way race, not a mandate.

In 1972 he crushed George McGovern. The final total was about 47.2 million votes (60.7 percent) to 29.2 million (37.5 percent), and 520 electoral votes to 17.

McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia; one Virginia elector defected to Libertarian John Hospers.

Coming out of the 1972 Election, President Richard Nixon had a mandate from the American people, a mandate that pathetic Senator Ted Cruz is trying to erase from history.

But why would Ted Cruz attack Richard Nixon? The answer is simple…

Republicans like Ted Cruz have always existed. Weak, spineless, immoral cowards who stand for nothing, while boasting of their false bravado.

Cruz, an effeminate Canadian-born fraud, and his betrayal of Richard Nixon highlights the divide within the Republican that existed in the days of Nixon, and continues into the days of President Donald Trump.

Richard Nixon represented the working class of this country, the backbone of America. The factory workers, the auto workers, the small businessmen and businesswomen nationwide. They are who elected Richard Nixon, and they were the main focus of Richard Nixon’s policies.

Much like President Donald Trump, Richard Nixon put America and Americans first.

On the other hand, establishment figures like Ted Cruz, who could be compared to any number of Republicrats of the Nixon-era, legislate from an entirely different perspective. Cruz comes from the Bush-era of conservatism.

While Americans that support Donald Trump believe in limited government, free speech, and the Constitution, Republicans like Cruz compromise, and even directly contradict these values, almost always arguing for Big Government, restrictions on free movement and free speech, especially online, and directly arguing against the rights enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

While Ted Cruz may play the part of a patriot, his record reads like that of a paper tiger.

As for his comments specifically relating to John Mitchell, Cruz couldn’t be more wrong.

The Watergate Special Prosecution Force proved that much of the evidence that was used to come after John Mitchell was entirely fabricated.

In a February 6, 1974, memorandum, WSPF lawyer Peter F. Rient identified 20 instances in which John Dean’s testimony before the Senate diverged materially from what was on the tapes. The Rient memorandum did not surface until 1997.

George Frampton, another WSPF lawyer, actually concluded that one key meeting Dean had described, deeply damning to Mitchell, “apparently didn’t take place, adding: “We probably would do well simply to omit Dean’s testimony about this.” In the same document, Frampton wrote about California attorney Herbert Kalmbach, the chief fundraiser of the “hush money” that was delivered to the Watergate burglars and their attorneys. Dean has always maintained that John Mitchell authorized the enlistment of Kalmbach. But the WSPF concluded: “Mitchell’s logs and schedule suggest…Dean exercised somewhat more discretion himself to forge ahead with getting Kalmbach into the picture than he has admitted.”

Ted Cruz obviously has no idea what really happened in Watergate.

Cruz not only has no clue what happened at Watergate, he’s also deeply corrupt.

Cruz told voters he and his wife liquidated their savings to fund his underdog 2012 Senate race. In reality, more than $1 million came from a Goldman Sachs margin loan (his wife Heidi worked there) and a Citibank line of credit.

He reported the money to the FEC as “personal funds” and did not disclose the banks as the source on campaign reports, as required.

The FEC later found the reporting inaccurate. In 2019 his campaign paid a $35,000 fine and signed a conciliation agreement.

Cruz called it an “inadvertent filing error.” The loans themselves were listed on his separate Senate personal financial disclosures, just not correctly on FEC campaign forms.

iHeartMedia produces and syndicates Cruz’s podcast. Between 2023 and 2024, IHeart paid roughly $630,000–$961,000 in “digital revenue” to Truth and Courage PAC, a super PAC whose purpose is getting Cruz reelected. Watchdogs argued this was an illegal corporate contribution or an undisclosed gift.

Cruz has also received luxurious gifts from donors, getting a $76,440 private-jet round trip to Turks and Caicos from Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, a Goldman Sachs executive. Cruz has received charter flights, Astros tickets, concert tickets, and a Longhorns ticket from Texas oil and real-estate donors.

Not only does Ted Cruz operate on a corrupt basis while working as a United States Senator, but he also barely shows up to work.

Reports have been published detailing the fact that in some years, Cruz has missed upwards of 32% of the Senate hearings he was supposed to attend.

Current figures put his absences at eighth-worst in the entire United States Senate, meaning there are only seven Senators who show up to work less than Senator Ted Cruz.

In addition to having one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate, Senator Ted Cruz has also spent the last 10 years being a quiet, yet effective objecting force to President Donald Trump’s agenda in the Senate.

In May 2022 Cruz voted for the roughly $40 billion Ukraine supplemental, which the Senate passed 86–11. In a floor speech he said he would have preferred a smaller, more focused bill, but concluded continued military support was in the U.S. national interest while Ukrainian forces were winning with weapons already supplied.

The 11 Republican “no” votes included Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee. America First critics of open-ended Ukraine funding have pointed to this vote.

Cruz’s support for Ukraine is a prime example of his willingness to stab Republican voters in the back whenever it suits his political career, rather than the desires of his constituents.

Ted Cruz is wrong about a lot of things, but few statements by Cruz have been as egregiously false as his statements about Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Cruz’s history as a traitorous, barely-present neocon that devours the most blatant and disgusting kind of corruption in the Senate is just the cherry on top of his lies.

Thom Tillis, a retiring North Carolina RINO, spent the last few days doing what he would not do in a primary. He bashed the president who carried his state, and shopped a book about it. He took the act to 60 Minutes on Sunday and The View on Monday. The book came out Tuesday.

Tillis has served two terms. He was elected in 2014, sworn in January 2015, and leaves in January 2027. He knows the last general-election result. He is still arguing with it.

Sunday he told Ross Douthat the next Republican nominee cannot be a MAGA candidate, because that candidate could not win a general election. After a tough midterm, he said, Trump will have a heavy hand in the 2028 primary, and the party has to speak frankly about the profile it needs. Asked what was wrong with the president’s pick, he said it works in red MAGA states and will not work in a general. 

Trump won the popular vote in 2024 with about 77.3 million votes, carried all seven swing states, including North Carolina, and took 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 226. In North Carolina, Trump received 2,898,423 votes to Kamala Harris’s 2,715,375, about 51% to 47.8%, wider than his margin in 2020. Tillis is not arguing with a theory. He is arguing with a certified result in his own state, and he is losing the argument.

He knew it was coming, which makes the lecture worse. On October 23, 2024, he told Bloomberg Television that Trump would carry North Carolina by about the margin he won in 2020. The brand he now calls a general-election loser is the brand he was counting on to save his state. Trump won. Tillis is the one fleeing.

He is arguing from the door because the door is the only place he is brave. On June 29, 2025, the day after he and Rand Paul voted against advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill and Trump said he was considering a primary, Tillis announced he would not run again.

Trump called him a talker and a complainer, not a doer. That was generous. Instead of fighting for the seat, he wrote a book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, and booked the two shows that exist to applaud a Republican who hates his own voters. Courage, on his schedule, starts when the primary can no longer hurt him.

It is no mystery. The primary he skipped already answered for him, and not in his favor. Michael Whatley, Trump’s endorsee, the former Republican National Committee chair, won the March 3 nomination with 64.6%. Don Brown, the next closest, took 15.6%. 

The general is against former governor Roy Cooper, who won the Democratic primary with 92% and leads the early polling. Tillis handed his voters a Trump-backed nominee, refused to defend the seat himself, and then went on CBS to say that kind of nominee cannot win. Whatley is on the ballot. Tillis is on a book tour.

Mitch McConnell was his mentor in the Senate, which tells you the ambition and the taste. Tillis named a dog Little Mitch after him, and in 2024 he said Little Mitch evokes the same emotions as Big Mitch, and that there is a reason he named a dog after Mitch. He still has the dog. He also rents McConnell’s carriage house in Washington. He votes with the party when the camera is off and saves the break for the shows that book critics of Trump.

On 60 Minutes he said he is the same conservative he was in 2014, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, for limited government and fiscal restraint. The only difference, he said, between him and people who call themselves true conservatives is that he has a long list of things that were ratified and they do not. The list is the deals that put him at war with the voters who elected him, recited now that those voters cannot retire him.

He claims he is filled with regret. He voted to confirm the Trump Cabinet, including Pete Hegseth. That vote was 50-50. His was the vote that kept the nomination alive, and Vance broke the tie. In the book he calls it the biggest regret of his career and wants Hegseth out. He writes that he also should have stopped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he names Tulsi Gabbard, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Howard Lutnick among the picks he now faults.

On 60 Minutes he called Noem and Hegseth the poster children for people who should never have had the authority they were given, citing a $200 million Homeland Security ad campaign and Noem’s description of people who were shot as potentially domestic terrorists. The regret arrived after the votes, and after the primary he refused to face.

On The View the next day, Whoopi Goldberg noted that he calls Trump a snowflake and still calls him an amazing political talent, and asked what she was missing. Alyssa Farah Griffin asked about his vote to confirm Pete Hegseth, which he now calls the biggest regret of his career. Tillis said he had deferred to his former Armed Services colleagues, that they all made a mistake, and that he hopes Hegseth gets fired. Ana Navarro then asked why he confirmed nominees he had called unqualified, Hegseth and Kristi Noem among them, and why he had just voted for Todd Blanche. He confirmed the people he now criticizes, Hegseth among them, then said the confirmation was a mistake. That is not oversight. That is a man building a second career as the Republican who warned you, after he declined to cast the no vote when it counted.

The same pattern of inconsistency shows up in his account of January 6. On 60 Minutes, Tillis told Douthat the day was despicable, that the people who assaulted police should still be in prison, and that they were there for the president. He was not disgusted enough to convict. He voted against conviction and now says the trial was rushed. He kept the vote that protected his standing in the conference and kept the speech that plays on CBS and ABC. Disgust, like courage, arrived after the risk was gone.

Tillis claims at least 30 Republican senators share his reservations in private and will not say so because Trump would target them in a primary. His line was that martyrs are dead. Then do not call it a principle. Call it a head count. They are not on 60 Minutes or The View. He is, because he is done and he wants the booking.

Tillis will be remembered as a senator who won twice, narrowly both times, and then quit rather than face a third. In 2014 he beat Kay Hagan. In 2020 he survived by 1.8 points, 48.7% to 46.9%, after Cal Cunningham’s affair disclosure. He is not running from a rematch with Cunningham. He is declining the term. That is a thin basis for a lecture on who can win a general. He won a Senate seat twice. He did not win a presidential election. Trump did, including in his state.

Newly released files show the FBI tracked Melania Trump’s and Barron Trump’s travel while planning the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, and later tapped the phone of Susie Wiles, co-campaign manager of Donald Trump’s political operation and now White House chief of staff, the New York Post reported. 

The files come from Plasmic Echo, the classified-documents investigation later handed to special counsel Jack Smith. Nine were declassified or approved for release on September 29 by White House Counsel Will Scharf, and the White House Government Transparency Task Force posted them Monday. Just the News, by John Solomon and Steven Richards, published the Wiles material first.

This was never about missing classified pages. 

Front and center was Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice, which opened a Sensitive Investigative Matter on a former president, timed a search of his home around his wife, Melania, and their minor son, Barron, then kept a line on Wiles while he was running.

Travel, down to the aircraft

A late-May 2022 email among FBI agents, names redacted, lists the steps as the bureau prepared to search Trump’s Palm Beach estate. One item: “Finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel (type of aircraft and specific timeline).”

Another note said any search would be served after the former president left Mar-a-Lago. It went ahead on August 8, 2022, and covered Trump’s office and both of the couple’s bedrooms. Barron was a minor. The checklist treated his movements, and Melania’s, as operational details for when to go in.

The release does not show either as a target. It shows a Biden-era bureau building a raid around a former first lady and a child. On July 13, 2022, an assistant special agent in charge said the Washington Field Office had not established probable cause. The department said it had, and wanted the residence, office, and storage space covered. The agent suggested calling Trump’s attorney again, or speaking with Trump and his counsel, and called the paperwork counterproductive if the goal was to recover the papers. The department “persistently disagreed.” Headquarters proceeded anyway.

Two sign-offs from the top

Plasmic Echo opened with a sign-off from the top. On March 24, 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray sent Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco a request to approve a Sensitive Investigative Matter, because those who might be investigated included a presidential candidate or senior campaign staff. On March 28, Monaco wrote on the memo, “Merrick, I recommend you approve,” and initialed that note. Garland signed the same day.

Wray’s March 24, 2022 memo opening Plasmic Echo. Monaco’s March 28 note, and Garland’s approval, are on the last page. Source: Just the News

A separate May 2022 note, reported by the Post, is the one tied to wiretap approval. Wray warned the investigation could reach top figures from the 45th president’s administration and “could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election.” He urged approval anyway. At the bottom he wrote, “Merrick, I recommend you approve. CW.” The misspelling is in the original. The Post reported Garland approved the wiretaps on that advice.

Susie Wiles’ phone, February to May 2023

Trump announced his 2024 campaign in November 2022 and named Wiles co-campaign manager. From at least February through May 2023, agents monitored her cellphone anyway. The logs cover calls and texts with at least 21 lawyers tied to Trump, labeled Lawyer 1 through Lawyer 21, plus campaign aides, political advisers, and at least five journalists. Most names are redacted. Two are not: Kash Patel, then out of government and now FBI director, and John Solomon, founder of Just the News.

The tool is a pen register and trap-and-trace. It captures who called whom, when, and for how long. Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 3121–3127 it takes a court order, and the standard is relevance to an ongoing investigation, not probable cause. None of the nine includes the order for her line. On February 3, 2023, the FBI also asked Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo to preserve the headers on her email: who emailed whom and when.

Agents logged calls with Trump on a “vanity number,” entered under FPOTUS. A May 19, 2023 entry reads: “2:05 pm The FPOTUS Vanity Number called WILES for 16 minutes and 11 seconds.” The word on that line is not in the files.

On March 9, 2023, Wiles made or received 39 calls. A sample from that evening.

A March 24 email shows how closely they watched. Agents saw Lawyer 7 call Wiles at 2:04 p.m. for 41 seconds. He had first called her at 2:10 p.m. on March 21, and she returned the call at 2:59 p.m. for 1 minute and 34 seconds, the only contact between them since the register began. A late-February note captured an ABC News reporter calling her at 8:48 a.m. for 2:36 seconds. Nothing in that note is evidence. They logged it anyway.

Wiles sat for an FBI interview in Jacksonville on April 7, two lawyers attending. On April 10 the Washington Field Office went back through her calls “to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview.” The April 6–8 log lists reporters from The Washington Post, CNN, and Politico, and a call of more than an hour with the Jacksonville firm Bedell, Dittmar, DeVault, Pillans & Coxe. She also spoke with Trump and several of his lawyers. This does not show a device on their phones. It shows the government reaching past the papers and into the press, using her phone to see who was calling.

A records case does not need the campaign manager’s line to map which reporters dialed her in the days around an FBI interview.

An endorsement is not evidence

The release shows Smith went past the search for the papers and after the campaign itself. A public donor list and political speech are not evidence, but both somehow made the cut at Biden’s DOJ. His team pulled Trump’s Save America PAC filings, including a 72-page FEC Form 3X naming donors and vendors, and monitored political speech on social media.

On February 6, 2023, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien was declining a voluntary interview. Prosecutors told the FBI to check whether he was still endorsing Republicans and whether he had endorsed Trump again. The subject line could not be blunter: “Ambassador O’Brien Has he endorsed Trump again?” Two days later, Smith subpoenaed him.

What happened to the case

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon killed the Florida documents case in July 2024, ruling that Garland’s appointment of Smith violated the Constitution. Smith dropped the appeal after the election. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said Monday: “Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power. Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple. Those responsible must be held accountable.”

The release does not show the content of Wiles’ calls. It does show enforcement turned political, and it shows the trajectory of a weaponized Biden DOJ treating a former first lady’s and a minor’s travel as raid logistics, monitoring a campaign manager’s contacts with defense lawyers and reporters for months, and demanding to know whether a Republican witness had endorsed Trump again. They were tracking a minor. Two sign-offs from the top put that in writing. Wray sent it up. Monaco recommended it. Garland signed, twice, once for the Sensitive Investigative Matter and once for the wiretaps, after writing that disclosure could disrupt the democratic process. Other presidents kept classified papers and did not get a raid built around a wife and a child. Garland signed anyway. The work went on. This was a politicized stunt.

Tim Burchett says he will try to stop New York DSA socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier from taking the oath if she is elected, the New York Post reported. She faces Republican Jomo M. Williams on November 3 in New York’s 13th District, northern Manhattan and the western Bronx.

If she wins, he told the Post he will move in January to block her from being seated, whether Republicans hold the House or not. The tool is Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, the clause that makes each house the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members. A majority can vote, before the oath, not to seat her.

The reason is a deleted tweet from December 2019. It is hers. “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” The post is gone. Burchett is not treating it as a joke. A 48-star flag hangs in his Knoxville office. It covered the casket of an uncle who was wounded in the hedgerows past the Normandy beaches and later died. Burchett’s line is that the same flag buried that man, and that a member-elect who used it as a napkin has already walked away from the oath.

Chevalier is a democratic socialist, a member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which put her up for the seat. In an interview with the DSA’s own magazine, she said those principles are central to her politics, not something she took on for the campaign. Asked what the word means, she has said socialism is the idea that working people should benefit from the wealth they produce, and that workers should have control over their work and their lives through democratic means. 

She points to Social Security and Medicare as socialist policies already in place, and says the system is broken in a district where a large share of children live in poverty. She has denied being a communist and called the question a distraction. Older posts favorable to communist leaders and Marxism are still on record.

That is the politics next to the napkin, not a separate file. 

She was in the 2024 Columbia takeover. She beat Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the primary, with Zohran Mamdani’s backing. She showed up at an anti-Israel rally the day after the October 7 attack, and posted in 2020 that the country was a disgrace and that Joe Biden was a war criminal. The Post also ties her to an anti-Israel group that once said it was fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. Her campaign did not answer the Post.

Congress has tried this before, and the courts shut it down. In 1967 the House refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell, a New York Democrat, over a scandal. In 1969 the Supreme Court said the House had gone too far. If voters elect someone and that person meets the rules written in the Constitution, age, citizenship, and residency, the chamber cannot add a new rule and keep them out. More than 600 election fights sit in the old record. A USC political scientist told the Post those fights stopped mattering about a century ago, and that the last decade is what makes the old move imaginable again.

John Feehery, a former senior House leadership aide, described the practical limit. “If we refused to seat folks in Congress who said things that we strongly disagreed with, nobody in the House would be seated,” he told the Post. He is not defending the tweet. His point is that the House cannot throw out every member it dislikes, or the room would be empty. The rule still stands.

The Supreme Court settled this in 1969, after the House refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell. A member-elect who meets the qualifications written in the Constitution is seated.

Burchett is talking to Democrats, and asking whether one of them will vote no. He noted that Democrats died for the country too. The line he is drawing in public is the flag. On the other side of it is a socialist who says the word is the point, and whose record treats the country as a disgrace.