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News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Trump Scheduling a War for the Day After You Vote?
CNN is reporting that Donald Trump is leaning toward major military strikes on Iran, and he’s planning to wait until after the midterms to launch them. Unnamed US officials told CNN that American forces in the Middle East are ready to carry out a major operation within four days of getting the order. Other current and former officials say it’s not a question of if but when, most likely before the end of the year and after the election. Trump isn’t hiding it. On Fox News Sunday morning he asked out loud whether he should make a deal with Iran or “finish them off.” Behind the scenes, an Israeli security source says Benjamin Netanyahu pushed hard for a joint attack before the election and Trump wouldn’t give the green light. Netanyahu’s office calls that fake news. The Pentagon says it’s a planning organization that executes whatever the president orders. Think about what that means. A war is being timed around an election calendar. They don’t want you voting with a war on your mind, so they’ll hand you the war after you’ve voted. That’s not national security. That’s a man hiding the bill until the check’s already signed.
AIPAC Goes Into Hiding and Buys Elections in Drag
The Lever just blew the lid off how AIPAC is spending its money this year. It’s not under its own name. Take Chicago. Weeks before the Illinois primary, 2 brand new PACs called Elect Chicago Women and Chicago Progressive Partnership dumped millions in attack ads on Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh. Three days after Biss won, the paperwork came out. The biggest donor was AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, at $4 million. A shell inside a shell. AIPAC linked groups spent $22 million on Illinois primaries alone. In New York they ran $2.8 million through BOLD America, a Latino PAC, to attack Darializa Avila Chevalier. In Colorado they routed money through Elect Democratic Women into something called Pro-Choice Majority Action to attack Melat Kiros. All told, AIPAC’s super PAC has pushed $13.1 million through outside committees this cycle, more than triple what it did in 2024. And last Wednesday AIPAC announced it’ll stop endorsing candidates altogether. Usamah Andrabi of Justice Democrats put it plainly. “Twenty targets are much harder to chase than one target.” Here’s the kicker. The insurgents won anyway. Biss, Avila Chevalier, Kiros, all of them. When a lobby has to hide its name to buy your vote, it’s already admitting it lost the argument.
Did Silicon Valley Just Realize It Bet on the Wrong Horse?
Cooper Teboe is a Democratic strategist in Silicon Valley, and his phone won’t stop ringing. The Washington Post reports that tech and defense firms who spent two years cozying up to Trump are now calling him in a panic, asking which Democrats to donate to and which ones to put on their boards. Why? Because Democrats look poised to take the House and maybe the Senate, and with that comes subpoena power. Nearly a dozen staffers, lobbyists, lawyers and executives told the Post that Democrats are preparing to investigate defense tech firms and the companies feeding the military supply chain. At the top of the list are firms tied to Donald Trump Jr. that got Pentagon money, companies tied to Elon Musk and DOGE, and anyone who got no bid contracts or equity stakes from the military. Jamie Bair, who runs congressional investigations at the law firm Crowell & Moring, says Democrats learned from 2018, when they wasted months being polite. This time, he says, “It’s going to get pretty intense pretty quickly.” These are the same people who stood on the inauguration platform. They bought access. Now they’re shopping for insurance. That’s what oligarchy looks like when it gets nervous. Remember that the next time somebody tells you corporations are just doing business.
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Can a Court Order Stop Trump Before He Touches a Single Ballot?
With Election Day just over a week away, a California lawyer named Kevin K. Johnson is pushing blue state leaders to go to court now, not later. He wants a court order, before Election Day, telling Trump he can’t interfere directly or indirectly with any state’s administration of the election. Johnson’s argument is that everybody’s playing defense, and every time Trump gets stopped he pivots, ignores the order or stalls. His nightmare is federal agents seizing ballots in competitive congressional districts and freezing the whole process indefinitely. He wants the order to run through January 3rd too, when the new Congress is sworn in, so there’s no repeat of January 6th. If Trump then violates it, Johnson says, “It’s a material breach. You’re out.” He’s pointing at JB Pritzker, Brandon Johnson and Rob Bonta as the people who could file. Pritzker already put Trump on notice last week after the Justice Department sent election monitors into two Democratic counties in Indiana. Pritzker’s office told Raw Story that Illinois will run a free and fair election. The lesson of 2020 is simple. You don’t wait for the fire to start. You get the hose out now.
Ohio’s Biggest Newspaper Rips Up Its Own Rule to Stop Ramaswamy
Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for Ohio governor just took a hit it may not recover from. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the biggest newspaper in the state, announced only nine months ago that it was done endorsing candidates for governor, Senate or president. On Sunday it tore up that rule and endorsed Democrat Amy Acton. Why? Because Ramaswamy ran an ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar. What the ad left out is that Acton was removed from her mother’s custody at age 12, after her stepfather was charged with raping her. The editorial board wrote that using childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it crosses a line Ohioans should defend regardless of party. Then they added, “We are better than this. We have a responsibility to show it.” Nine days before the election, a newspaper that promised to stay out of it decided it couldn’t. This is Trump’s billionaire pick, running against the doctor who got Ohio through the pandemic, and his closing argument is her childhood trauma. When your campaign’s final message is cruelty, voters notice. And apparently so do editorial boards.
Raskin Drops a 50 Page Bomb and Accuses Blanche of Witness Tampering
House Judiciary Democrats released a 50-page report this morning alleging Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the 1990s. The report draws on FBI records, documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the accounts of 11 women. Five of them directly accuse Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s company. Six others describe what look like attempts by Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell to traffic them to Trump. Then there’s the cover up. The report says Trump’s Justice Department shut down investigations and withheld evidence. And during his July 2025 prison interview with Maxwell, Todd Blanche, then deputy attorney general and now the attorney general, steered her away from one particular survivor at least three times, saying, “Let’s not talk about individuals.” That survivor says she was 14 when Epstein introduced her to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Democrats call that potential witness tampering and obstruction. Jamie Raskin wants a special counsel. The White House says none of it’s true. These are allegations, and nobody’s been charged. But a Justice Department run by the president’s own defense lawyer telling a convicted trafficker not to talk about individuals is exactly why the founders gave Congress the power of oversight.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, October 26, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
