How a J.D. Vance Event May Have Broken Michigan Law

J.D. Vance may have gotten himself and some local allies in hot water over a so-called press conference he held outside of the police station in Shelby Township, Michigan.

Earlier this month, Vance looked out over the station’s mostly empty parking lot as he hostilely answered—or refused to answer—questions from the press. The event was billed as remarks, rather than a rally, and he used his time on the podium to push his ironic “stolen valor” attacks against Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. During the speech, Vance was flanked by police officers and officials showing their support for the candidate.

Last week, the Detroit Metro Times questioned the legality of such an event, alleging that the police department may have broken the Michigan Campaign Finance Act, which forbids the use of public resources to support a political candidate. Any violators could be jailed for 93 days.

Within two days, Shelby Township resident Melissa Arab filed a formal complaint.

“I feel like we can get the attention on it, and if they can spank these police departments right now or put someone in jail for 93 days, it will stop in the rest of the state and country,” Arab told the Metro Times. “You can’t have him doing this across the country.”

Arab explained that she was unnerved by the display at her local police department, and the possible misuse of taxpayer dollars.

“It’s very intimidating to see the police officers lined up behind Trump and Vance,” Arab said. “It’s very scary.”

The Michigan Bureau of Elections has agreed to investigate Arab’s complaint.

Meanwhile, a Donald Trump event held about 45 miles west of Shelby Township, in Howell, Michigan, has run into similar trouble. Trump delivered a low-energy speech from the Livingston County Sheriff’s office’s shiny white garage, standing in front of officers and police SUVs, flanked by large signs that said “Michigan is Trump Country.” The Michigan Bureau of Elections is now reviewing two complaints against the sheriff’s office for allegedly violating state campaign finance law.

In an interview in Tucker Carlson’s fake-log cabin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’s not simply endorsing Donald Trump, he is a part of the Trump team.

Kennedy announced on Monday that he is officially “working with the campaign,” not only to get Trump elected. “We are working on policy issues together.”

“I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team,” Kennedy added, “to help pick the people who will be running the government” in a potential second Trump term.

As Kennedy announced Friday that he will formally suspend his campaign (but will, confusingly, still appear on the ballot in “non-battleground states”), he appeared to be vying for the position of health secretary on Trump’s team. He even went so far as to coin his own Trumpian phrase, “Make America Healthy Again.”

Trump has already appointed donors Linda McMahon and Howard Lutnick as co-chairs of his transition team, as well as his adult sons as honorary chairs. Trump on Monday confirmed the news of RFK Jr.’s appointment to his transition team, alongside another notorious conspiracy theorist, Tulsi Gabbard. The news could be seen as a snub to Project 2025 and other Trump loyalists, who have worked tirelessly to prepare for Trump’s first year in office, especially given Kennedy’s previous comments about the former president.

This story has been updated.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s crusade against supposed voter fraud appears to be targeting the state’s Democrats.

Last week, Paxton’s office announced raids and undercover actions against organizations in Texas it accuses of illegally registering noncitizens to vote. In practice, though, the raids have taken place against members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., as well as several prominent Democrats in south Texas. 

According to LULAC officials, the group’s members had their cell phones and laptops confiscated by law enforcement officials carrying out search warrants.

“Attorney General Paxton is using his position of authority to harass and intimidate Latino non-profit organizations like LULAC, Latino Leaders and LULAC members,” Juan Proaño, LULAC’s CEO, told CBS News. “It is evident through his pattern of lawsuits, raids, searches, and seizures that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting.”

One of the activists targeted was 87-year-old Lidia Martinez of San Antonio, a LULAC member for more that 35 years who works to expand voter registration for seniors and veterans. Last Tuesday, she said nine officers in tactical gear knocked on her door, presented a warrant, and questioned her for more than three hours. They took her phone, calendar, computer, blank voter registration forms, and her certificate to conduct voter registration.

“This is a free country, this is not Russia,” Martinez said in a press conference denouncing the raid.

Paxton does not appear to have been dissuaded by the backlash to his office’s raids, claiming that there was “sufficient evidence to obtain the search warrants” based on the results of a two-year investigation.

“My office is investigating every credible report we receive regarding potential criminal activity that could compromise the integrity of our elections,” Paxton said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris Administration has intentionally flooded our country with illegal aliens, and without proper safeguards, foreign nationals can illegally influence elections at the local, state, and national level.”

The allegations would carry more weight, except for the fact that Republicans and conservatives have been repeating the claim of noncitizens illegally voting ad nauseam, with little, if any proof. Last week, Fox News presenter Maria Bartiromo repeated an allegation of “massive lines of illegals” for nearly a week on national television, with only a “friend of mine’s wife” as her source. House Speaker Mike Johnson has pledged to take on the nonexistent problem by sponsoring the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, even though the information he’s citing is bogus. Elon Musk has also been taken in by right-wing propaganda on the issue, urging new laws to be passed to tackle something that’s already illegal.

Paxton himself has little, if any, credibility for any of the allegations he makes. He has piggybacked on the right-wing anti-trans panic by calling gender-affirming health care “child abuse.” His raids against Texas Democrats follow punitive measures even against Republican critics. And then there’s the fact that his own party tried to impeach him last year. If anything, Paxton taking up the “Democrats are getting noncitizens to vote” myth gives it even less credibility.

Jesse Watters made a comment about Vice President Kamala Harris so gross that all his Fox News co-hosts had to call it out.

If elected, Harris is “going to get paralyzed in the situation room while the generals have their way with her,” said Watters during Monday’s episode of Fox’s The Five.

His co-hosts, including Jeanine Pirro and Dana Perino, immediately turned against him and reprimanded Watters by his full name.

“I don’t like that,” said Pirro, “take it back.”

Instead, Watters doubled down that he wasn’t saying anything weird. “Have their way with her, control her—not in a sexual way,” said Watters with a smirk.

Later, the Fox host went on to preempt any criticism of the odd picture he painted, while also tearing his mom down. “I’m sure my mother [would] probably go on MSNBC tonight and say my son, Jesse Watters, made a joke about Kamala Harris being manhandled by generals in the situation room.”

Perhaps Watters should in fact consider listening to his mother before making another unnecessarily gross comment about Harris.

Donald Trump doesn’t like Elon Musk very much, even though the billionaire technocrat is pulling out all the stops to get the former president back into the White House.

Since formally endorsing Trump in July, Musk has raised millions for Trump’s campaign through his America PAC, which has poured $16 million into outreach in the last two weeks alone. Due to an FEC rule passed in March, Musk’s super PAC is able to coordinate directly with the Trump campaign—forming what could be an essential part of Trump’s otherwise flimsy ground game.

Last month, Musk held a glitchy, train-wreck interview with Trump on X that got them both in legal trouble, and the X owner promptly started placing ads for the Republican nominee all over his social media site. Trump went on to mention Musk at several sleepy rallies and chaotic press events, and posted really, really strange stuff to tout their new friendship—but apparently their alliance is purely transactional. In reality, Trump thinks his new ally is … well …

Trump “thinks he’s weird,” one source close to the former president told Rolling Stone. “Sorry to use a word used a lot by Democrats now.” The source had spoken to Trump about Musk as recently as July.

Another source who had been in the room several times while Trump had spoken to Musk told Rolling Stone that the former president had complained about the Tesla CEO a few times, calling him “boring” and describing him as tiresome and moody.

Musk’s pro-Trump PAC has already landed in hot water in Michigan and North Carolina for allegedly collecting personal information under the guise of voter registration, although lawyers for the PAC wrote letters assuring state investigators that “America PAC is utilizing the data it collects to register voters and encourage them to vote.” It doesn’t seem like either state will take immediate action against Musk’s PAC, but both said that they will continue to monitor the group.

Donald Trump may have made the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan worse for President Biden.

General H.R. McMaster told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday night that Trump, while president, sought to negotiate with the Taliban as U.S. troops began leaving Afghanistan, which undermined the Afghan government. As a result, the U.S. government forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 members of the Taliban.

The former national security adviser was on CNN to discuss his new book, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. The revelation puts the chaos of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan into greater context, as conservatives sought to lay much of the blame onto Biden and successfully pushed that narrative into media coverage.

It’s the latest damaging revelation from McMaster’s book. Last week, an early excerpt from the book detailed how Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin was able to manipulate Trump by playing on his “ego and insecurities.” On Monday, another newly revealed excerpt described meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” where Trump made particularly “outlandish” suggestions, including one instance in which he asked, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in regards to narcotics in Mexico.

McMaster is one of many of Trump’s former national security officials to criticize the now convicted felon for his conduct as president. One of his other former national security advisers, John Bolton, said earlier this month that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly has described the former president as “a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.… A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said.”

“God help us.”

Donald Trump gave another low-energy speech Monday during an appearance at the National Guard Association of the United States General Conference in Detroit.

Trump’s sleepy, staggered reading from his teleprompter focused largely on criticisms of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and Kamala Harris who Trump has knocked as being the “last person in the room” with Biden before the decision was made. Trump, who reportedly viewed Afghanistan as a lost cause during his time in office, has repeatedly blamed Biden for abandoning $85 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan, although it was more like $7 billion. 

Trump has also blamed Biden’s accelerated withdrawal timeline for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, who were killed in a terrorist attack at the Hamid Karzai International Airport that also killed 170 Afghans. The Republican nominee appeared at a memorial honoring the three-year anniversary of the attack on Monday morning, but by the afternoon, he seemed confused by the event. 

“And the fake news doesn’t want to talk about it.” Trump complained on stage. “They don’t even talk about the three-year anniversary—a terrible word to use, but that’s what they’re calling it, an ‘anniversary.’ I think of ‘anniversary’ as a little bit different, but it’s three years now,” Trump said. Of course, “anniversary” simply refers to the date that an event took place in a previous year—its alternative meaning to Trump is yet unclear. 

On stage, Trump promised he would ask for the resignations of “every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity to be on his desk at noon on Inauguration Day.”

“You have to fire people when they do a bad job. We never fire anybody. You gotta fire ‘em, like  on The Apprentice!” Trump said. As Trump reminisced about his old NBC show—from which he was fired in 2015 for making derogatory comments about immigrants—he seemed momentarily excited.

“You’re fired! You did a lousy job,” he said, imagining his first day in the White House, as the audience applauded. His acting out did little to invigorate him, though, as he proceeded on a monotonous speech. 

Trump complained about “losers” he’d fired writing books about him, possibly a reference to Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s blistering account of Trump’s White House, which is set to be released Tuesday. 

Trump told a winding story about traveling to Iraq to see about dealing with ISIS without rest, “unlike other people that we know,” he joked, a strange shot at Biden, who is no longer running for president. 

“He’d rest and then leave—there’d be no meeting!” Trump quipped all the same. 

Trump continued to insist that Afghanistan was selling the $7 $85 billion in equipment the U.S. had “stupidly left them,” complaining that Washington had left night vision goggles behind. “How stupid these people were,” Trump said. 

Under Trump’s administration, “we were getting out, but we were getting out with strength, and dig-ny,” the former president boasted, slurring slightly. 

Trump continued to falsely claim that the sheer fact of his presidency had kept U.S. military members safe. “We didn’t have one soldier killed—even shot at in 18 months. And then these guys took over, and uh, big lack of respect. But they had a lot of respect for us during that period,” Trump said, calling himself “the first president in decades who started no new wars.”

Trump’s claim that no soldiers were killed for 18 months in Afghanistan is blatantly untrue, according to Reuters. During Trump’s presidency, there were 45 hostile deaths and 63 total deaths, with no 18-month gap in casualties, including when Trump was negotiating an Afghanistan withdrawal, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System for Operation Freedom’s Sentinel database.

Trump went on to brag that he was “very good at using a telephone,” and whine about Ukraine’s “surge” into Russia, which he claimed would result in World War III. 

He continued to criticize U.S. support of Ukraine against Russia, claiming that as a result of the U.S.’s tremendous support, its own military was running out of ammunition. It was a haphazard reference to a high-profile report on U.S. national defense that claimed the U.S. would likely run out of munitions within “three to four weeks” in the event of a war with China. 

“That’s a lousy thing,” Trump said, claiming that if he were president, he would not have released such a report. “You don’t do reports that say we’re going to lose to China in a war, stupid people do that.”

“These people are just so destructive,” Trump said of U.S. officials responsible for the supposed munitions blight. “So—you know I always look for good words. Highly sophisticated, [I’m] highly educated. I like sophisticated words, but there’s only one word I can—stupid, they’re stupid people.”

The classified documents case against Donald Trump is not dead yet, as special counsel Jack Smith is asking a federal appeals court to reinstate it. 

In July, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the 42 felony charges against the former president and convicted felon, ruling that Smith’s appointment to the case was unconstitutional. On Monday, Smith appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the dismissal is “at odds with widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government.” 

Trump allegedly broke the law by retaining classified documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and then refusing to return them to the federal government. Cannon was criticized for her handling of the classified documents case, bogging down proceedings by entertaining questionable motions from Trump’s defense and seemingly favoring the Republican presidential nominee. Her experience was called into question by legal experts including one of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb. A ruling in Smith’s favor could result in a new judge taking over the case, though notably Smith did not ask for Cannon’s removal in his brief to the 11th circuit.

Cannon’s dismissal came after the Supreme Court ruled that American presidents have immunity for their “official acts” while in office, throwing the case’s future into doubt. And even if the appeals court overturns Cannon’s ruling, there is no timeframe on when a new trial would take place, meaning that it would almost certainly come several months after the November elections. This raises the possibility that Trump could return to the White House with the case underway, and then would simply ask his new attorney general to drop the charges.  

Trump still faces federal charges for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in connection with the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The Supreme Court’s ruling has also put that case in limbo, with a hearing to determine the next steps postponed until September. The former president also faces criminal charges in Georgia for attempting to overturn the state’s presidential election results, but that case is stalled over attempts by Trump’s legal team to have its prosecutor, Fani Willis, thrown off of the case.  

Right now, the only criminal case against Trump to proceed to a trial verdict is his hush-money case in New York, where the Republican presidential nominee was convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. If Smith has his way, Trump may one day face a criminal trial again.  

Hundreds of staffers that served under President George W. Bush, Arizona Senator John McCain, and Utah Senator Mitt Romney jointly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday, writing that another presidency under Donald Trump would be “untenable.”

“Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected,” the group wrote in a letter. “The alternative, however, is simply untenable. At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”

“Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies,” the letter continued. “We can’t let that happen.”

The letter received 238 signatures in all—significantly more than endorsed the 2020 edition of this letter, in which 150 former Republican staffers announced their intention to vote for President Joe Biden.

Some of the signees include former McCain chiefs of staff Mark Salter and Chris Koch, former McCain legislative director Joe Donoghue, McCain’s 2008 press secretary Jennifer Lux, and George H.W. Bush chief of staff Jean Becker.

The endorsement underscores how divided traditional Republicans feel from other conservatives as Trump, Project 2025, and increasingly extreme factions of the right tighten their grip on the future of the party. Some of that tension has actually been stoked by Trump himself: While running for president in 2015, Trump—who famously avoided the Vietnam War draft with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs—mocked McCain for being taken prisoner while serving in Vietnam, declaring that the 2008 Republican presidential nominee was “not a war hero” and that he “like[s] people that weren’t captured.”

But Trump’s anti-military rhetoric isn’t just in the past. Instead, it’s been a point of contention for the MAGA candidate even in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Trump came under fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment rubbed veterans the wrong way, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, thinks Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of him is a “big” deal.

“He’s a great guy, respected by everybody,” a low-energy Trump said on Friday after Kennedy announced he was suspending his campaign.

Fact check: RFK Jr. is not respected by everybody. Even his own extended family regularly pillories him in the press.

Over the weekend, Trump reposted pro-Kennedy messages on Truth Social, including one referring to Kennedy and Trump as an “anti-establishment ticket.” Maybe J.D. Vance really is in danger of losing his job.

It’s been quite the journey for Kennedy. He entered the 2024 race as a Democrat, switched to independent, and then allegedly begged Kamala Harris for a spot in her administration. Her campaign ignored him.

But Trump, desperate for any kind of advantage against Harris, has welcomed Kennedy with open arms. This, despite the fact that Kennedy allegedly said earlier this summer that Trump was “a terrible human being. The worse [sic] president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.”

On Sunday, Kennedy claimed that he will pave the way for more Democrats to jump ship to the Republicans, saying in a Fox News interview that the Trump campaign will soon make a “series of announcements about other Democrats who are joining his 2024 campaign.”