Pro-Trump Election Interference Has Begun in Key Swing Districts

Ballot drop boxes in two states were set on fire Monday, potentially damaging dozens of ballots.

In Vancouver, Washington, first responders pulled flaming ballots out of a ballot box at Fisher’s Landing Transit Center in the early morning, according to KATU News.

Clark County auditor Greg Kimsey said that “hundreds” of ballots were potentially damaged and added that anyone who placed their ballot in the receptacle after 11 a.m. on Saturday should contact his office to confirm whether their ballot had been received.

Vancouver is located in Washington’s 3rd congressional district, where Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is seeking to keep hold of the seat she won two years ago, a major upset in a district that was long held by a Republican.

While losing her House seat could weaken Democratic hopes of regaining control, for her part, Gluesenkamp Perez has set herself apart from her Democratic colleagues by regularly voting against her own party. She voted against Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan and in favor of Republicans’ SAVE Act, and refused to endorse Kamala Harris.

Biden won Clark County, where Vancouver is located, in 2020, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly beat Donald Trump there by only 107 votes.

In Portland, Oregon, a ballot box was lit on fire Monday by what Portland police described as an “incendiary device.” The Multnomah County election office said that “fire suppressant inside the ballot box protected virtually all the ballots” and only three were damaged, according to NBC News.

It’s unclear whether the two incidents were related, but the FBI is investigating them both.

In Phoenix, a United States Postal Service mailbox also was lit on fire Monday, damaging a small number of mail-in ballots, according to The Guardian.

This series of burning ballots follows a nearly two-week-old warning from the Department of Homeland Security to law agencies across the country. Online chatter suggested that election deniers were plotting to bomb ballot boxes ahead of the general election, according to the department.

One of Donald Trump’s campaign employees has been fired after complaining about money being wasted and sent to firms overcharging the campaign.

The Daily Beast reports that a campaign worker wrote an email calling out Trump’s campaign co-chairs, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, alleging that they are funneling millions of dollars to companies she accuses of overcharging the former president, including one run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.

“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was fired October 18. “I’m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”

In her email, the worker, who has requested anonymity, also alleged that she and other campaign employees believed that their bosses put “a listening device in a cut out hole” in a conference room at the campaign’s south Florida headquarters. She wrote that the campaign’s chief financial officer, Sean Dollman, was worried enough to search the conference room to try and find such a device.

The worker wrote that Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation. There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”

Dollman has denied the worker’s allegations.

“This is nothing more than fanciful lies and fabrications from a disgruntled former employee of a vendor, and this person apparently was a terrible teammate who also disclosed private, internal information to outside individuals,” a senior campaign official told The Daily Beast.

The worker was responsible for making sure Trump’s campaign ads were posted on platforms including YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, and was employed by Launchpad Strategies, an ad firm owned by Dollman, and not the campaign directly. In her email, she said Dollman fired her at the behest of LaCivita.

While the worker did not go into detail about the “grift and greed,” The Daily Beast reported that other sources said she had raised concerns for months about how ad money was being spent by LaCivita and Wiles. Earlier this month, The Daily Beast revealed that LaCivita’s firm has raked in more than $19.2 million in just two years while he served as Trump’s adviser.* The campaign worker was fired three days after that.

Trump’s campaign, much like its candidate, has had multiple issues with transparency regarding money. It has failed to identify who received millions of dollars in ad spending, and millions of campaign dollars have been funneled into the former president’s businesses. One of the latest super PACs to support him is skirting campaign disclosure laws. It seems that a businessman notorious for grift can’t help bringing it into politics as well.

* This article has been updated to reflect corrections made by The Daily Beast.

When Hurricane Milton hit Florida nearly three weeks ago, the Category 3 storm ravaged the coastline and created a record number of tornadoes—at least 41—inside the Sunshine State. At least 24 people died from the storm, and more than three million people were left without power.

But the hurricane also devastated things even far outside of its reach: namely, Donald Trump’s legal defense in his January 6 case.

On Monday, Judge Tanya Chutkan granted a motion to extend deadlines in his January 6 trial by several weeks after Trump attorneys Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, John Lauro, and Gregory Singer claimed that Milton had “severely” affected their ability to stick to the previous schedule. The legal team did not specify exactly how they were affected by the southern storm but wrote in a footnote that they would elaborate under seal if required by the judge, claiming that the “personal details” of the reasoning were irrelevant to the public.

“Specifically, the impacts of the hurricane, which remain ongoing for certain counsel, have substantially slowed progress on the Response,” the filing said. “This, in turn, has limited counsel’s ability to thoroughly consider the Court’s extensive classified and unclassified discovery order and prepare an appropriate Motion to Compel.”

Chutkan noted that special counsel Jack Smith’s office did not oppose the request.

The decision moves the Trump team’s November 7 deadline to submit several legal filings, including a motion to strip “immunity-related discovery” from Smith as well as an argument that Smith was unlawfully appointed, to November 21. It also moves briefings on the immunity issue from December 5 to December 19, apparently also based on Hurricane Milton’s disruption.

Earlier this month, Smith’s team released an eye-opening report that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6, outlining what Smith described in the redacted document as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

The motion was broken into four separate sections: The first section outlined Smith’s case against Trump, while the second offered a road map to aid Chutkan in determining which actions undertaken by Trump were considered “official,” in light of a July Supreme Court ruling that redefined executive protections by expanding the definition of presidential immunity.

The third section of Smith’s motion tied in how the principles will apply to Trump’s case, and the fourth section featured a conclusion requesting Chutkan rule that the actions outlined in the entirety of the document do not fall within the fresh definition of immunity.

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when they ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law.” She warned that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

Trump has been charged with four crimes in the election interference case: two related to the disruption of Congress’s certification of votes, one for Trump’s alleged scheme to defraud the U.S. via disrupting the collection and certification of votes, and a fourth for the conspiracy to deprive citizens of their right to vote.

Donald Trump’s stock is surging, but don’t be fooled: It’s still absolutely worthless.

Trump Media & Technology Group’s stock value surged Monday following his rally in New York City. After increasing by 32 percent over the last week, Trump’s stock bumped up 16 percent on Monday morning, according to CNN.

But according to one financial expert, that isn’t enough to save Trump’s terrible stock.

David Bahnsen, the managing partner of the Bahnsen Group, told Fox Business Monday that he struggled to speak about Trump’s DJT stock without laughing.

“There’s not even a fundamental connection to Trump winning the election with it. It’s just a company that sets hundreds of millions of dollars on fire, and there’s no path to changing that,” said Bahnsen.

There was no real product behind the DJT stock, Bahnsen explained. “If Trump wins, Twitter is still the big social media app for this.”

In reality, Trump’s Truth Social has very little market value. George Kailas, CEO of Prospero.ai, told CNN that the latest surge has left Trump Media trading at more than 1,600 times its enterprise value, which is a measure of a company’s market capitalization and any debts.

Kailas called DJT’s valuation “crazy.”

Still, following Trump’s racist rally at Madison Square Garden, there appears to be a surge in support for the stock, as people may feel more confident about his chances of winning. However, Trump’s odds in betting markets should be taken with a grain of salt.

Trump’s stock has fluctuated wildly in the past three months. Its value operates like a meme stock and appears to be based on social sentiment for the Republican presidential nominee. It fell significantly after he was found guilty of 34 felony charges and continued to plummet after Kamala Harris joined the presidential race. It briefly peaked after his failed assassination attempt in July before cratering.

The stock hit an all-time low in late September when it was valued at nearly $12 per share. As of Monday, the stock has been valued at just over $46 per share, its highest value since May, rising nearly 200 percent.

It seems that Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden, which has been compared to a full-on Nazi rally, has sparked enthusiasm among investors. The people on Wall Street must have been really impressed by the racist jokes and overt threats to democracy.

However, there is reason to believe that there could be some influencing behind pro-Trump surges in the election market. The boost could also be the product of shifting favor on other betting sites, such as Polymarket, which revealed last week that what appeared to be four large bets placed on Trump’s victory, totaling $45 million, were actually all placed by the same person.

Noncitizens voting isn’t a statistical issue in the 2024 election—but that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump’s allies have given up the ghost.

Eight days out from Election Day, a legal effort by Virginia’s election leadership to slash their voter rolls has reached the Supreme Court’s shadow docket via an emergency application for a stay.

The filing, submitted Monday by several members of the state election board, Virginia Commissioner of Elections Susan Beale, and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares asks the Supreme Court to uphold a recent regulation that systematically purged 1,600 names from the state’s voter roll. Virginia argued that it believes the voters did not provide adequate evidence of citizenship to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In separate cases, the Department of Justice and several organizations of Virginia voters sued Old Dominion for the regulation, arguing that the change was illegal and plainly flouted the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which bars states from changing their voting rules within 90 days of an election.

On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered that the state reinstate the voters, but MAGA Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin quickly appealed the ruling. On Sunday, the Fourth Circuit unanimously refused to grant a stay, writing in a six-page opinion that the state’s arguments were “weak” and that there were several other options available to Virginia to cull the roll outside of the overreaching regulation.

“My own best guess is that the Supreme Court will deny Virginia’s request for a stay,” wrote Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck Monday in his newsletter One First. “Of course, whether or not 1600 voters will be restored to the rolls may not seem like a big deal in a state in which the presidential race isn’t likely to be that close, but this is the same Virginia in which a state legislative race—and control of the House of Delegates—was settled by a drawing after a literal tie in 2017.”

As part of Trump’s election conspiracymongering, the former president has campaigned on the notion that noncitizen voters are upending the presidential election results and, by extension, American democracy in favor of the Democratic Party. But an audit at the epicenter of Trump’s conspiracy—Georgia—uncovered just 20 noncitizens out of the Peach State’s 8.2 million voter roll, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shared on Wednesday. Those cracks in the system accounted for just 0.00024390243902439 percent of the state’s voting population.

Nine out of the 20 noncitizen registrations had participated in elections years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Election officials canceled the registrations and subsequently reported the individuals to law enforcement.