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 has raked in more than $22 million in just two years as Trump’s adviser, thanks to his consulting firm making money on Trump campaign ads. 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.

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.

At Donald Trump’s rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday, one speaker took a bigoted swipe at Muslims—and he holds an important position in the Trump campaign.

Howard Lutnick, the CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and a co-chair of the Trump campaign’s transition team, told the crowd why they should vote for the former president and, raising a fist, invoked Islamophobia.

“So, the first thing: We must elect Donald J. Trump president because we must crush jihad,” Lutnick shouted to cheers.

Lutnick’s use of the word “jihad” in this context is an allusion to bigoted views about Islam. The term is widely mistranslated as “holy war,” when the literal Arabic translation is “to strive” or “to struggle.” In a religious context, the word is used to describe a person’s internal or external struggle to do good deeds.

The comments undermine the Trump campaign’s recent efforts to woo Arab American and Muslim voters, particularly in the battleground state of Michigan. Trump has a narrow lead among Arab American voters over Kamala Harris, and has found an opening due to the Harris campaign’s neglect of the community.

Harris has campaigned in Michigan with former Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, drawing the ire of the state’s Arab American community, which includes 90,000 Iraqi Americans who remember the elder Cheney’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 as well as his daughter’s reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry.

The state also boasts large Lebanese and Palestinian communities who are seeing the Biden administration’s staunch support for Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza and Lebanon as the Biden administration continues to make no progress on a cease-fire or arms embargo. At the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris’s campaign neglected to highlight Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim voices on the stage.

But Harris has some good news in Arizona, where last week more than 100 Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders in the southwestern battleground state signed a letter supporting her campaign. The vice president’s campaign will have to hope that statements like Lutnick’s, as well as Trump’s own bigoted record on Islam and Muslims, will help her win over more of the crucial vote. 

JD Vance was called out for lying … again. 

The Ohio senator was caught trying to create a conspiracy theory about retired Gen. John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, who said last week that Trump fits into the “general definition of fascist.”

During an interview with Jake Tapper Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Vance was faced with his own creative interpretation of Kelly’s decision to sound the alarm against Trump.

“You said the other day, quote, ‘I guarantee John Kelly talked to somebody on Kamala Harris’s campaign beforehand,’ before he did this interview,” Tapper said. “I’ve spoken with people in John Kelly’s circle, and I’ve spoken with people in the Kamala Harris campaign, they say there’s been no communication the entire time, so where did that come from?” 

“Oh, I’m highly skeptical of that, Jake,” Vance replied. “You know the way that these attacks work, you know the way that these people are often vetted by a campaign before something goes out there—”

“So, you made it up?” Tapper interjected. 

“No, I said that the American media and the American Democratic Party apparatus works a certain way,” Vance said. “If it comes out that John Kelly never even spoke with a person in the Kamala Harris orbit—”

“I’m telling you that,” Tapper insisted. 

“You’re telling me that based on secondhand conversations with John Kelly,” Vance said. 

“If it is true that he never spoke with anyone in Kamala Harris’s orbit, I’m happy to apologize to John Kelly for misstating how he delivered this news to The Atlantic magazine,” he added.

To cast attention far away from his lie, Vance then suggested that Kelly had a “particular ideological motive” for going to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he said had “encouraged” the invasion of Iraq with “dishonest” journalism. 

During his interview with CNN, Vance also tried to defend Trump’s remarks calling Democrats “the enemy within” and threatening to send the military after American citizens by pretending Trump had never said that at all, and then claimed Trump’s threats were taken “out of context.” 

Trump has “said publicly that he wants to use the military to go after ‘the enemy within,’ which is the American people,” Tapper explained.

“He did not say that, Jake,” Vance responded. “He said that he was going to send the military after the American people? Show me the quote where he said that.”

For the record, here’s the quote from earlier this month: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the—and it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

But Trump hasn’t just said “enemy from within” once, he’s said it at nearly every speaking event for the past two weeks, adding more and more context to exactly whom he views as the “enemy from within.” 

The Republican presidential candidate has used the term to describe Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, suggesting that “enemy from within” referred to his political rivals. In an interview with Joe Rogan on Friday, Trump used the phrase again, referring to people who disagree with his politics as “people that are really bad, people that I really think want to make this country unsuccessful.”

Vance went on the defensive anyway. “He said that he wanted to use the military to go after far-left lunatics who are rioting, and … he also called them ‘the enemy within,’” Vance insisted Sunday.

“He separately, in a totally different context, in a totally different conversation, said that Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were threats to this country,” Vance continued, conveniently leaving out that Trump had used the exact same language about both—the very definition of taking something out of context.

But it took barely a few hours before Trump repeated the phrase again Sunday night, at a rally in New York City, adding even more context.

“A massive, crooked, vicious radical left machine that runs the Democratic Party,” Trump said. “They’re just vessels.”

“And when I say the ‘enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy. Becomes a soundb—‘Ohh, how can he say?’ No, they’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within,” Trump whined.  

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is suing Elon Musk over the billionaire’s election interference plot.

Krasner on Monday filed a civil lawsuit arguing that Musk and his America PAC have violated Pennsylvania law by operating an illegal, unregulated lottery in the state, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Though several legal experts and the Justice Department have sounded the alarm, Krasner’s lawsuit announced Monday is the first legal challenge that Musk has faced for his $1 million bribe.

“America PAC and Musk must be stopped, immediately, before the upcoming Presidential Election on Nov. 5,” the lawsuit states. “That is because America PAC and Musk hatched their illegal lottery scheme to influence voters in that election.”

The lawsuit avoids the bigger question of whether the whole stunt—encouraging swing-state voters to sign a petition in return for a chance at winning $1 million—violates election law by essentially paying people to register to vote. Instead, Krasner’s legal argument states that Musk is operating an illegal lottery. Under Pennsylvania law, a lottery can only be run by the state and for the benefit of the state’s seniors.

He also argues that Musk’s giveaway isn’t as random as the Trump surrogate states. “Though Musk says that a winner’s selection is ‘random,’ that appears to be false,” Krasner’s lawsuit says. “Multiple winners that have been selected are individuals who have shown up at Trump rallies in Pennsylvania.” More than half of America PAC’s $9 million doled out to voters has gone to Pennsylvanians.

As of Monday morning, Musk has yet to make a statement about Krasner’s suit, but he did retweet a video of himself condemning the partisan “legacy media” and arguing that it should be easier to get rid of a law than make one.

Donald Trump’s campaign is desperately trying to backtrack after a comedian at Trump’s New York rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday made a very racist joke about Puerto Rico.

Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at the rally, immediately drawing backlash from across the political spectrum, even including Republicans like Senator Rick Scott and Representative Maria Elvira Salazar.

On Sunday night, the Trump campaign immediately went into damage control mode, with spokesperson Danielle Alvarez telling CNN, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Then, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt went on Fox and Friends early Monday morning before sunrise, and initially tried to spin the rally as “amazing” and diverse.

“The energy last night was palpable in the room, the spirit. It was happiness and joy. And it was such a diverse group of people in that stadium packed to the house. There wasn’t an empty seat. You had Black Americans, Latino Americans, Jewish Americans, men, women of all ages coming in support of President Trump and unafraid to show it,” Leavitt said.

Steve Doocy then addressed the elephant in the room.

“You know, this morning, the mainstream media has picked up on the comic’s comments, which were offensive, have been denounced by the campaign and everybody else. What went on with that?” Doocy asked Leavitt.

Leavitt tried in vain to distance the campaign from Hinchcliffe’s language.

“Look, it was a comedian who made a joke in poor taste,” she replied. “Obviously, that joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or our campaign. And I think it is sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”

But none of the following speakers at the rally Sunday, including Trump himself, condemned or tried to distance the Trump campaign from Hinchcliffe. The comedian himself doubled down, accusing his critics, including Walz, of “having no sense of humor.” It also was a reminder of Trump’s poor record regarding Puerto Rico, and how he mishandled the aftereffects of Hurricane Maria’s devastation of the island in 2017.

Trump’s rally was full of disturbing parallels to a 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden supporting the Nazi Party, and the racism was just the icing on the cake. Americans who oppose such racism, including the many Puerto Ricans living in battleground states, should keep that in mind when they head to the polls.

Even Fox News has raised its eyebrows at podcasting behemoth Joe Rogan’s decision not to interview Vice President Kamala Harris despite penning in a three-hour slot for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

During a Sunday discussion on the network between Fox News host Howard Kurtz and pundit Caroline Downey, the MediaBuzz anchor claimed that it was Rogan who had stiffed the Harris campaign.

Downey argued that the lopsided interview opportunity proved a “net benefit” to Trump’s campaign, since “every TV hit that Kamala Harris does, she comes off more bitter, more angry, and more jaded, whereas Trump comes off as a normal guy.”

“So, you know, Kamala Harris claims she’s trying to cater to the younger generation, but she’s sticking to legacy media interviews for the most part, and she refused to go on Rogan,” Downey said.

But Kurtz was quick to push back on Downey’s behind-the-scenes speculation.

“Well, no, I don’t think that’s true. I think she wanted to go on Joe Rogan, and I don’t think Rogan wanted her,” Kurtz said. “I think it would have been a good thing if she’d gone.”

“So, even though Rogan, I believe, has refused to have Trump on in the past, he seemed largely sympathetic to the former president, and you heard him dismiss the media as a bunch of left-wing Democrats,” the host added.

In recent weeks, Trump has dodged mainstream news appearances, including going so far as to break election tradition by refusing to sit for a 60 Minutes interview in September, which he reportedly backed out of last-minute over fears that the rigorous show would fact-check him.

Instead, Trump has relegated his TV appearances to friendlier, more sycophantic networks, including Fox News, whose anchor Maria Bartiromo did not interrupt or correct Trump when he claimed that the real Election Day threat is the “enemy from within” while suggesting that the military should forcibly involve itself in handling the election results.

But a chat with Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters for either candidate.