Civil Rights Groups Sue to Protect Georgia Voter Data Seized by FBI

The federal government is being sued by civil rights organizations to protect voter data seized by the FBI in a raid at a Fulton County, Georgia, elections building last month.

The NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Georgia Coalition of the People’s Agenda, and other groups filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia Sunday to “prohibit the Trump administration from misusing the voter information” it seized as part of the raid.

Donald Trump has long claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him despite no evidence of voter fraud. Georgia was won by President Biden in that election, and as a result, the Trump administration last month launched an investigation into Fulton County, the largest and most Democratic-leaning county in the state.

“Having already failed to overturn the valid results of the 2020 presidential election by invoking false claims of widespread voter fraud, promoting fake electors, and inciting a violent insurrection, Trump and his minions are refusing to give up the ‘lost cause,’ trampling even more voting and privacy rights in the process,” said Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyer’s Committee, in a statement. “Ironically, this is happening in the same jurisdiction where Trump pressured state elections officials to ‘find 11,870 votes’ in an effort to declare himself the victor in 2020.”

The Georgia raid has raised concerns that Trump is trying to manufacture a justification to take over elections in battleground areas, especially considering that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was inexplicably present and found to be giving updates to Trump the next day. The president claims the raid happened on the orders of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who hasn’t cleared things up.

Gabbard has spent the last several months investigating long-debunked claims of voter fraud from the 2020 election, a departure from her supposed job overseeing U.S. intelligence. Under her watch, the FBI seized close to 700 ballots and other election materials from Fulton County, including tabulator tapes from scanners that count votes, electronic ballot images created when ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls.

This new lawsuit joins another legal action filed by the county earlier this month to return all seized materials. Meanwhile, Trump and his Republican allies continue to push for a federal takeover of elections, with the president threatening to push through voter I.D. even without Congress. It seems that the future of free and fair elections rests on whether the courts can stop the Trump administration.

President Trump is blaming Maryland Governor Wes Moore for sewage pollution in the Potomac River, something Moore has no control over. 

“There is a massive Ecological Disaster unfolding in the Potomac River as a result of the Gross Mismanagement of Local Democrat Leaders, particularly, Governor Wes Moore, of Maryland,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday afternoon. “A sewer line breach in Maryland has caused millions of gallons of raw sewage to be dumped directly into the Potomac River, a result of incompetent Local and State Management of Essential Waste Management Systems. This is the same Governor who cannot rebuild a Bridge. It is clear Local Authorities cannot adequately handle this calamity.” 

Trump added that he is “directing Federal Authorities to immediately provide all necessary Management, Direction, and Coordination to protect the Potomac, the Water Supply in the Capital Region, and our treasured National Resources in our Nation’s Capital City.” 

Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin reposted Trump’s message. 

It sounds like Trump heard “sewage emergency in Maryland” and took the opportunity to shit on a popular Black Democrat and potential 2028 presidential candidate without doing his research.  

“He’s just blatantly lying about this,” The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg wrote on X. “The pipe is maintained by ⁦DC Water⁩ and runs along the Clara Barton Parkway, which is maintained/run by the National Park Service. It has nothing to do with ⁦Governor Wes Moore⁩.”

A massive overflow of sewage spewed into the Potomac River in January after a large pipe burst, leading to contamination in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. Federal authorities were already involved before Trump’s Truth Social post Monday, as the National Park Service has been closely working with DC Water to address the issue.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland, which Trump was likely referring to in his post, collapsed in 2024 when a cargo boat struck one of its piers, and is projected to open back up in 2030. 

Donald Trump’s so-called Department of War is threatening to cut ties with Anthropic because it won’t help the Pentagon conduct mass surveillance on Americans or make fully autonomous weapons that the administration can use however it likes.

A senior Trump administration official told Axios Monday that the Pentagon was fed up after Anthropic refused unfettered use of its AI systems. “Everything’s on the table,” including cutting ties altogether, the official said.

An “orderly replacement” would have to be found, if they ended the relationship, the official added.

Last summer, Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon valued up to $200 million—but the company set hard boundaries against its systems being used to develop weapons, conduct surveillance, or facilitate violence. For months, the Pentagon has sought to negotiate with Anthropic to let the military use its tools for “all lawful purposes,” including weapons development and intelligence gathering, without being forced to argue individual use cases.

In January, tensions came to a head after an executive at Anthropic reportedly reached out to an executive at Palantir to ask whether it had used the company’s Claude AI assistant as part of the U.S. military raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. (Spoiler alert: It did.)

“It was raised in such a way to imply that they might disapprove of their software being used, because obviously there was kinetic fire during that raid, people were shot,” the senior official told Axios.

A spokesperson for Anthropic denied that such a conversation had taken place in a statement to Axios, saying the company had “not discussed the use of Claude for specific operations with the Department of War. We have also not discussed this with any industry partners, outside of routine discussions on strictly technical matters.”

“Anthropic’s conversations with the DoW to date have focused on a specific set of Usage Policy questions—namely, our hard limits around fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance—none of which relate to current operations,” the spokesperson added.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell suggested to The Wall Street Journal that the Department of War’s relationship with Anthropic was under review. “Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight,” Parnell said.

Meanwhile, Anthropic appears to only be wading further into politics. Last week, the company announced that it would pledge $20 million toward Public First, a super PAC that will oppose groups funded by the company’s rival OpenAI.

Former President George W. Bush won’t defy the “code of silence” that prevents ex-U.S. leaders from publicly chastising their successors, but he’s apparently not opposed to throwing shade.

In a Presidents’ Day essay published Monday by the pro-democracy institution More Perfect, Bush’s adoring gaze toward the qualities of America’s first president only served to underscore just how unpresidential the current administration has become.

Bush waxed poetic on several of George Washington’s qualities, but paid particular attention to ones that are currently in short supply. Those included “humility,” a deep appreciation for history, a reverence for knowledge superior to his own, and an unwillingness to retain power “for power’s sake.”

“Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to,” Bush wrote. “In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to.”

Bush also dissected Washington’s commitment to a code of conduct that was considered, at the time, to be the “gentlemanly arts.” Washington, according to Bush’s research, “schooled himself” by copying “the 110 maxims from Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” a text authored by French Jesuits in the late sixteenth century.

“Many of the qualities that came to be associated with Washington’s leadership, from self-control and courteousness to modesty and diplomacy, can be traced to that short book on manners,” Bush wrote.

Washington’s repeated decisions to step down from power were critical lessons for the nation, according to Bush, who argued that Washington’s decision to step down as commander of the U.S. Army after the Revolution, and his later decision to end his presidency after two terms,  “ensured America wouldn’t become a monarchy, or worse.”

The message carried particular weight considering that Donald Trump has continually contested election results in fruitless grasps at power, including an attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and threats to run for president a third time, against the constraints of the law.

But Washington’s performance—and his commitment to building a lasting governmental foundation—was paramount not just to his success but to the future of the Oval Office and the country, according to the forty-third president.

“Our first leader helped define not only the character of the presidency but the character of the country,” Bush wrote. “Washington modeled what it means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and selfish ambition. He embodied integrity and modeled why it’s worth aspiring to. And he carried himself with dignity and self-restraint, honoring the office without allowing it to become invested with near-mythical powers.”

A small-town Kansas mayor is in trouble for voting illegally as a noncitizen—but he has the support of his town.

Joe Ceballos was recently reelected mayor of Coldwater, Kansas, by a comfortable 101-20 margin. But just hours before the results came in, Ceballos, a legal permanent U.S. resident, was charged in state court with three counts of election perjury and three counts of voting without being qualified.

The Trump administration gleefully highlighted the case as it reinforced right-wing claims of widespread voter fraud. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin included Ceballos’s picture and a copy of his signature on a voter registration form on a press release, saying, “This alien committed a felony by voting in American elections.”

But the town of Coldwater, almost entirely Republican, is rallying around their mayor, who voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections and has lived in the town since he was a teenager. Ceballos, 55, came to the United States at the age of 4 from Mexico, moving around a lot with his family before settling in Coldwater, close to Kansas’s border with Oklahoma. He received his green card in 1990.

Ceballos told The New York Times that he has never been back to Mexico since he left. While he used to help police as a Spanish interpreter, he doesn’t speak the language very well these days. According to the Times, by all appearances he is a Kansan—he drives a Ram truck, has a slight Southern Plains accent, and wears cowboy boots.

“I still strongly believe in Trump’s immigration laws about, ‘Let’s get the bad guys out of here.’ You know, they’re murderers, they killed people, they molested people, let’s get them out of here,” Ceballos said to the publication. “But I feel like I don’t fit that category. And I feel like that’s how they’re treating me.”

Ceballos has a misdemeanor battery conviction from 1994 for a fight involving multiple people, which he said was related to his first marriage. He doesn’t seem to have had any brushes with the law since then. After he was charged with voting illegally, he resigned. But the people of Coldwater have come to his defense, with ads being placed in the local newspaper to support Ceballos at his court hearing, which was so well attended that it was standing-room only.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who has railed against voter fraud for more than a decade, is trying to make an example out of Ceballos. At a news conference announcing the charges against Ceballos, he said, “Noncitizen voting is a real problem. It is not something that happens once in a decade. It is something that happens fairly frequently.”

In reality, noncitizen voting occurs very rarely in the U.S., with very few cases. Ceballos freely admits that he voted illegally, but he said he didn’t know that he couldn’t vote as a permanent resident and that he had never been told that he couldn’t. Last year, he applied to become a citizen, and he answered “yes” to a federal official in an interview who asked if he had ever voted. That, Ceballos says, is when everything went downhill.

Now Ceballos fears he will be found guilty and deported to Mexico, away from his family, or picked up by ICE before he even returns to court. Will the president he voted for take an interest, or use him as a poster child for voter fraud and justify his deportation?

A judge ordered Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Monday to restore a slavery-related exhibit at the President’s House in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

Burgum ordered the National Park Service last month to remove the Philadelphia exhibit at the former residence of President George Washington, which still contains remains of the quarters in which he held enslaved Black people.

Now, Judge Cynthia Rufe has ordered Bergum to put the exhibit back up, after a lawsuit from the city of Philadelphia.

Rufe began her ruling with a quote from George Orwell’s 1984: “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”

She then turned her attention to the matter of enslaved Africans at the President’s House.

“At the turn of this century, historians identified the location of the first official residence of the President of the United States, where Presidents Washington and Adams lived during their terms,” she wrote in her order. “This historical research also identified information about nine enslaved Africans whom President Washington owned, brought to the official presidential residence, and rotated in and out of Pennsylvania, a practice which prevented enslaved individuals from petitioning for their freedom under Pennsylvania law.”

“It is not disputed that President Washington owned slaves,” Rufe continued. “And yet, in its argument, the government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control. Its claims in this regard echo Big Brother’s domain in Orwell’s 1984.”

This is one of the first blows to President Trump’s culture war on national parks. His “ Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order was an ahistorical attack on virtually any mention of Black, LGBTQ, or women’s history.

Burgum has yet to respond.

This story has been updated.

Bari Weiss’s variant of CBS News has opted to keep Peter Attia on as a network contributor, despite his recently revealed ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Attia was named as an on-air contributor in January—one of 19 that Weiss said she was “so excited” to introduce to the broadcasting behemoth’s lineup just three weeks ago. CBS has not made its position on Attia public, but staffers who spoke with The Guardian indicated that the network intended to retain him as an on-air analyst.

“Everyone internally unofficially concluded he was staying as of about a week ago,” one CBS News staffer told The Guardian.

The celebrity wellness influencer shared hundreds of messages with Epstein throughout the 2010s—after the financier pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution, according to files made public by the Justice Department late last month. A simple search for Attia’s name in the Epstein files trove returns 1,838 results. Some of the messages are superficially benign, relating to health guidance, while others hint at a darker truth.

In a June 2015 email headed “fresh shipment,” Attia wrote to Epstein: “You [know] the biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul … ” The email included an image, though its contents were redacted by the DOJ.

In another crass exchange with the convicted sex criminal, Attia cracked about the various health benefits of giving oral sex to women.

“Pussy is, indeed, low carb,” Attia wrote to Epstein in February 2016. “Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”

In a message to Epstein’s assistant dated January 2016, Attia said that he goes into “JE withdrawal” when he fails to see him. A year later, he chose to spend time with the convicted sex trafficker instead of visiting his infant son, who had been hospitalized after entering cardiac arrest.

Staffers at CBS News were reportedly frustrated by the decision to keep Attia on the company payroll.

“We’re pissed off about it,” another unidentified CBS employee told The Guardian.

In a lengthy public apology posted to X earlier this month, Attia described his outed communications with Epstein as “embarrassing, tasteless, and indefensible.”

Earlier this month, inside sources told the New York Post’s On the Money newsletter that Weiss had agonized over the decision of whether to keep Attia—in large part because she felt that “contrarian voices like his” were crucial to restructuring CBS News’s business model.

Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon once called Jeffrey Epstein “God” during a text message exchange, newly released government files reveal.

In May 2018, the two men were having a discussion about currency trading, in which Bannon praised Epstein’s financial acumen.

“Bannon hammers; God shorts,” Bannon wrote.

“I don’t think of myself that way,” Epstein replied.

“I do,” said Bannon.

A text message like this seems to go far beyond an exchange by a documentarian and his subject. Bannon built a close relationship with Epstein while ostensibly filming the billionaire financier and convicted sex offender for a documentary he was making. The files show that the pair would correspond often, with Epstein offering plane trips to Bannon and the two regularly meeting. Bannon offered Epstein advice on how to deal with increased negative publicity from 2017, when the two first met, through July 2019, when Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors.

Bannon claims that all of this was part of his efforts to secure interviews from Bannon for the film.

“I am a filmmaker and TV host with decades of experience interviewing controversial figures,” Bannon told The New York Times in a statement. “That’s the only lens through which these private communications should be viewed—a documentary filmmaker working, over a period of time, to secure 50 hours of interviews from a reclusive subject.”

Bannon said in the statement that the documentary, which a spokesperson claims will be released later this year, would “destroy the very myths [Epstein] created.” But Bannon is hardly innocent of helping to build those “myths.” Was it necessary for Bannon to call Epstein “God”?

The rest of the released texts and emails between Epstein and Bannon show the pair working together and maintaining a close friendship. Epstein offered to cover Bannon’s medical expenses, and the pair shared multiple meals together at Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan.

At one point in 2018, Epstein told another associate, regarding Bannon, “We have become friends.” That same year, Epstein told Bannon, “Whatever you need, I’m in,” of Bannon’s efforts to advise far-right political parties around the world. Today, Bannon can claim all he likes about wanting to destroy Epstein’s myths, but he not only bought into them but also sought to assist and protect the sex criminal.

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries still refuses to engage with growing calls to abolish ICE, even as the agency is in the nadir of its popularity.

The Left Hook podcast host Wajahat Ali read Jeffries a list of facts when they appeared together Friday on The Joy Reid Show.

“Sixty-five percent of people taken by ICE had no convictions, that’s from the Cato Institute, a right-wing institute. ICE has killed eight people this year alone that we know of.… Over 60 percent of Americans now disapprove of ICE. That means in three weeks, it’s gone from 30 percent to 60 percent,” Ali said. “If you lead on something, people will follow. It seems the wind is behind your back for the first time ever.… You said you wanna rein in ICE.… Why not lead, and say ‘abolish ICE’?”

“What you’re telling us is that you want our taxpayer dollars to pay for a lawless, masked, armed agency to continue terrorizing our cities,” Ali continued. “I’m trying to figure out how you as a leader can be telling Americans that their taxpayer dollars should be going to ICE.”

“I don’t understand anything that you just said,” Jeffries replied curtly.

“I spoke English,” Ali replied.

“I don’t understand anything that you’ve just said to me when I’ve made clear that taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, not brutalize or kill them. That’s the whole reason we’re in this fight right now,” Jeffries continued. “That’s the whole reason that DHS is getting ready to shut down.”

While Jeffries is right regarding why DHS is currently (partially) shut down, it will surely reopen. And some are skeptical that the demands of Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are strong enough to stop ICE from committing more harm, or if agents will even abide by them when the moment comes.

Ali again asked Jeffries to take a stance on abolishing ICE.

“I’m gonna use the language that I wanna use; you can use the language that you wanna use. And the language that I’m using right now relates to these type of bold, meaningful, dramatic changes that are designed to save lives right now.”

Can asking ICE agents to wear body cameras and not detain U.S. citizens (which is already illegal) really be described as “bold, meaningful, dramatic” change?

“I think Wajahat Ali was clear. He acknowledges the current fight, but asks Representative Jeffries to lead on the long term goal of abolishing ICE,” one liberal user shared on X. “I don’t understand the leader’s reticence on that very simple, and frankly moderate, position.”

Donald Trump’s White House is posting about President’s Day in the creepiest way possible.

In honor of the holiday, the White House Monday posted a menacing picture of Trump accompanied by the quote: “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter.”

That particular cliche comes from an unwieldy interview with NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich last month, where Trump offered a strange description of the difference between his first and second terms in office. “In a way, I was the hunted, and now I’m more of the hunter,” Trump said.

The president went on to claim he’d been “hunted by these horrible people,” and openly bragged about getting revenge on his perceived political enemies.

Revenge is a major part of the grievance-fueled Trump presidency. The president reportedly holds daily meetings with Department of Justice staffers to discuss his ongoing plots against individuals like former Special Counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. However, publicly announcing one’s intention to seek revenge is actually very bad for winning court cases.

The White House’s declaration that Trump has transformed into a “hunter” comes as his administration has resoundingly failed to go after any of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators. It’s not so much that they’re missing shots but that they’re refusing to take any.

But if you ask some women, Trump was always a predator—and the White House knows it too.