Nearly Two Dozen Democratic States Hit Trump With Elections Lawsuit

Officials from 23 different states (and the District of Columbia) are taking Donald Trump to court over a brazenly unconstitutional executive order that looks to limit Americans’ voting rights.

The executive order, signed on Tuesday, banned the U.S. Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to anyone not on a preapproved list compiled by the USPS itself. Trump and his cronies like to claim mail-in voting is rife with fraud—despite a lack of evidence and the fact that the president likes to vote by mail himself. But the executive order’s solution to this is sketchy at best. Why, and how, does the USPS get to choose who can vote by mail?

Perhaps even more insidious is another section of the executive order, which calls on the federal government to compile its own list of voters in each state, which will then be sent to states 60 days before each federal election—presumably along with a bunch of threats that they better not find anyone who doesn’t match their list voting.

States, of course, have been responsible for keeping their own voter rolls for centuries, but this executive order threatens to change that. And which federal department has the president tasked with creating nationwide voter rolls? Why, the Department of Homeland Security, of course! You know, the same department that has repeatedly been caught lying in court, and which executed two Americans in the street just a few months ago! What could go wrong?

The good news is that lawsuits have already curbed some of Trump’s voting-related executive orders. This suit, filed in Massachusetts District Court, will hopefully be no different.

“The President’s latest attempt to interfere with the States’ administration of their elections is as unprecedented as it is unconstitutional,” the states’ complaint reads. “Under our Constitution, the President has no authority to restrict voter eligibility or mail voting to lists of voters pre-authorized by the federal government.”

The conservative leader of Catholics in the U.S. military had some damning words for Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump’s holy war on Iran.

Speaking in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation set to air Sunday, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services and one of the most conservative Catholic prelates in the United States, said it was “hard to cast this war as something that would be sponsored by the Lord.”

Broglio criticized Hegseth’s bloodthirsty prayers for violence against “those who deserve no mercy” at a recent Pentagon Christian service.

“It’s a little bit problematic in the sense that the Lord Jesus certainly brought a message of peace, and I think war is always a last resort,” Broglio said.

When asked directly whether he believed the war was justified, he replied, “I would think under the just war theory, it is not.”

He explained that the war was “compensating for a threat before the threat is actually realized” and said he would “align” himself with Pope Leo XIV, who has urged a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

President Trump has made only one comment as reports of yet another U.S. combat plane going down directly contradict his constant comments that Iranian air defense is completely devastated.

On Friday afternoon, The New York Times reported that an A-10 Warthog crashed in the Persian Gulf region over the Strait of Hormuz around the same time an F-15 was shot down in Iran. The report came from two U.S. officials speaking anonymously about the matter, but they did not offer additional details.

While the lone pilot of the A-10 is safe, only one of the two pilots from the downed F-15 has been rescued. Trump has remained shockingly silent as these two significant military losses occurred back to back. He’s had no public events Friday and has not acknowledged the jets in any posts. His most recent post after news of the second crashed warplane, around 3:20 p.m. on Friday, read “KEEP THE OIL, ANYONE?” He did not acknowledge the fallen aircraft or missing servicemember.

It makes no sense to rant about how the war is already won when Iran clearly still has some level of defense capability available.

This story has been updated.

Iran is no longer entertaining a potential peace deal with U.S. negotiators.

Tehran declared Friday that it would not meet with U.S. officials in Islamabad, adding that the White House’s demands are “unacceptable,” reported The Wall Street Journal’s senior Middle East correspondent, Summer Said.

The country’s regional neighbors are still attempting to mediate the situation, offering Iranian officials other opportunities to settle the conflict with the U.S. Turkey and Egypt have offered new venues for the talks, including Istanbul and the Qatari capital, Doha, as well as new proposals, noted Said.

However, Qatar has so far resisted efforts by its neighbors and the U.S. to play a major role in the peace talks, “complicating efforts to find a way forward for the talks,” mediators told the Journal.

Earlier Friday, Mohammad Javad Zarif—a former Iranian foreign minister who served as Iran’s top diplomat from 2013 to 2021—became the first figure in the country to offer a detailed, “comprehensive peace” plan that he believed Tehran would find attractive. It outlined a nonaggression pact between the U.S. and Iran, as well as “economic interactions” that include the involvement of American companies in Iran’s oil sector.

But Zarif is only on the periphery of power in Iran. The country’s current leadership is fronted by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of previous Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated in February by a U.S.-Israeli joint operation. The junior Khamenei is considered even more extreme, and has been described as his father “on steroids.”

Iran’s newly installed leadership refuted claims made by Donald Trump earlier this week that the country was open to a ceasefire, informing state media Wednesday morning that the idea was “false and baseless.” Iranian state media has repeated the idea that Iran is “winning” the war, despite the devastation wrecked by American forces.

The campaign has so far cost the lives of more than 2,000 people in Iran, including dozens of political leaders, according to Al Jazeera. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have also been killed in the war, not including the two crew members of an F-15 fighter jet that was downed by Iranian fire earlier Friday. So far, one crew member has been rescued, while the other is still missing. American, Israeli, and Iranian forces are rushing to locate the ejected soldier, reported Axios.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted Monday that the conflict would be resolved in the coming weeks, and that the war itself would not take longer than four to six weeks (the conflict is currently in its fifth week). Military officials have not agreed with that estimate, predicting that the war could instead rage for months or even years.

Donald Trump’s so-called fraud crackdown will soon be coming to a (Democrat-led) state near you.

On Friday, the president celebrated the beginning of the crackdown, claiming that fraud is being committed “primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS, like those in California, Illinois, Minnesota (Somalia beware!), Maine, New York, and many others, have had a ‘free for all.’”

Trump added that Vice President JD Vance would become America’s “FRAUD CZAR,” a title that sounds amusingly like Vance is being tapped to commit fraud.

A day earlier, the Justice Department arrested eight people in California allegedly involved in health care fraud schemes netting more than $50 million.

Most of the California fraud consists of hospice centers allegedly filing false Medicare claims to receive federal funds for patients who did not need them. Hospice centers located in Artesia, Glendale, Tarzana, and Simi Valley—all cities and suburbs surrounding Los Angeles—were caught up in the DOJ raid.

The most egregious alleged fraudster is the owner of an Artesia hospice center who paid middlemen to refer fake hospice patients to her. The DOJ claims she submitted more than $9 million in fake Medicare claims and was paid over $8.5 million, and that one couple at the center said they were told they could receive $300 a month each if they signed up for hospice care, though neither needed it.

Two additional detainees are charged with defrauding a California labor union out of health care money, and a final person is accused of forging immigration-related medical documents.

The Trump administration enjoys singling out California when discussing nationwide fraud, frequently equating the alleged fraud with its Democrat leadership, personified by Governor Gavin Newsom (notably not a fan of the president).

Newsom, for his part, signed a law in 2021 that paused new hospice licenses over fraud concerns. He said his state has been cracking down on hospice fraud ever since, rescinding over 280 hospice licenses in two years and investigating 300 further medical centers.

“Glad the federal government is finally stepping up to do their part,” Newsom wrote on X.

Trump has made tackling Social Security and Medicare fraud a focus of his administration, which is great in theory. But the government has not produced many notable results yet, and we are yet to see whether the allegations into these eight Californians will hold up in a legal sense. Trump’s Department of Justice has had an incredible capacity to lie and face-plant in court, perhaps more so than any former iteration of the department.

And of course, the great irony is that there are many instances of massive, provable fraud taking place in Trump’s own Cabinet. The president also likes to pardon and drop investigations into convicted fraudsters who have pledged fealty to him.