Trump Officials Explored Unnerving Plot to Ban All Voting Machines

The Trump administration considered banning voting machines in over 50 percent of the country by deeming Dominion Voting Machine software—used in 27 mostly blue states—a national security risk.

The plan, first reported by Reuters on Friday, was spearheaded by White House adviser Kurt Olsen, whose primary job is to find ways to prove President Trump’s false rigged election claims to be true. Olsen’s plan was to force states to switch to hand counting ballots, a method many experts say leaves more room for potential cheating.

The plan advanced far enough last year that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other department officials began working to find a justification to implement it, but they ultimately failed to do so, as there is no good reason to swap out the voting method of millions of people—especially right before a midterm election. There is no proof that voting machines have ever been hacked, despite the president’s repeated allegations.

The Trump administration appears desperate to gain an upper hand ahead of the midterms. In December, the Justice Department sued and raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and has filed lawsuits to gain voter rolls in more than 30 states. This is all aimed at creating chaos and doubt so that Trump can declare any election he loses fraudulent.

Both Secretary Lutnick and Olsen have yet to comment.

Jeffrey Epstein’s former assistant has provided the House Oversight Committee with the names of three new alleged co-conspirators.

Sarah Kellen appeared before the committee in a closed-door hearing Thursday. Committee Chairman James Comer described her participation as forthcoming, and shared that her testimony was “what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Sarah Kellen has been very helpful. Of all the people we have interviewed thus far, this was by far the most substantive and productive interview that we’ve had,” Comer told reporters after the hearing. “She was very brave coming forward. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to go into detail about the abuse that she endured at the hands of Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell.

“One very positive thing today is she gave us three names of people that were involved in abuse. These were new names for us,” Comer continued.

The Kentucky Republican said that the committee would be releasing the transcript of Keller’s testimony as soon as possible, but that it would need to first redact the names of several mentioned victims.

“As far as the men that were the abusers—alleged abusers—the whole world will see that,” Comer said.

Kellen began working for Epstein in 2001 and stayed on his payroll for more than a decade, during which time she said she was “sexually and psychologically abused” by the pedophilic financier. It was only through years of therapy that she said she had come to realize that she too was a victim of Epstein’s grooming and manipulation.

“The abuse happened on average on a weekly basis, and was at times violent,” Kellen told the committee, according to her opening remarks.

“It included Jeffrey entering my room in the middle of the night and putting his fingers inside me, waking me up from my sleep,” she said. “It included an occasion in Palm Beach when he trapped me in the gym by lowering the metal hurricane shutter … choked me, and violently raped me.”

Kellen explained she stayed on as Epstein’s assistant for so long because she had “nowhere else to go.”

“I had no money, no family, no education, and no sense that I deserved any better.”

Kellen was named as a potential co-conspirator in Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors, which shielded him from federal sex-trafficking charges.

“I was not told this was happening,” Kellen said in her opening remarks of her co-conspirator status. “I was not asked about it. No one from law enforcement ever spoke with me, ever heard my side, ever asked me a single question.

“I want to start turning some of the pain and trauma into something good that can help others and bring awareness to this important topic,” Kellen told MS NOW ahead of her appearance on Capitol Hill.

Dani Bensky, another survivor of Epstein’s abuse, described Kellen’s situation to MS NOW as “complicated.”

“When you are victimized and then you are put in a position where you are manipulated to recruit, that is a very sticky, complex situation,” Bensky said. “People really need to understand what sex trafficking is and what it looks like.… It really is like a pyramid scheme.”

The charges against the remaining “Broadview Six” protesters were dropped Thursday, in a win for anyone who has protested ICE activity under the Trump administration.

The six protesters were hit with felony conspiracy charges carrying a maximum sentence of six years in prison after they surrounded an ICE agent’s car in the Chicago suburb of Broadview in September, in an attempt to slow it down. It was alleged the protesters “pushed and scratched and otherwise damaged,” the vehicle, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. But like many charges brought by the feds against anti-ICE protesters, they failed to hold up in court.

The government first dropped charges against two of the protesters, Catherine Sharp and Joselyn Walsh. Then it threw out the conspiracy charges against the other four—Brian Straw, Michael Rabbitt, Andre Martin, and former congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh—and instead tried to convict them of one misdemeanor count each for impeding a federal agent.

In the end, the administration couldn’t even do that. Chicago’s top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, dropped the charges with prejudice in front of U.S. District Judge April Perry, meaning the case cannot be refiled in the future.

Boutros remained petty to the end. He called the protesters’ actions “unacceptable in a civilized society,” adding: “It is for the grace of God that that agent moved at two miles per hour.”

Perry was unimpressed. “You are significantly undercutting your mea culpa here by standing behind the charges and continuing to vilify these particular defendants,” she told Boutros.

Boutros had already annoyed the judge once before, when his assistants took transcripts of themselves explaining the conspiracy laws to the grand jury pool, then apparently redacted some of the transcripts when Perry asked for them. She discussed this with them in a private hearing. Boutros later insisted to Perry that “no one acted with the intent to mislead your honor.”

ICE came to Chicago in Operation Midway Blitz, a deportation campaign beginning in September 2025, a few months before Operation Metro Surge took over Minneapolis. The campaign resulted in protests, arrests, and the fatal shooting of one resident, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez.

Even members of Congress are taking the opportunity to cash in on Donald Trump’s slush fund.

The DOJ created a $1.8 billion honey pot earlier this week, offering “anti-weaponization” payouts to virtually any right-winger who felt targeted by the previous presidential administration—at cost to U.S. taxpayers.

The money is apparently worth more to lawmakers than the negative impacts it will have on their constituents. Republican Representative Andrew Clyde came out in favor of the executive branch’s creation, suggesting to Politico Thursday that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of taking money from the account himself.

The Georgia Republican argued that he had been previously targeted by the IRS and had to forfeit assets to the tune of $1 million. Clyde won most of the money back after he took the IRS to court, but he told Politico that he still has considerable legal fees from the endeavor.

There are others far beyond Capitol Hill who are interested in milking the fund, such as the financially ruined CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, who lost most of his net worth for spreading unfounded conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election.

Hundreds of pardoned January 6ers are also in the queue, including former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a sex offender who bear-sprayed cops, and a convicted child molester who told his victims he would give them money from a Trump payout in exchange for their silence.

Trump leveraged the promise of payouts to his success on the campaign trail. In January—months before the slush fund became a reality—Democrats attempted to stave off such payments, introducing the “No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act.” But the bill never went anywhere, and has made no progress since.

The slush fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself. Rather than settle his $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration, Trump opted to drop the case entirely earlier this week and, in turn, extracted a pledge from the DOJ to financially assist his allies.

The arrangement came with a curious addendum from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, immunizing Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote Tuesday, is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business.

Legal experts are questioning whether the scheme is unconstitutional. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, Trump will have effectively thwarted the powers of both the legislative and judicial branches, and soiled the constitutionally defined separation of power.

Ahead of a meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the White House sent a document to GOP senators on Thursday explaining why President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund is actually a great idea.

The document says the fund is about “seeking accountability” for millions of Americans “who were victims of lawfare and weaponization.” It falsely claims the president cannot profit from it, lets senators know they can get a piece of the action themselves (wink, wink), and even attempts to paint the fund as a bipartisan win. “Democrats can submit claims, too,” the document states happily.

Unsurprisingly for the most corrupt presidential administration in history, the document greatly contradicts the legal agreement that actually established the fund. Journalist Adam Klasfeld found nine different instances where the document differs from the agreement.

For example, the document claims the fund can be audited by a third party, while omitting the fact that Blanche gets to choose the auditor and can veto the audit at will. The document also claims there is no “partisan restriction” to the fund, despite the legal settlement defining the “weaponization” in question as being committed exclusively by Democrats.

Even Republican senators realize this fund is incredibly corrupt. Just a few hours after receiving the White House document, the GOP canceled its plans to vote on a budget bill that would fund the Department of Homeland Security though the end of Trump’s second term, largely due to fears Democrats would force Republicans to go on the record about whether or not they support the fund.

The fund was announced on Monday as a result of a massive legal settlement between Trump and the IRS. It is expected to be doled out to Trump allies—including January 6 rioters and members of Trumpian super PACs—who claim they were unfairly targeted by past administrations. Of course, no one except Blanche will actually know who is awarded the bounties, and how much they’re getting.

The fund has come under intense public scrutiny since it was created. One legal watchdog called it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” Democrats have bashed it as clear fraud, and a few Republican legislators have similarly gone on record to say it unfairly benefits the president.