Republican State Senator Charged With Felonies for Election Fraud

A South Dakota Republican state senator has been hit with two felony charges for falsifying party nomination forms, reports the South Dakota Searchlight.

Tom Pischke, 44, allegedly submitted 16 forged forms to try to put candidates on the ballot for county party leadership, unbeknownst to the candidates themselves.

The fake forms were caught by Minnehaha County auditor Leah Anderson, who noticed that the address for one of the nominees didn’t match the one on their voter registration. She then noticed that all 16 forms had similar handwriting, and the signatures didn’t match other documents the candidates had signed.

Pischke initially denied forging the forms, but turned himself in after footage showed his car dropping off papers at the post office, and his DNA was found on the envelopes, reports the South Dakota Searchlight.

Pischke represents a deep-red district near Sioux Falls, and ran unopposed in his Republican primary, according to the AP.

Korry Petterson, the chair of the Minnehaha County Republican Party, said that he believes Pischke’s meddling was likely an attempt to interfere with his more centrist agenda and push the party to the right.

He told the South Dakota Searchlight that he wants prosecutors to push for a severe punishment for Pischke if the allegations are proven, and that he hopes the Republican Party as a whole will take this as a warning.

“If anything, I think it will help people realize that the extremism has got to stop,” Petterson said.

President Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about high prices—even at his own Great American State Fair.

Attendees at the first day of the president’s festival were disappointed to discover that what few food options were actually open were far from cheap.

USA Today reported that the only food stall open on Thursday sold turkey legs for $23—almost twice the price of the same offering from a Disney theme park. The stall also offered smashburgers and giant Western sausage sandwiches for $20, and lemonade for a whopping $9.

Online, people were particularly outraged by the price of a stuffed pretzel roll—which ranged from $12.48 to $24.96.

One attendee wasn’t impressed by the offerings at the Express Hibachi stand, which offered pizzas and salads for $13 to $14, boneless wings for $15, and rice bowls for $16.

“Do you see a single corndog? No! It’s a tragedy. It’s an affront to American culture,” joked political commentator Alex Cascio.

D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson also expressed her disappointment in the fair’s offerings. “Not a funnel cake, corn dog, bucket lemonade, or fried Snickers in sight. The only ride is the Ferris Wheel,” Henderson wrote on X. “It’s not that kind of state fair, y’all.”

A Republican congressman went on a racist tirade Thursday at a conservative town hall on Capitol Hill.

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the U.S. House majority whip, went on an anti-immigrant rant, complaining that “Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re gonna call us a racist, you’re gonna call us an Islamophobe.”

“I am done being careful, even the least bit. And I don’t really care where you come from, but if you come to this great country, you have to understand you’re coming here to be an American,” Emmer said to applause from the audience at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s event.

“We celebrate everyone’s culture. We’re happy with that—as long as you are an American. Celebrate your culture, I don’t care, Italian, Polish—you know, Somali, OK? But they don’t assimilate. And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from,” Emmer continued, to more applause from the right-wing crowd.

Emmer’s jab at the Somali community carries weight, considering he’s third in the party’s House leadership. He’s definitely not telling Italian and Polish immigrants who don’t assimilate to “go the hell back to where they came from.” Somali Americans in Minnesota number about 108,000, and almost half of them were born outside of the U.S. The majority of them have citizenship or legal residency.

President Trump has targeted the community in the past year, accusing them of committing fraud when receiving government assistance and amplifying false smears from a right-wing influencer. Emmer seems to be following his lead. The House whip’s comments came the same day as the Supreme Court ruled that the president could end Temporary Protected Status for Syrian and Haitian refugees. Trump’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the U.S. have taken over the Republican Party.

Former White House national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he unlawfully kept and transmitted classified national security information. The case is a big win for President Donald Trump, who went after Bolton after he exposed embarrassing details about Trump’s first term.

Bolton admitted to sharing classified details with his wife and daughter, which amounts to one felony count. He was accused of 18 violations, but only pleaded guilty to one. Bolton has agreed to pay a fine of over $2 million, and could face up to five years in prison.

The case centered around notes Bolton took for his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, and the information he shared with his family as part of the editing process. During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department tried to prevent the book from coming out, claiming it contained classified information.

The memoir revealed damning details about the first Trump presidency, including Trump’s corrupt foreign policy dealings, his general incompetence, and confirmation that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine until it agreed to investigate Joe Biden, which Trump was impeached for in 2019.

Trump has called his former national security adviser a “lowlife” and a “sleazebag,” and claimed that if he had listened to Bolton’s advice while in office, the U.S. would be in “World War Six” by now.

Though Bolton is just one of many Trump enemies who have been prosecuted at the president’s fancy, CNN reports that the case against him was more sound than the others.

Somehow President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair keeps getting worse.

As temperatures topped 80 degrees Thursday, the festival’s food hall lost power, causing all the ice cream to melt, according to Fox 5 DC reporter Homa Bash.

The food hall wasn’t the only attraction affected by power outages. The much-hyped Ferris Wheel temporarily stopped running Thursday due to generator issues.

In order to cool off, attendees crowded under one of the only sources of shade on the National Mall—Trump’s Temu Arc de Triomphe.

The Great American State Fair was already off to a rocky start Wednesday evening when dozens of attendees were seen flocking toward the exits in the middle of Trump’s address, which was meant to kick-start the two-week event.

The line for admission appeared to dwindle on the festival’s second day.

Also on Thursday, Pennsylvania joined nine other states to pull out of the Freedom 250 gala on the National Mall, including Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Vermont.

A stall celebrating Maine remained empty Thursday, as the state did not send a delegation to Trump’s festival. Connecticut, too, was just “chairs,” according to Bash.

All in all, it seems like Trump’s festival isn’t a resounding success, but who can be surprised when the president has shrunk the meaning of patriotism to be more about him than about the country he leads?