FBI Escalates Trump’s “Voter Fraud” Crusade With Disturbing Move

FBI Director Kash Patel wants to know where you are.

Patel’s FBI has taken a new and dangerous step in its quest to root out alleged voter fraud—tracking down the IP addresses of people who register to vote online.

According to a new report from Axios, the FBI recently requested and obtained the IP address of someone who went online to register to vote in South Carolina. This move is a massive overreach by the Trump administration into local election processes.

“It’s not typical for the FBI to be calling state election officials … and conducting a fishing expedition to see private voter data,” a former senior Justice Department official told Axios. “It’s not typical and it’s not appropriate.”

Although an IP address cannot reveal a person’s exact identity, it does show the user’s geographic location, service provider, and the network they’re using. In the context of voting, an IP address could indicate the state and country a person is registering from.

Axios also spoke with a longtime election official in York County, South Carolina, Alan Helms, who said he had never seen this kind of election interference before.

“It is not common” to get a request like this, Helms said. “In my tenure as an election official, going on 20 years, that is the first interaction with law enforcement.”

If the FBI continues pursuing voters’ IP addresses, the fallout could extend far beyond any one state—42 states, plus Washington, D.C., currently allow some form of online voter registration.

The move to track down voter IP addresses is just the latest in President Trump’s ongoing mission to make it harder for Americans to vote ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. Trump has sued 30 states and D.C. in an attempt to obtain state voter rolls. In the past month alone, the president has attacked mail-in voting, repeated his ridiculous claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” in a prime-time national address, and attempted to shove his signature voter suppression bill, the SAVE America Act, through Congress. Since the start of his second term, he has mobilized government agencies—including the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and now the FBI—to request voter registration lists, ballots from previous elections, and access to voting equipment.

Ohio’s Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, got booed off the stage Wednesday in Cleveland while speaking to the Young Americans for Liberty.

Ramaswamy was supposed to speak for half an hour at the libertarian student group’s national convention but had to end his remarks after only 14 minutes due to backlash from the crowd. The heckling started the moment he took the stage and continued as Ramaswamy was pressed on issues like Israel, and as he took shots at the less than friendly audience.

“The truth of the matter is, you know no matter what happens in whichever direction we go, people in my generation have already made it. We’re gonna be fine. It’s going to be your generation that pays the price. That choice belongs to you,” Ramaswamy said, nearly being drowned out by boos.

“We don’t want to hear your bullshit talking points. You’re a political cretin, and you need to get the fuck out of here,” one audience member yelled to Ramaswamy at one point.

Ramaswamy also said that the real divide in America was not between Democrats and Republicans but “winners and whiners.” He responded to one heckler by saying, “You want to give a speech? … Well, you can get on when they give you a slot, alright? So, until they do, you can sit down.”

It’s not the first time the former presidential candidate has drawn a backlash from his own party’s base. In December 2024, he caught MAGA’s ire after saying that companies prefer the work ethic of foreign employees over the laziness of American ones.

While the speech was part of the YAL national convention, and not necessarily representative of all of Ohio, Ramaswamy is not polling well in the governor’s race. A New York Times/Siena University poll has him dead even with Democratic nominee Amy Acton. This speech is certainly not going to help him, even when presented in full.

Senate Republicans Thursday blocked a resolution directing President Trump to end the war in Iran. Again.

Only three Republicans—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky—crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats to advance the measure. Again. Mitch McConnell didn’t show. Again. And Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted with Republicans against the measure.

Again.

The final vote was 49–50 to vanquish a resolution out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that would have instructed the president to withdraw U.S. troops from Iran, blocking him from military action in Iran without congressional approval. The resolution only needed a simple majority to pass, but Fetterman tanked it.

Although Fetterman initially ran his 2022 campaign for a Senate seat with a progressive mask, his M.O. since entering office has been the exact opposite. He is one of the most outspoken supporters of Israel in Congress, he supports the deadly and expensive campaigns against Iran and Lebanon, he voted with Republicans to confirm Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and he has become increasingly aligned with President Trump on a host of other issues.

The House of Representatives has now passed two separate war powers resolutions, and for a moment there it looked like the upper chamber might join them, but the Senate (and one senator, in particular) continues to hold out. This was its thirteenth vote on a resolution to end the Iran war this year.

These resolutions are only growing in importance as the war spreads, with the U.S. resuming airstrikes and Iran launching missiles at targets across the Middle East. Just Wednesday night, U.S. Central Command struck dozens of Iranian targets for the first time in days, following Iran’s attacks on American military sites earlier this week.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mass immigration detention policy was struck down twice in a single day on Thursday, in a brutal loss for President Donald Trump.  

Two separate federal appeals courts rejected the Trump administration’s bid to detain immigrants—many of whom have lived in the U.S. for years without a criminal record—without a hearing. The rulings mark the administration’s fifth and sixth consecutive losses on the case.

In a 2–1 ruling by the Wisconsin-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the majority found that the government could not refuse bond hearings to undocumented immigrants who were already living in the U.S. In executing its mass detention policy, the government had been improperly applying a rule meant to apply to immigrants “seeking admission” at the U.S. border. 

Earlier Thursday, there was a 2–1 ruling by the California-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which similarly found that the government had misconstrued decades-old immigration laws to justify its actions. The majority opinion was written by Trump appointee Judge Daniel Bress.

These rulings follow the same logic as decisions from the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit, the New York–based Second Circuit, the Colorado-based Tenth Circuit, and the Ohio-based Sixth Circuit. Only two federal appeals courts have sided with the Trump administration’s mass detention policy as it inevitably makes its way to the Supreme Court. 

Mass detention isn’t merely a step along the way to achieving Trump’s goal of mass deportation: It’s also the goal. 

ABC accused the Federal Communications Commission Thursday of “attempted censorship” and a clear “retaliation” effort meant to send a message to every other media company in the country.

“The Administration has openly and repeatedly called for the revocation of ABC’s licenses, because it dislikes the content and viewpoints expressed on ABC network programs,” ABC wrote in a fiery 119-page regulatory filing to the agency.

The filing is the latest in a legal battle between the television network and the FCC, which abruptly moved to review the licenses of eight ABC-owned television stations in April. The agency initially claimed that the review was related to ABC’s diversity and inclusion hiring policies, though it came shortly after Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about President Trump that Trump didn’t like. The federal government had never before demanded such a vast review of a major television network’s licenses.

ABC’s latest filing called out FCC Chair Brendan Carr by name and made clear that this fight isn’t just about the Disney-owned network: “The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price.”

“Across the government, regulatory and contracting carrots and sticks have been trained on other disfavored speakers,” the filing continued. “The tools vary; the objective does not: a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely.”

Carr has rejected accusations of censorship, despite the sledgehammer he’s taken to the free press since the start of Trump’s second term.

“Look at the results so far,” Carr bragged at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. “PBS, defunded. NPR, defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Stephen Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership, as well.”

Still, despite it all, Carr claims he doesn’t view the FCC as “the speech police.”

Luckily, as ABC outlined in its filing, the network has received a massive outpouring of support from viewers, current and former FCC officials, advocacy groups, and political leaders on both sides of the aisle—including warnings from conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Senator Ted Cruz. The FCC’s website has been buried in public comments supporting ABC and offering passionate defenses of the First Amendment and local television.

This latest filing may not change Carr’s approach, but it could rally the rest of the industry—and the public—before the FCC makes its next move.