Republican Official Warns Election Threats Are “Coming From Within”

The Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, is warning that the federal government is threatening the integrity of American elections.

“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things,” Henderson told CBS News. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”

Henderson pointed to the Justice Department’s demand for every state to hand over their full voter rolls, including information that is legally required to remain confidential.

“They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” Henderson, whose job includes overseeing Utah’s elections, said to CBS. Out of concerns for the federal government’s motive, she refused to provide the data alongside officials in 29 other states.

Last month, the DOJ notified Henderson in writing that she is under investigation.

“I have to tell myself it doesn’t matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I’m doing what’s right,” Henderson said. “I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guard rails, holding the line. Someone has to.”

Federal agents acting on orders from the Trump administration have seized ballots and voting machines this year, and President Trump himself has continuously pushed election conspiracies. Trump has signed executive orders requiring proof of citizenship to vote and restricting mail-in ballots, and last week, his Department of Justice sued California, claiming, without proof, that the state was sending ballots to 20,000 noncitizens.

California’s top elections official, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, said that the Trump administration didn’t say where the “20,000” number came from or how they verified those individuals’ citizenship status.

“The USDOJ’s relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” Weber said in a statement.

President Donald Trump’s press secretary-for-a-day Katie Zacharia couldn’t even exit the White House without making one last mistake.

Zacharia posted two photographs with Trump in the Oval Office after her unceremonious firing that were digitally altered to conceal an image sitting on the president’s desk, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

The first post, on Friday, contained a photograph with just the two of them, where a document on the president’s desk was blurred but still identifiable to preservation advocates as a renovation plan for the East Potomac Golf Links, the public golf course the president has decided to transform into an exclusive, high-end one without any legal approval.

The second post, on Saturday, contained a photograph that included Zacharia’s family standing behind the desk, and this time the document appeared to have been removed altogether. The Post identified the book sitting beneath it as The White House Historical Association guidebook—noting that the digital alterations had removed an image on the book’s cover of the executive mansion.

The censored image could prove controversial considering that government lawyers have insisted that there is no final design for East Potomac Park, as the plan undergoes a legal challenge from a historic preservation group. Such a slipup is par for the course for Zacharia, who crashed and burned out of the White House after just five days as the president’s spokesperson.

Last week, District Judge Ana Reyes blocked the government from felling hundreds of trees at East Potomac Park. The judge tore into the Trump administration lawyer for claiming that tree removal is not part of the president’s renovation plans. The Department of Justice demanded that she step down, claiming that her outburst proved she was biased against the government. The judge refused, sending Trump spiraling on Monday.

So long, Zacharia, we barely knew ye. I would say don’t let the door hit you on the way out—but it appears you already have.

After Kimberly Guilfoyle was fired on live television last week, she reportedly begged MAGA allies to rescue her, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, and U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack. None of them did.

The ex–ambassador to Greece was unceremoniously dumped from the Trump administration during then–White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first and last press briefing on October 13, following a Wall Street Journal report that Guilfoyle had engaged in pay-to-play schemes, including offering a MAGA donor special access to Trump administration officials in exchange for covering her $100,000 credit card bill. The donor, Eric Deters, has since filed a defamation lawsuit against her.

After Zacharia announced to the world that Guilfoyle had been asked to resign, Guilfoyle went off the deep end. She considered rescinding her resignation, and begged Hegseth and Barrack to speak to President Donald Trump on her behalf. Barrack reportedly tried, but obviously made no impact on the president’s decision. Guilfoyle also allegedly asked 95-year-old Murdoch—chairman emeritus of News Corp, which, among other things, owns Fox News and the Journal—to limit the Journal’s unfavorable coverage. He refused.

“Kimberly was spiraling, calling people and suggesting, ‘Maybe I don’t resign,’” an official familiar with the situation told PunchUp Wednesday. “I don’t think she was serious, but she was in her feelings last night. She was processing what had happened—but not very well.”

As fewer and fewer MAGA allies and conservative influencers agreed to take Guilfoyle’s calls, many scrubbed the internet of any evidence that they ever knew her. In Greece, where Guilfoyle remains ambassador until the end of the month, her authority has dissolved.

“The people in the embassy are no longer afraid of her. Nobody is listening to her or taking her orders anymore,” a source in Greece told the Daily Mail. “She is all alone in that house, screaming at her old staff that they are leakers, and waiting to get kicked out. It’s an insane situation.”

President Donald Trump on Monday attacked a federal judge who blocked his lawless construction on a public golf course in Washington, D.C.—and it immediately came back to haunt him.

At a hearing, the preservation group mounting the legal challenge against Trump’s federal takeover of the East Potomac Golf Links introduced the president’s own Truth Social post as evidence that the government plans to proceed with renovations “IMMEDIATELY!”

Ahead of the hearing Monday morning, Trump raged against District Judge Ana Reyes, who barred the National Parks Service from cutting down any more trees on the East Potomac Golf Links. The tree clearing is part of a plan to transform the public course into an exclusive, high-end one.

“The United States Department of Interior wants to take a terrible and very unsafe golf course, and make it into a great, safe, and prestigious golf course. They have an absolute right to do so. It’s as simple as that!” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s meltdown comes after Reyes refused the Department of Justice’s request that she recuse herself, over the fact that she yelled at a government attorney last week. A furious Reyes slammed the Trump administration for giving last-minute notice that it would resume cutting down trees during the previous holiday weekend. When Justice Department attorney Marissa Piropato argued the actions over the weekend were “not a renovation,” Reyes tore into her excuse as “preposterous,” “doublespeak,” and “completely beyond the pale.”

“The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday. “The tapes have been blocked from usage by the judge.”

The Trump administration’s determination to proceed with expensive demolition projects without receiving a whiff of congressional or legal approval would make anyone a little crazy.

This story has been updated.

CBS News editor in chief and anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss urged her newsroom to cover right-wing conspiracy theories regarding Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed. 

Semafor reported that Weiss was particularly focused on El-Sayed’s (nonexistent) ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and 9/11, and Talarico’s (also nonexistent) trip to a mental health facility. El-Sayed, an Egyptian American Muslim, has denounced the Muslim Brotherhood numerous times amid Islamophobic attacks from both the right wing and the Democratic establishment. 

Weiss “personally advocated” for a deeper dive into El-Sayed’s personal history, and she even faced internal pushback for her insistence that the newsroom inaccurately tie El-Sayed to the 9/11 terror attacks, as she published an August headline reading “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

“Anyone discussing this race needs to be very careful about putting the name of a man who would be America’s first Muslim senator next to ‘9/11’ on very thin grounds. It reads like a dog whistle,” Atlantic journalist Helen Lewis wrote at the time.  

As for Talarico, his whole “mental health” episode was thoroughly disproven as a smear campaign, even though Weiss thought it was worth spending time on. It’s notable that both Talarico and El-Sayed are progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, something that Weiss, her pro-Israel The Free Press blog, and CBS have covered with extreme bias. 

This is not the first time Weiss has experienced internal pushback for inserting herself into stories. She initially pulled the plug on former 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega’s CECOT megaprison story in El Salvador, and was “very, very hands-on” with a story covering Israeli settler violence in the West Bank.