Was This JD Vance Group Trying to Fund Bolsonaro? Brazil Wants to Know

A Brazilian judge has ordered an investigation into a donor network co-founded by Vice President JD Vance, saying it may have aided right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential election.

The Washington Post reports that Brazil Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino has ordered Brazilian federal police to investigate the contacts between Vance’s Rockbridge Network and any Brazilian political operatives or companies. It’s illegal in Brazil for political candidates to accept assistance or aid from overseas.

Dino wrote the investigation was “necessary to verify if there was the effective furnishment of resources—including human resources—services, or other measurable economic advantages, identifying its origin, its destination and its eventual use in the campaign.”

Vance has spoken at Rockbridge events within the last year. The donor organization denied any contacts with Brazilian officials, and Vance’s office declined to comment to the Post. Rockbridge received multiple complaints during Brazil’s elections.

The Workers’ Party led by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro, filed one with the country’s Supreme Court, while Renan Santos, a right-wing presidential candidate who was eliminated in the first round of voting, went to the country’s Supreme Electoral Court. Santos said that Brazilians who claimed to represent Rockbridge had spoken with Bolsonaro campaign officials about providing support.

An unnamed source said they also reached out to Santos offering campaign help. Rockbridge denied any connections with the Brazilians claiming to represent it.

“The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent,” the network said in a statement Tuesday.

Bolsonaro is under investigation for fraud and money laundering in Brazil, and has fled to the U.S. after the State Department reportedly granted him and his family visas. He left before Brazilian police could seize his passport, as the country’s Supreme Court had ordered. If Vance’s group was helping Bolsonaro, that would only add to his charges, and show how far the Trump administration is willing to interfere in other countries’ elections even as it fearmongers about the same happening in the U.S.

Meta suspended a Latino outreach Instagram account for Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon without explanation just days before the midterms, stoking even more allegations that the massive social media company is meddling in elections.

“Hey @Meta 👋We are currently hosting a get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community, and our #LatinosConAngie @instagram page was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from the event,” Nixon wrote Tuesday evening on X. “This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community. With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.

“We are calling on Meta to immediately restore the page and provide an explanation for its removal,” she continued. “Voters deserve access to critical election information, especially in these final days.”

Nixon reported that the account was back up an hour later.

This comes after Meta’s own employees accused the massive social media company of suppressing the campaign of leftist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, while outside sources found it was “actively boosting” right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign with its algorithm. Meta also shut down the No Kings Instagram account the weekend of the group’s midterm protests, and gave the same treatment to Serbian accounts critical of right-wing President Aleksandar Vučić earlier this year.

Meta has donated $5 million to President Trump’s White House ballroom fund and $1 million to his inauguration fund.

Tennessee state Senator Brent Taylor’s adolescence must have run a bit longer than the rest of humanity’s.

Taylor is the Republican nominee for the Volunteer State’s 9th congressional district and has been endorsed by Donald Trump. He is simultaneously running for reelection in the Tennessee state Senate, hoping to continue to represent district 31, which covers parts of Memphis and the southwestern portion of the state. (If he wins both races, he will have to resign from one of the seats, prompting a special election to replace him.) He has been in politics since 1995, when he was 27 years old, and has framed himself as a Christian family man and a committed husband.

But Taylor’s dual campaign—and his regional reputation—was torn to bits Tuesday when he confessed to sending unsolicited nudes and then proceeded to brush off the wanton behavior as a simple mistake of his youth.

“As I near 60 years old, the expiration date has come and gone on any of my youthful indiscretions,” Taylor told the Nashville Scene when asked about the unsolicited nudes allegation. “Whatever story you think you’ve got, my wife is well aware of, and we’ve worked through it a long time ago.”

“My God and my wife have forgiven me, and I would consider everyone else doing the same,” Taylor added.

One individual who was provided anonymity told the Scene that they received unwelcome nudes from the congressman as recently as 2021—when Taylor was 53.

“All I can tell you is, in the past, I’ve been guilty of being a rounder, back in the day,” Taylor told the Scene.

He did not provide a clear definition for the term “rounder,” even when asked. Instead, he urged the Scene’s reporter to look it up. The digital news outlet noted that “rounder” likely refers to a barfly prone to morally dubious behavior.

Katie Zacharia is blaming the meanies in the media for her spectacular flame-out as White House press secretary.

Appearing on Newsmax’s Finnerty Tuesday, Zacharia tried to spin her own narrative on why she was fired after just one week of serving in the White House.

“Listen, the media does not like outsiders, and Washington, D.C., does not like outsiders. And what I would briefly say is that the media and all of Washington made it very difficult for me to do the job that I set out to do,” Zacharia said.

“They would not let me do my job,” she said, which was to “focus” on President Donald Trump.

It may have become difficult to focus amid the intense blowback Zacharia faced regarding her phony legal credentials, train-wreck first press briefing, and disastrous appearance on Fox News’s Hannity, where she tried to defend calling herself a “lawyer” but not an “attorney.”

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty asked Zacharia what she made of her interview with Sean Hannity, whose softball questions about her fake legal background had proven to be too much for her to handle.

“Katie, I was shocked by the Hannity treatment, if I’m being honest. I don’t think he does that unless he gets the green light from somebody, perhaps at the White House, I don’t know,” Finnerty said. “But what do you make of this narrative that Fox did this on purpose, that Hannity and the Fox & Friends interviews were set up, deliberately, not to go well for you?”

Zacharia said she was “perplexed” by her treatment on Fox News because she believed she had a “very friendly rapport” with Hannity. “I was not prepared for the hostility I received,” she said.

Finnerty pushed Zacharia to speculate that her terrible interview with Hannity was the nail in the coffin for her short tenure as press secretary. She agreed that if not for that interview, she hoped she would still be press secretary today.

President Trump spent a lot of time talking about ass and meat at his midterm rallies in Texas on Tuesday.

“I made the mistake of saying that I started off by studying his ass,” Trump said at a rally in Lubbock, referring to his repeated praise of Republican Senate candidate John Husted. “Then I looked at [Husted’s] feet and they were massive … and then I looked at his hands.... He had fingers like sausages.... He went from being down to being up [in the polls]. Maybe I should do that with Ken Paxton, but I’m not sure your body is going to qualify. I’m gonna do it with Ken!”

At another rally hours earlier in Corpus Christi, Trump mimicked Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, who used to be vegan, trying to eat meat.

“I love the meat, ahhh! I love it, look!” he said, making strange gestures and a slurping sound.

This is all a continuation of Trump’s obsession with publicly discussing posteriors, particularly those of Husted and, more recently, MAGA rapper Nicki Minaj. Trump spent the rest of his time in Texas bragging about how great his war on Iran is going, how he should make Venezuela the fifty-first state, and how Talarico wants to make every child in Texas transgender. Not the most inspiring showing less than a week out from the midterms.

“Trump’s commentary on men’s physiques gets more homoerotic by the day, but his absolute revulsion at Ken Paxton’s appearance remains unwavering,” The Bulwark’s Sarah Matthews wrote online.