Republican Senator Makes Wild Ad About His Own Political Scandal

Against the wishes of his campaign advisers, Republican Senator Roger Marshall made a video ad attempting to address the criticism he has received over suing hundreds of his patients during his previous career as a doctor. 

The New York Times reports that Marshall went behind his senior aides, got a camera crew together, and recorded the 60-second ad trying to explain that his medical practice often provided free care, but it “did have to keep the lights on.” 

“So we occasionally handed some accounts over to a collection agency, just like nearly every private medical practice does,” Marshall said, not specifying that he sued over 700 patients. “My involvement in any patient’s account ended the minute it was turned over to an outside agency. I never had anyone arrested.”

Ultimately, Marshall’s campaign staff decided not to run the ad anywhere, because they thought it would bring unnecessary attention to the scandal. But that didn’t stop Marshall, who sent the ad directly to people outside of the campaign. A Kansas City talk radio host, Pete Munro, posted the ad on X Saturday night.  

The video ends with the disclaimer “Paid for By Kansans for Marshall. Approved by Roger Marshall.”

When the Times reached out to Marshall’s campaign regarding the video, a spokesperson didn’t discuss its content. 

“If the best that our haters have is a video that the campaign hasn’t posted or isn’t running anywhere as an ad and that only Twitter is talking about goes to show you that Senator Marshall is on track for a great night on November 3rd,” spokesperson Alex DeGrasse said. 

Marshall’s Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton, has hammered the senator in attack ads, with one of them featuring a woman who said police came to arrest her over $3,596 she owed for a C-section delivery. Marshall has also been sued by his former patients in a class-action lawsuit filed last week. 

The Trump administration’s big anti-fraud announcement in Minnesota didn’t go as planned Friday.

First of all, Vice President JD Vance canceled his appearance at the event in St. Cloud without giving a reason—leaving other Trump officials to stand in front of a giant banner reading “The Vice President’s Fraud Task Force,” with the vice president nowhere in sight.

But things only went south from there. Shortly after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a federal crackdown in the state, with coordinated searches and a $25 million whistleblower incentive program, a reporter pointed out that the Trump administration has an issue of its own: The Department of Homeland Security paid $495 million for a prison in Appleton, Minnesota, in August, despite its owner, CoreCivic, Inc., offering it to the state for just $75 million last year. Bessent didn’t want to answer that question.

“Uh, yeah, I don’t know anything about that, what we are here to do is prosecute criminal fraud and any question like that that deflects away from it I think is a waste of our time, thanks,” Bessent said.

Minnesota TV station KARE 11 reported on the massive overpayment Thursday, citing records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming the $420 million price difference. It’s the largest real estate purchase in Minnesota history, and it’s a 34-year-old vacant prison that’s been closed for 16 years.

“It’s unexplainable!” Minnesota Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell told KARE 11 when he was asked about the sale.

“Obviously, I was stunned given the reality of the offer that had been made to us just a little over a year prior to that,” Schnell said. “I still can’t figure it out.”

That purchase price doesn’t include any necessary improvements the government will have to make on the facility, which will likely be numerous considering it has been defunct for 16 years and is located in a small town about a three hour drive from Minneapolis and St. Paul. The company in question, CoreCivic, has profited immensely from Trump’s mass deportation policies, and donated $500,000 to President Trump and Vance’s inauguration. But don’t expect that to be the subject of a big federal fraud investigation.

Republican Senator Roger Marshall, who is in the middle of a tight reelection campaign, was sued Friday for allegedly charging illegal interest rates to his patients in his former career as a doctor.

Marshall’s former patient Meischa Zimmerman filed the class-action lawsuit Thursday in Kansas state court against both Marshall and his former medical practice on behalf of herself and several other patients. Last month, The New York Times broke the story that Marshall sued hundreds of his patients for medical debts in rural Barton County, Kansas, where many residents live in poverty and don’t have health insurance.

Zimmerman, an obstetrics patient of Marshall’s in 2009, said the practice sued her over a $3,596 bill for the delivery of her child, plus an 18 percent annual interest rate. According to the court filing, debt collection efforts linked to the usurious debt led to her arrest on three separate occasions.

Under Kansas law, doctors and other businesses can only charge 15 percent interest rates, with some exceptions allowing higher rates if they specify them in a preexisting contract. Marshall and his practice, Heartland Regional OBGYN, charged an 18 percent rate to his patients, mostly mothers from low-income, uninsured, or underinsured backgrounds. The lawsuit calls those rates illegal, and part of a “callous and predatory” debt-collection scheme.

The revelations over Marshall’s past have helped put his seat in play in normally solidly Republican Kansas. That has led to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance jetting off to Kansas to campaign for him, but it hasn’t gone so well: Marshall’s Democratic challenger, pastor Adam Hamilton, has a slight advantage in recent polling.

This lawsuit is not going to help. Hamilton has called out Marshall’s high interest rates and propensity to sue his patients for as little as $101, saying in a debate last month that “there are 2,000 verses in the Bible that speak to caring for the poor. This is not happening under this man.”

The news of Marshall being sued just days before Election Day on Tuesday will ensure that his medical practice will be in the news through the weekend. It’ll pile on the fact that another damaging story broke about him earlier this week: He made a suspiciously timed pharmaceutical stock purchase when he was a congressional representative on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee eight years ago. Come Tuesday, voters in Kansas might have an easy decision to make.

A Texas grand jury indicted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Friday for intentionally running a man over with his vehicle earlier this month.

Officer Mario Alberto Morales is facing a charge of assault with a deadly weapon after running over Miguel Parra Hernandez, who was on foot, with a black unmarked SUV. Hernandez broke his leg and also injured his hip and ankle, according to his family. He is currently undergoing rehab in ICE custody, and Morales was placed on administrative leave.

Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was driving to his construction job when immigration agents tried to pull him over. Hernandez and another passenger fled from the vehicle. According to street camera and body cam footage, Morales then turned his vehicle and accelerated over Hernandez. Hernandez can be heard screaming “You ran over me,” while Morales replies, “You got hit with the car, bro.” ICE backed Morales’s version of events, saying in an official statement that Hernandez “ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.”

ICE still maintains that story, saying that Morales’s indictment “is nothing more than a political stunt by Houston sanctuary politicians.” It also argues that the local government doesn’t have jurisdiction to try and investigate Morales in the first place, a claim Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare says is “false.”

“An ICE badge does not give you free rein to injure, kill, or violate the constitutional rights of anyone,” Teare said.

Morales is only the second ICE officer to face any legal consequences for their actions since the beginning of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE officer Christian Castro was charged with four counts of assault for shooting Venezuelan immigrant Julio Sosa-Celis in Minnesota in January.

With just days until the midterm elections, moderate Democrats are still finding ways to undermine Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi criticized El-Sayed on a recent episode of the On Brand podcast. Host Donny Deutsch claimed El-Sayed had made “concerning” comments opposing the existence of a Jewish state. “That’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

“No, it’s more than concerning. It’s wrong,” Pelosi said. “It’s wrong, and it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States. This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress.”

Since launching his campaign, El-Sayed, who is Muslim, has been bombarded by baseless claims of antisemitism. The Democrat has stated that he opposes any state’s right to be organized around an ethnic or religious group, and has been clear that his issue is with the Israeli government, not Jewish people. “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” he said during one interview on ABC News.

But Pelosi appeared more interested in defending Israel than a Democrat on the eve of an important election. (Her spokesperson said Friday that she was urging people to support El-Sayed.)

Representative Haley Stevens, whom El-Sayed defeated in the Democratic primary, also took an eleventh-hour shot at her party’s only hope to keep control of the state’s Senate seat. Stevens issued a statement Friday suggesting that her support for El-Sayed was contingent on whether he condemned a political advertisement that was not even produced by his campaign.

The video was made by Rebellion PAC, a left-wing fundraising group led by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks—who Stevens wants everyone to know is also “Hasan Piker’s uncle.” The video, which originally aired in February 2024, blamed the rising price of groceries on America’s continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Why does Mike Rogers care so much about what Israelis want, and so little about what you want?” the ad asks, claiming that pro-Israel PACs had poured $228,808 into Rogers’s campaign.

Stevens said she had agreed to appear at an event with El-Sayed and Representative Jim Clyburn, expecting that El-Sayed would formally condemn the ad. “A disclaimer is not condemnation, and everyone in my community knows the difference,” Stevens said in the statement.

But that wasn’t all she was expecting. Stevens called for El-Sayed to apologize for his own statements tying Israel to Michiganders’ affordability crisis, though it wasn’t immediately clear that he actually had made any such claims. She also asked him to take down another campaign advertisement that included a clip of Tucker Carlson, among a montage of right-wing media figures.

Again, with Stevens, we see Democrats placing continued support for Israel before the success of their own party and their own constituents. Is it any wonder that Stevens lost?