On today's BradCast, we turn briefly away from the folly and fallout of Trump's war on Iran to focus again on the folly and fallout of Trump's war on democracy here at home, with the critical 2026 Midterm Elections looming and threatened anew by Trump's corrupted High Court. To that end, one of our favorite guests returns today to offer a bit of what we'll describe as "hope". [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... A few related election matters...

• In a somewhat bizarre --- and seemingly unprecedented case --- a Republican sheriff running for Governor in California recently seized more than 650,000 ballots from last year's Special Election on Proposition 50. That was the ballot measure, overwhelmingly approved by almost 3.5 million votes, allowing the state Legislature to redraw California's U.S. House maps to make them more friendly to Democrats in response to Republican gerrymanders in Texas, North Carolina and elsewhere. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco announced on Friday that he'd obtained a warrant to take the ballots from the Riverside Registrar's office on the basis of a claim made by a local "election protection" group that last year's tally in the County included some 45,000 ballots that were not lawfully cast. Or something. State officials, including CA's Democratic Attorney General and Secretary of State, are objecting to the seizure and tally which was initially to be carried out by the Sheriff's staffers. The count was paused by a court earlier this month, before being restarted with a Special Master overseeing it late last week. We'll try to keep our eyes on this bizarre story.

• In North Carolina today, the state's most powerful Republican, state Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, conceded his 23-vote loss in the state's March 3rd Republican primary to Rockland County Sheriff Sam Page. Berger, who shepherded Trump's demand for a mid-decade gerrymander through the state Legislature last year, was endorsed by Trump. He lost his primary nonetheless in the Republican-leaning district.

• On Monday at the White House, Donald Trump told media: "Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating," adding, "I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all." It was also revealed on Monday, according to Palm Beach County, Florida records, that Trump cast a mail ballot for today's Special Election, in the County where he is registered to vote. (Late word after today's show: The Democratic candidate has won today's Special Election in Florida for the state House in the District that includes Mar-a-Lago, flipping the seat from "red" to "blue".)

THEN... On the very same day that it was revealed Trump voted yet again by absentee ballot --- as he frequently does, even while claiming mail-in voting is fraudulent --- in that Special Election, his Solicitor General was at the U.S. Supreme Court arguing against a law in deep "red" Mississippi that allows a five-day grace period for absentee ballots cast and postmarked prior to Election Day to arrive at the elections office to be counted.

Such laws are wildly popular around the country. Some 30 states allow similar. Mississippi's Sec. of State defended it at the corrupted High Court against Trump and the Republican National Committee's challenge. The Court's farthest right members --- Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito and Kavanaugh --- offered a series of bizarre hypotheticals about weird ways in which someone might try to exploit such laws to steal an election. (One of Gorsuch's took the prize. It had something to do with mail voters attempting to "recall" their late arriving ballots after Election Day. Tune in for the details on that absurdity which apparently went on to take up about 40 minutes of the two-hour oral argument!)

Then there was Alito's argument that because Congress declared Labor Day, Memorial Day and Washington's Birthday to be held on a specific day, that means they never meant people should be able to count votes after Election Day, even if they were clearly cast before hand. But, what about Early Voting? What about those whose mail ballot arrives before Election Day? As our guest explains, the rightwing Justices did their best to avoid those questions.

We're joined today by the great MARK JOSEPH STERN, longtime legal journalist at Slate, who was, let's say, chagrined by the radical and ridiculously Trumpy arguments offered by at least four of the Trump-friendly Republican Justices.

"Of course the reality is that we do not all vote on Election Day, and our ballots are not all counted on Election Day. So if the plaintiff's theory is correct, and if Alito is correct that the day is the day --- that there is this 24-hour period where everything has to happen --- then early voting is illegal, mail voting is illegal, and no ballots can be counted after midnight on Election Day," asserts Stern. "If it's not your birthday after midnight, then it can't be Election Day after midnight. There has to be a timer that goes off and every ballot that hasn't been counted just needs to be set on fire because the day is over. That's the implication of his theory."

The theory falls far short of facts and reality, including the notion that Congress, when establishing Election Day in federal law, really meant that ballots could only be cast and counted on that day. But that defies the way the nation has voted going back at least to the Civil War, when soldiers deployed in the field cast their ballots early by mail.

"If you take these theories seriously, it means that the way that we have conducted elections in this country, going back to the Civil War, has been unlawful and nobody knew it until now," Stern tells me. "Congress secretly smuggled in this ban on early voting, and nobody figured it out until the geniuses on the 5th Circuit did in 2024."

He calls it "a completely absurd and fantastical legal theory, just flying in the face of 'Support Our Troops.' Because what this theory would do in practice is ensure that a whole lot of service members who are serving in uniform abroad would not be able to have their votes counted in elections."

"Just to be clear," Stern emphasized, "at no point has Congress ever passed a law that says that states cannot count late-arriving ballots." In fact, as he also notes, "there are a lot of states that actually enacted these laws specifically to help military and overseas voters. And when Congress came in, a few decades ago, and issued these new rules about military and overseas voters, it specifically deferred to the states' ballot deadlines. So Congress knew at the time that some states were allowing these ballots to come in late, as long as they were sent by Election Day."

And that is key. Because, the Constitution grants the States the power to determine the "manner" of their own elections, unless Congress adopts a law that counters a state regulation. Congress has done no such thing in this case. Even if the Court's radical members don't like a state law, they have no Constitutional power --- at least for those who bother to read the Constitution conservatively --- to block such laws.

Despite the chaos and disenfranchisement it would cause --- about 750,000 ballots were tallied that way in the 2024 election alone --- and as absurd as all of this seems, you may have seen headlines from a bunch of media outlets' coverage of Monday's oral argument, suggesting that the Court's "conservatives" seem prepared to strike down the counting of late arriving ballots this November. (NYT: "Supreme Court Appears Poised to Reject Late-Arriving Mail-In Ballots Law"; AP: "Supreme Court sounds skeptical of late-arriving ballots, a Trump target"; Guardian: "US supreme court appears poised to limit mail-in ballots ahead of midterms", etc.)

While all three liberal Justices will vote in favor of the plaintiff and the counting of late-arriving ballots, and four of the Court's radical rightwingers seem prepared to vote against, the matter will likely come down to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

"Not very encouraging whenever we're having to rely on John and Amy to come to their senses," quips Stern, before noting hopefully: "There's an old saying that 'sometimes an opinion won't write.' I really think if there were ever an instance where that could happen, it would be here."

As I express gratefulness for his optimism he counters: "I'm not sure optimism is the right word. But I will say that despair is never a helpful emotion when we're talking about the Supreme Court. And despair is what the bad guys want us to feel. So I'm choosing to hold out some hope."

Nonetheless, he cautions against betting "on the outcome that I foresee is possible. Because, again, if you bet on this Court doing the worst thing imaginable, that bet quite often pays off."

FINALLY... We close with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, with a look at the climate and environmental damage from Trump's war on Iran, and much more...

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We're getting caught up on today's BradCast with a whole bunch of stuff, from the dark Trump secrets still buried in unreleased Epstein Files, to his lies, illegal actions and terrible advice about the economy, to another loss for Republicans in the Gerrymandering Wars and some actual election fraud finally discovered in Georgia! (And you'll never guess whodunnit!) [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Happily, the corporate mainstream media finally seems to be fully on board the disturbing, still-unexplained, and unlawful absence of critical documents from the Epstein Files released to date by the Dept. of Justice as per the Epstein Files Transparency Act. In addition to the absence of multiple 2019 FBI interviews with a woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was just 13-years old, additional revelations are coming to light. CNN, for instance, confirmed those three missing interviews and contemporaneous FBI interview notes this week, and found that at least another 90 interviews with other survivors are also apparently missing, for unexplained reasons, from the DOJ's website.

But, with the major outlets seemingly digging in, we've got a bit more time today to get caught up on some other stuff, regarding some economic matters, some SCOTUS issues, and some election news. Among those stories...

• Fallout from last week's 6 to 3 U.S. Supreme Court ruling determining that Trump's chaotic, worldwide taxes on imports to the U.S., as issued under the supposed authority of the U.S. International Emergency Economic Powers Act (or, IEEPA), are both unlawful and unconstitutional. As it turns out, those illegal tariffs have also been very expensive for American consumers who paid for about 90% of them according to studies issued this month from both the Federal Reserve and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That, despite Trump's repeatedly lie (as echoed again during his State of the Union Address this week), that "the tariffs [are] paid for by foreign countries." Both the Fed and Congress disagree.

• But, don't be fooled by SCOTUS' ruling last Friday, even if it came in opposition to the President for a happy change. In fact, the challenge to Trump's tariffs was a case brought by the far-right architect of today's corrupted Supreme Court, and it took almost half a year longer to be handed down by the corrupted Court than necessary. No, SCOTUS has not "joined the No Kings Movement", as MS NOW's Stephanie Ruhle ridiculously declared after the ruling was handed down.

• For the record, the "economic emergency" that Trump disingenuously declared as his pretext to enact the levies was supposedly based on a global trade deficit that the U.S. has with many countries of the world. As it turns out, that deficit grew larger under Trump's tariffs last year, according to Trump's own Commerce Dept. data.

• Not to worry, however, everyone is going to be rich once the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act kicks in for this year's tax season, right? Um, so far...based on IRS data to date, not so much, as average refunds in the first part of the filing season have been some 42% lower than the Administration has long been promising they would be.

• But, hey, there are a lot of MAGA suckers out there, I guess. And we should have expected no less from the guy whose failing media company, Trump Media & Technology Group (which trades as DJT on the stock exchange) has seen its value plummet faster than his approval ratings. This week, shares in his loser company, which once sold for $100 --- and cost a bunch of MAGA folks their life savings --- closed for the first time on Monday in the single digits! The company, which has lost hundreds of millions of dollars every year since it went public in 2022, clawed its way back above $10/share in recent days. It seems unlikely to stay there.

• In election and voting news, Team Red continue to struggle in their Gerrymandering Wars in advance of the critical midterm elections, as both the Utah state Supreme Court (on Friday) and a three-judge federal panel (on Monday), rejected state Republicans' attempts to override a 2018 ballot initiative in which voters chose to require U.S. House district maps in the otherwise very Republican state to be drawn fairly, with neutral rules, by an independent redistricting commission. The GOP state Legislature has been trying to lock in their unlawful map, drawn to create four safe Republican Congressional Districts. But, after the recent rulings, we appear now to be at the end of their four-year battle to block a new map that will offer three Republican leaning Districts and one safely Democratic seat in Salt Lake County.

• Down in Georgia, where Trump has been falsely claiming massive voter fraud since he lost the 2020 election there, the MAGA majority on the State Election Board has, in fact, finally discovered some election fraud! And it was apparently committed by one of Elon Musk's super PACs in both 2020 and 2024.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report today, with a bunch of energy related lies from Trump's SOTU this week; Big Oil's appeal to SCOTUS to help them quash climate liability lawsuits; Trump's Interior Dept. quashing bedrock conservation rules for public lands; and a new suit filed by young Americans to challenge the Trump EPA's recent gutting of 20 years of climate change-related regulations...

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On today's BradCast: Some of us saw it coming and warned about it long ago. Now that it's here, many STIL don't seem to see it. We get some help today, toward that end, from our guest, who published a startling report on all of it this week. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP, however, a few headlines...

The Trump Administration claimed today to be drawing down their deployment of under-trained, over-paid ICE and CBP goons from Minnesota. They say they are immediately withdrawing 700 of them. Donald Trump says a "softer touch" is needed. But that "softer touch" will still leave at least 2,000 thugs on the streets of Minneapolis --- the same number that had already been terrorizing residents in the Twin Cities region before they murdered Renee Good last month.

But staffing issues for the federal government is clearly a problem for them. More than a dozen of the top prosecutors have now resigned from the U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota in recent weeks, since the start of Operation Metro Surge. And with hundreds of habeas petitions filed in court by detainees since then, federal judges are accusing ICE and government attorneys of ignoring scores of court orders to release them.

On Tuesday, one of those attorneys hit a breaking point. Julie Le, an ICE immigration court judge who volunteered at the beginning of January to help out the short-staffed U.S. Attorney's office, had been assigned more than 85 cases in that time. During a hearing yesterday, she made an emotional and dramatic plea to the judge. "I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep," she said, adding "The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what you need."

Today, it appears Le was pushed out of her job by DOJ, along with her supervisor.

THEN... We're joined today by Talking Points Memo's investigative reporter JOSH KOVENSKY, to discuss two different disturbing stories he's published in recent days. Both of them insane. One of them wacky. The other exceedingly troubling.

Following the FBI's raid of the Fulton County, Georgia elections warehouse last week outside of Atlanta --- part of Trump's latest scheme to obfuscate his humiliating election loss in 2020 --- the President of the United States took to social media to double down. He advanced a number of posts that revived the old "ItalyGate" conspiracy that posits (and forgive me if I get a detail wrong), that Barack Obama and China, with the help of money from Iran --- funneled somehow through Switzerland and/or Dubai --- took control of Italy's military spy satellites to hack computerized voting machines and/or ballot tabulators to steal the election for Joe Biden in 2020.

Sure, it may sound crazy, but that's only because it is. And while there may be no actual evidence to support any of it, that didn't prevent Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, from being on the ground to oversee last week's FBI raid of 2020 ballots in Fulton County. Why would the nation's top spy chief, whose job has nothing to do with domestic law enforcement, be there? We discuss that and other related idiocy today with Kovensky.

In far more troubling news, in a deep dive at TPM this week, Kovensky details how a series of White House memos issued after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, direct the Dept. of Justice to reinterpret a post 9/11 federal terrorism statute known as 2339A. The statute, as originally intended, allows prosecutors to hold associates of terrorists and terror groups to account for "material support to terrorists".

The Trump Administration's reinterpretation of the statute, however, demands, as Kovensky reports, that prosecutors use the provision to "target those who espouse 'anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,' [and] direct federal law enforcement to use speech --- including "extremism on migration, race, and gender" --- as key criteria for who to investigate and against whom to bring the most aggressive charges possible."

Once again --- (as longtime BRAD BLOG readers may recall when they were turned against me and my family in 2013 in a different way) --- the federal government's post 9/11 tools for fighting terror, are being turned against non-terrorist Americans.

In this case, the government is now employing these measures to prosecute, as terror organizations, people and left-leaning advocacy groups regarded as political opponents of Donald Trump, including Black Lives Matter and "Antifa" --- along with anybody else the government wants to associate with them.

"These are 'material support for terrorism' statutes. It sounds dry, but it's important," argues Kovensky today, explaining how the provision has already been used to go after people at protests where someone else may have committed a crime, "if the protest was associated with a leftwing cause or something opposed to the administration. Then we are now starting to see the DOJ go after it as 'terrorism'."

"With 'material support for terrorism', if you're convicted on that," he adds, "prosecutors can then apply for a 'terrorism enhancement.' Even if you have no prior criminal history, and regardless of whether or not the underlying charge was non-violent --- it could be something as simple as spray-painting a government building --- you're now looking at a recommended minimum for the judge of 17.5 years behind bars. So it dramatically increases the severity of the possible sentence."

This is why you may have heard people like A.G. Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and others in the Administration in recent months, refer to protesters --- even those like Renee Good and Alex Pretti who were murdered by immigration officials --- as "domestic terrorists", along with vows to hunt down and break up their "networks".

"It gives the government greater powers to investigate," Kovensky tells me, "but it also raises unbelievably grave concerns about freedom of speech and freedom of association."

And, yes, this is what many civil libertarians argued more than two decades ago. "If you look at the commentary in the early 2000s after 9/11 and what a slippery slope this was with the PATRIOT Act, it's all very eerie," he says.

Told you this was a troubling one. Tune in for much more...

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Hey! Another busy day on The BradCast! What are the odds? [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

No, you're not hallucinating. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith did testify previously before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. It was back in December last year. But it was a closed-door hearing with mostly Committee attorneys on the Republican side doing the questioning on behalf of the Committee's Republican members. Smith had wanted to testify publicly last year, as all previous Special Counsels have done following Presidential probes. Republicans were so proud of that hearing that they waited until New Years Eve to release its transcript and audio, so as few Americans as possible would see it.

Today in D.C., in the same Committee, Smith was finally allowed to testify publicly. The man who secured two different federal, criminal indictments of Donald Trump --- one for his alleged crimes related to trying to steal the 2020 election, the other for stealing thousands of pages of classified national security documents upon leaving office the first time --- has nothing to hide. [Full video now here.]

As Smith told the Committee today during his opening remarks: "If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat. No one --- no one --- should be above the law in this country. And the law required that he be held to account, so that is what I did. To have done otherwise on the facts of these cases would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and as a public servant, of which I had no intention of doing."

The veteran, three-decade long Dept. of Justice prosecutor testified for about five hours today, and Republicans weren't able to lay much of a glove on any aspect of his election probe. Not that they didn't try, of course. (Smith was unable to speak about the stolen documents case beyond what has already been made public about it, as sycophantic Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon still has his report on that matter under seal.) For his part, Trump was so bothered by it that he took to his failing social media cite to again call Smith "deranged", while instructing his Attorney General to bring charges against Smith.

Republicans focused many of their attempted attacks against Smith on false claims that he "spied" on the phone calls of GOP members of Congress in the days before and after Trump's January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Neither Smith nor his team "spied" on anyone. They did, however, receive judicial warrants to obtain toll records for the phones of several members who Trump contacted while the Capitol was under violent siege, when the sore loser President hoped to delay Congressional confirmation of Joe Biden's 2020 victory, as he falsely claimed the election had been stolen from him. The toll records do not include information on the content of phone calls. They only detail numbers dialed or received, the date and time, how long they talked.

Several Republicans also took the old First Amendment "free speech" defense out for a spin today. It didn't work much better at denting the case against Trump. As Smith explained once again, Trump is welcome to lie about a stolen election all he likes. But when those lies are used in furtherance of a crime, it's a different matter.

You can lie to your friends that you are worth $10 million dollars, if you want, explains our guest today, former lifelong Republican and attorney KEITH BARBER. But you can't offer that same lie on your mortgage application. That becomes criminal fraud, not free speech.

Barber, who now contributes to the progressive Daily Kos website, joins us for analysis, with both legal and political insight on Smith's testimony, and how --- or if --- today's public hearing might move the political needle one way or another for those in his former party.

After observing that there was next to no coverage of today's historic hearing on the front page of the Fox "News" website this afternoon, Barber argues: "The opinions of MAGAs on this are intractable. It's a cult. There's nothing you can do about it. Everybody else is more open-minded and I think has already decided Trump is out to lunch on this. I don't think that these hearings are going to move the needle all that much."

Barber is with us for much of the hour today for both analysis of the Smith hearing and for legal insight on an extraordinarily disturbing story broken late last night by the Associate Press. The outlet reported on a secret memo instructing federal ICE agents --- in contradiction of the Constitution, decades of Supreme Court precedent and written training materials for new officers --- that they may enter a private home without a judicial warrant signed by a judge. Only an administrative warrant, issued by ICE itself, is needed, according to the memo revealed by two agency whistleblowers.

Similarly disturbing: though the memo, signed last May be the acting Director of ICE, is addressed to "all ICE personnel", it has only been distributed to "select DHS officials" who have then shared it with some employees "who were told to read it and return it," according to AP. The memo offers no detail on how this new legal determination was made nor any explanation for basis of reversing decades of longstanding guidance.

Barber published his own report on the troubling news earlier today at Daily Kos, in a piece headlined "Secret ICE Memo Trains Agents To Conduct Unconstitutional Home Invasions". He tells me that the secret change in guidance has resulted in more violence, as people are dragged out of their homes, believing the old rules, that a warrant signed by a judge is needed to enter a home. Then, their doors are smashed in and they are dragged out.

"It's really concerning because it is increasing the level of violence associated with these things, and because of the secrecy involved in it. And it's also just wrong under the law," says Barber. "That is not what the Supreme Court in multiple cases and certainly a host of lower courts have ruled the Fourth Amendment allows."

Finally, we close out another absurdly busy day with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, as the Arctic's climate change-disrupted polar vortex returns to freeze much of the U.S. this week, and as our dumb President offers astoundingly stupid new lies about wind energy...

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Today on BradCast: I don't care what he says, no President has the power to cancel American elections. Period. Even if that definitive statement of fact is unlikely to be the end of that story. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Now, officially, one year into his final term as President, Donald Trump's "Golden Age for America" is a complete --- if wholly predictable --- failure. His approval ratings have tanked; he has terrorized a great American city by placing it under siege by his hapless, if deadly, militarized immigration goons from ICE and CBP (with some 1,500 U.S. military troops said to be standing by, should he decide to fraudulently invoke the Insurrection Act); NATO, the largest and most successful alliance in world history is now on the brink of collapse, thanks to his threats to steal the peaceful, semi-autonomous nation of Greenland from our ally Denmark; and, oh yeah, the stock market tanked today amid Trump's new tariff trade war threats against our friendly European allies who disagree with him regarding Greenland.

The November midterm elections can't come soon enough. But they will come, despite Trump's various impotent threats or suggestions to the contrary. A President has no power --- none, zero --- to cancel elections in the approximately 10,000 jurisdictions around the country which run them independently of the federal government.

Nonetheless, his Administration's fraudulent abuse of the legal system to try and make it more difficult for legal voters to vote continues. As does his Administration's failures in court, where their attempted legal fraud is not going well --- even in cases overseen by Trump-appointed judges.

Among today's coverage...

• A federal Judge late last week dismissed the Dept. of Justice's pathetic lawsuit against California, seeking to force it to turn over state voter roll data. The Democratically-controlled Golden State is just one of 23 states and the District of Columbia being sued by the DOJ for refusal to turn over private voter information --- including Social Security numbers, birth dates and Drivers License details --- as part of the performative Trump campaign to ferret out supposed fraudulent voter registrations by millions of non-citizens. In tossing the case, the judge found DOJ has no basis, nor legal authority, to demand CA turn over its voter file. Similar DOJ suits against the other states who refused to violate their own voters privacy rights are likely to be similarly unsuccessful.

• At the same time, the New York Times reports that federal officials have been unable to find any evidence of widespread fraud or mass non-citizen registrations among nearly 50 million state records examined so far. The records, from mostly Republican jurisdictions, have been run though a Dept. of Homeland Security database which was not designed for this purpose, under the DOJ ruse of assuring that voter registration databases are "clean". To date, just 0.02% of records checked have revealed even potential evidence of registration by non-citizens. That tiny number includes registrants who never voted or even knew they were registered, and/or naturalized citizens that triggered false positives in the DHS database.

• Of course, one of the reasons that 23 states are refusing to turn over state voter data to Trump's federal government, is for fear that sensitive information (Social Security numbers, etc.) will be misused. As we've learned today, those states were right to be concerned. The DOJ admitted in a "Corrections" court filing last Friday, that members of Elon Musk's failed DOGE team stole and misused sensitive, personal data from the Social Security Administration. At least one of the DOGE Bros apparently discussed an agreement with a Republican voter fraud group to share personal SSA data with the aim of somehow overturning election results.

• But the Trump Administration fraud doesn't stop there, of course, as even a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled today. In the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge David Novak ruled that Lindsey Halligan --- Trump's former tax lawyer --- and the DOJ, were unlawfully identifying Halligan in court documents and elsewhere as the District's U.S. Attorney. Back in November, a different judge in the District ruled that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi. As such, the indictments Halligan secured against former FBI Director James Comey and NY A.G. Letitia James were dismissed. Judge Novak recently gave Halligan seven days to explain why she was still representing herself as USA after the court, last November, found her unlawfully appointed. He demanded to know why that didn't represent a sanctionable fraud against the court. Last week, Halligan responded with an obnoxious, over-the-top, Fox "News"-like explanation (most likely written by Trump's former defense attorney turned Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who signed the document along with Bondi and Halligan). Today, Novak called them all out in a blistering 18-page order [PDF], forcing them to strike Halligan's use of USA in legal filings and elsewhere, while giving Halligan and the others fair warning that further ignoring orders from District judges may result in sanctions, including referral to the Bar Association.

• But wait, there is still more waste, fraud, abuse and court losses for the Trump Administration today, as we close with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, detailing yet another court ruling that has blocked Trump's attempt at shutting down construction of new off-shore wind farms --- many of them nearly completed --- set to offer clean, cheap, renewable energy for millions of Americans. Trump tried to shut down five such projects. Judges have, so far, restarted three of them. The other two are still being adjudicated...

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Well, we're back! And I had some great stuff I was looking forward to covering on our first BradCast after a long holiday break. But, of course, our psychotic President of the United States had other ideas. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Don't worry. We will get to those other things that he'd prefer we don't cover, one way or another in coming days. But today we try to make sense of his stupid, senseless, unlawful attack on Venezuela late on Friday night/early Saturday morning, and of his kidnapping of that nation's corrupt President, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife. ("Corrupt" if only because he stole his 2024 election.)

Anyway, as you'll hear, I'm a bit under the weather today. So, I'm gonna keep this summary short.

We cover what happened; how unlawful it was; how much both Donald Trump and Team Trump lied about it all before, during and after; how clueless they seem to be about what happens next; and, ultimately, why he decided to attack Venezuela in the first place.

Yes, it's about distraction from the Epstein Files and the Jack Smith testimony. Yes, it's about oil, (but only somewhat, in my opinion). But it's also about at least two other things most of all: 1) A raw show of power by a very weak man and 2) Trump's rejection by the courts last year when he attempted to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as justification for the mass deportation of Venezuelan migrants. Tune in for more on that, and for what our callers think it's all about...and which country (Cuba? Mexico? Colombia? Iran? Greenland?) will be next...

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Elections, crime and voter suppression. Three of our favorite topics here on The BradCast, all of which we cover in several different ways and several different cases on today's show. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

As I described as a virtual certainty on yesterday's program, the federal government did indeed shutdown this morning as of 12:01am. Republicans, who control the White House and both chambers of Congress --- and who could keep the government open all by themselves --- have chosen to shut it down, rather than negotiate with Democrats. For their part, Democrats want to prevent Republicans from spiking health care costs for tens of millions of Americans as of January 1. Short of a deal to prevent that, Dems seem determined to avoid helping Republicans pass a new spending bill. (Which, did I already mention, Republicans could do all by themselves? Even in the U.S. Senate.)

This is likely to go on for a while. The Trump Administration is hoping to hurt as many Americans as possible in the bargain, and is violating federal law by posting notices on every single page of federal government websites (which are supposed to be strictly non-partisan), like the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), falsely claiming: "The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government." Completely unlawful. But, as we know by now, Donald Trump doesn't care about Law and Order or the Rule of Law.

In the meantime, voters may have something to say about all of this in several states next month and in all 50 states next year. So, rather than offer policies the American people might like, Republicans at Trump's corrupted, weaponized Dept. of Justice are hoping to help him rig next year's midterm elections instead.

In the battleground state of Nevada, Trump's U.S. Attorney, Sigal Chattah, according to an exclusive report last night from Reuters, is asking DOJ to help Republicans by investigating "voter fraud" claims made by the state Republican Party and to investigate organizations that help to elect Democrats. Chattah was formerly the state Republican Party Chair. She is also seeking to drop the cases against the GOP Fake Electors in Nevada, who tried to help Trump steal the 2020 election. Chattah was the personal attorney for one of those Fake Electors, even as she, as a federal prosecutor, is now trying to undermine the case against them rather than recusing, as required by DOJ ethics rules, from such cases.

Tune in for more of Chattah's corruption today. But amusingly, a George W. Bush-appointed federal Judge ruled just last night that she is unlawfully serving as the top federal prosecutor in the state as Acting U.S. Attorney beyond the 120 days allowed for someone to hold that position without Senate confirmation.

And, speaking of the failed GOP attempt to steal the 2020 Presidential election, a federal judge late last week found that MyPillow CEO and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell defamed the election technology company Smartmatic at least 51 different times while falsely asserting that the election vendor interfered with the 2020 election to steal votes from Trump and give them to Joe Biden. The only jurisdiction in the entire nation where Smartmatic's voting systems were used that year was in Los Angeles County, where Biden won 71% of the vote. Smartmatic and another company, Dominion, have either won or struck multi-million settlements in every defamation case that each has brought so far against three different rightwing media outlets (Fox, Newsmax and One American News) and several of Team Trump's 2020 MAGA election deniers, such as Lindell. (In a side note, the MyPillow dude says he is now preparing to run for Governor in Minnesota next year against Democratic Gov. Mike Walz! That should be fun!)

AND THEN... Earlier this year, Trump's DOJ ordered 27 mostly Democratic-controlled states to turn over their entire, unredacted statewide voter registration databases to the federal government for unspecified reasons. The Department's Civil Rights Division (which has been turned on its head under Trump) is demanding the entire files, including unredacted personal and sensitive information such as Social Security and Drivers License numbers, etc., for every registered voter. The reasons are unclear, and most states have refused to turn the files over. But now the Department is suing at least eight of those states, including California, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania for those files.

Our old friend ARI BERMAN, best-selling author and National Voting Rights Correspondent at Mother Jones, has been covering this story and joins us today to help us try to make sense of it.

The DoJ is claiming in their lawsuits that the states in question are somehow violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and the Civil Rights Act of 1960. We discuss all of this today with Berman, who describes the weaponization scheme as of a piece with the GOP's broader "voter-suppression agenda" (which he details in full in MoJo's cover story this month.) Among the questions I've got for him today...

• Why is the Trump Administration demanding access to these databases and the sensitive information within them in the first place?
• What are they accusing the states of having done, in their claims that they have somehow violated three of the nation's landmark voting rights related laws?
• If it's a fishing expedition regarding claims of voter fraud and non-citizens supposedly voting illegally, didn't the Trump Administration already try (and fail) to show the very same thing with their quickly disbanded "Election Integrity" Commission during Trump's first term, when our delusional President was falsely insisting he actually won the popular vote in 2016 but for some 3 million unlawful votes he pretended were unlawfully cast against him in the very blue state of California?

Lots to discuss with Ari today! Hope you'll tune in!...

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We've got a bit more on today's BradCast regarding Team Trump's attempt to distract from the many failures of his Administration by hoping to frighten Americans with the deployment of military assets against those of us here in Los Angeles. Plus, we've got a number of other stories that I suspect they would be happy for us not to tell you about today. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

The City of Angels continues to hang tough against the Trump Administration, even as horrible human and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, last night, described the city of nearly four million people as "a city of criminals". The pathetic insult against the nation's second largest city came after Trump federalized 4,000 California National Guard troops against the wishes of the state's Governor, Gavin Newsom, and deployed 700 U.S. Marines to L.A., purportedly to help ICE round up migrants as part of the Administration's by the San Francisco Chronicle from Noem to Fox "News" host turned SecDef Pete Hegseth, the DHS chief requests Hegseth order military troops to actively participate in arrests and detentions on U.S. soil, an apparent violation of the law, unless the President invokes the Insurrection Act first under certain circumstances. Her letter suggests the Administration is preparing to do exactly that. Or she doesn't understand how the law works. Or both.

In 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, spurring far larger protests than the relatively minor ones we've seen here in L.A. in recent days, Donald Trump insisted it would be against the law for him to federalize and deploy troops against the wishes of a Governor. "We have laws. We have to go by the laws," he insisted at the time. "We can't move in the National Guard. I can call 'insurrection' but there's no reason to ever do that. We can't call in the National Guard unless we're requested by a Governor."

Things change. Presidencies fail. The protests against the Administration in cities large and small are expanding by the day from coast to coast.

IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK covered on today's program...

• U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi's brother Brad Bondi bombed --- and I mean bombed --- in his run to become President of the D.C. Bar Association. We discuss what that means and why it's important.

• SCOTUS did something right by voters, for a change --- this time in Pennsylvania --- against the wishes of the Republican Party which hoped to disenfranchise voters (as usual).

• MyPillow CEO and 2020 election conspiracy doofus Mike Lindell took the stand this week to double-down in his own defense during trial in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer. Since 2020, the bedding impresario and former crack addict has spent tens of millions to repeatedly echo evidence-free claims of a stolen election, including the false charge that Coomer was part of an "antifa" scheme to rig voting machines and steal the election from Trump. We've got much more for you today on all of this to remind you of many of Lindell's ridiculous lies, schemes, antics and evidence-free allegations. Though they are completely nuts, his own attorneys now seem to be hoping to use them in order to buttress his defense. Tune in for details.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, on toxic smoke from record, climate-change driven wildfires in Canada, threatening the health of residents in both their country and ours; more bad news about indoor air pollution; a new lawsuit against Big Oil for its role in a heat wave that killed an elderly Oregon woman; and the Trump Administration's curious attempt to bury a federal report on last year's decrease in climate warming carbon emissions...

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Donald Trump's chaos coaster continues on today's BradCast. Our top on today's ride: Social Security. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... As we warned yesterday amid "irrational exuberance" as the stock market briefly skyrocketed following Donald Trump's social media announcement that he was pausing his unilateral worldwide tariffs for 90 days, investors began to notice that it wasn't quite as good as it looked. Trump's remaining 10% tariffs on almost every nation (other than Russia) and boost of duties against imports from China to 145%, helped lead the U.S. markets to tank again today, if not quite as much as they rose yesterday.

But some brighter news for those who believe in both truth and election integrity today. Rightwing propaganda outlet Newsmax, which quietly settled a defamation suit last year brought against them by voting system company Smartmatic, was found this week by a judge in Delaware to have defamed Dominion Voting Systems following the 2020 Presidential election. A jury will now determine if the Trump-allied outlet intentionally smeared Dominion with "actual malice" when they claimed the company rigged voting machines in favor of Joe Biden, despite the lack of any such evidence. The trial is set to begin at the end of this month...unless Newsmax decides to settle that one too.

But, speaking of actual voter fraud, it looks like Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, committed it last year in Hawaii when she voted there in the 2024 election after previously declaring herself to be a resident of Texas. Oops.

THEN... Elon Musk's DOGE Bros are unleashing absolute havoc at the Social Security Agency. Their latest chaos involved a plan to end phone services for people filing for retirement or survivor benefits as of this coming Monday. But with cries of outrage, impossibly long lines at field offices, wait times on the phone, and website crashes for new applicants and longtime beneficiaries in recent days, the Agency has now backed off that terrible plan as well. For now.

We're joined today for insight and warnings about Trump, Musk, DOGE and much more by longtime Social Security expert DR. ERIC KINGSON, emeritus Professor of Social Work at Syracuse University, co-founder of the nonprofit Social Security Works, and policy advisor to two different Presidential commissions on Social Security Reform under both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

What DOGE is doing at SSA "has nothing to do with efficiency or correcting errors," he tells me. "There's an extremely small error rate in Social Security. As for efficiency, we spend less than one percent administering the program. It's a well-administered program --- until now."

He worries that for "the first time since the creation of the program, there is a major, major risk of dramatic changes that will hurt the American public, especially middle-aged workers and young workers today."

"It's purposeful," Kingson argues, regarding the chaos unleashed at the agency by Musk's DOGE Bros in recent weeks. "You don't do the things that DOGE is doing because you want to fix something. You want to destroy it. And you want to destroy it with cruelty and disrespect for human dignity."

Kingson, the co-author of a book on protecting and expanding "the Insurance Americans Love and Count On", believes "the next game plan" is to privatize the Agency on the basis that the havoc unfolding now will be used to argue later that the private sector "will do a lot better".

He concurs with President Biden's SSA Administrator Martin O'Malley that the damage being done right now could soon result in the collapse of the system; argues that DOGE and Trump "have been stripping Social Security of its expertise and historical memory"; and charges that Trump, Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who claimed today that "Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will not take a hit" in the President's legislative agenda moving forward in Congress, are lying about fraud at the agency and benefits for Americans, which they plan to undermine. Kingson cites "a huge crisis" on the road ahead, as "half of today's workers under 67 will not be able to maintain their standard of living in retirement. If you count the cost of healthcare and long term care, it's probably about two-thirds. That's a crisis. What they are doing is stripping away the one thing you can count on: Social Security."

Much more on all of that --- and what you and I can and should do about it (hint: "Fight like hell!") --- in my conversation today with Kingson. I hope you'll tune in.

FINALLY... Desi Doyen is here with our latest Green News Report, as Trump signs a slew of Executive Orders to bail out the dying, polluting American coal industry, and as Big Banks plot new ways to profit off of our climate crisis...

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Today on The BradCast: Things get worse for the Trump Administration and the buffoonish Republicans who love him on Capitol Hill, following another embarrassing round of disclosures from 'Signal Gate', while Dems take back control of a state House and flip a very "red" state Senate seat in Special Elections yesterday in a key battleground state. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

That's hardly all we've got for you in yet another too big show today...

'NOBODY WAS TEXTING WAR PLANS,' EH?: Capitol Hill continued to roil on Wednesday, after The Atlantic's Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg published the full message thread from the Signal group chat that he was invited to join, for some still-unexplained reason, last week, by Donald Trump's National Security Advisor Mike Waltz in advance of a U.S. attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The small group consisted of high-level Trump National Security and Defense officials, from the Vice President to the Sec. of Defense, Sec. of State, CIA Director, Director of National Intelligence and more. The newly published text messages from the Signal conversation on the unsecured commercial mobile app, reveal very specific times, places and methods of attack, just as Goldberg originally asserted in his original blockbuster report on Monday.

In response to the original report, SecDef doofus Pete Hegseth falsely told reporters, "Nobody was texting war plans." Today's Atlantic report reveals that he very much did. The new details also appear to counter claims from Trump's CIA Director John Ratcliffe and his wildly unqualified Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, when they both asserted that no classified information was shared with the Signal group. They were both members of that group. Donald Trump also made that same false claim on Tuesday. If very specific attack plans posted to Signal by Hegseth weren't "classified" details, they certainly should have been. But, even if not, they were definitely National Defense Information, which means members of the group chat may have violated the Espionage Act. The messages set to disappear after a number of weeks by Walz, would also be in violation of the Presidential Records and Federal Records Acts, according to legal experts.

Even a number of rightwing columnists are calling for accountability and the removal of Hegseth and Waltz. A few Republican U.S. Senators are calling for full investigations. And, of course, Democrats have already been demanding accountability, both at yesterday's Senate Intel hearing and in another one today in the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, which also featured laughable testimony from Ratcliffe and Gabbard. Desi Doyen has details for us on today's program.

PA VOTERS PUSH BACK: While things are falling apart politically for Trump and his incompetent aides and Congressional sycophants in D.C., voters are already ringing in with their dissatisfaction at the polls. In Special Elections in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, a Democratic win in the state House has resulted in the party regaining their slim majority in the Legislature's lower chamber. But that was to be expected from a very Democratic district. Bigger news for Dems came in the Special Election for the state Senate, where the Democratic candidate managed to flip a seat in a very red district that Trump won by 15 points last November. James Malone narrowly defeated his Republican opponent by running against Trump's madness and Elon Musk's DOGE Bro efforts to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid and the rest of the federal government. It was a huge upset victory for the Democrats, as they won this particular area of Republican-leaning suburbs and farming communities for the first time in 136 years! (Tuesday's win echoes another last month when Dems flipped a state Senate seat in a special election held in a deep red, Trump +21 district in Iowa.)

MORE ELECTIONS NEXT TUESDAY: Another round of critical elections are underway right now, with Election Day next week (April 1) in Wisconsin and Florida. The battle for majority control of WI's Supreme Court is underway (as we discussed recently with the Badger State's John Nichols of The Nation), as the world's richest man, Elon Musk, has thrown some $18 million into the race to support far-right Trump Republican Brad Schimel, in hopes of defeating liberal candidate Susan Crawford.

In Florida, there are two special elections Tuesday for the U.S. House, though both are in very red districts. The CD-1 race will fill the seat vacated by alleged child sex trafficker Matt Gaetz, the other, in CD-6, is to fill the seat vacated by Trump's incompetent National Security Advisor and Signal chat enthusiast Mike Waltz. Democratic candidates Gay Valimont and Josh Weil, respectively, are waging uphill battles to flip those very "red" U.S. House districts to "blue". Each have, reportedly, outraised their Republican opponents. Though Musk has now also reportedly jumped into those races with his billions as well, at the very last minute. A victory for Democrats in either of those seats (or anything close to it), will be seen as a political earthquake next week.

TRUMP ATTEMPTS ELECTION POWER GRAB: Finally, you may have heard about the Executive Order that Donald Trump issued last night, purporting to mandate proof of citizenship when registering to vote. That said, Presidents DO NOT HAVE THE POWER to issue such mandates. Election law is largely the legislative domain of States, Counties and occasionally via laws adopted by Congress. Trump's largely performative EO (which also includes a number of other voting and election mandates that are similarly beyond his powers as President) will face huge legal challenges. As Election Law professor Rick Hasen noted in his initial response to Trump's "dangerous Executive Order" last night, the measure is an attempted "executive power grab" that, if successful, would "disenfranchise millions of voters."

Ya know...Just another dull day in these United States...

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On today's BradCast: A spotlight on Trump's latest scheme to make election crimes --- specifically his own, but Elon's too --- unaccountable again. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Last Friday, the Chair of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, posted a letter she received from the White House informing her that she had been fired. It was the first time in the FEC's 50 year history that any Commissioner had been fired by a President. It is, also illegal. Weintraub, appointed by George W. Bush in 2007, is challenging the unlawful firing. She has, in the meantime, been locked out of her office, her email, her work computer and banned from the FEC building where she has worked without incident or scandal for 18 years. There is a legal way to replace Commissioners. This is not it.

Today we are joined by former FEC Chair ANN RAVEL, appointed by Barack Obama, she served on the Commission with Weintraub from 2014 through 2017. She also served as Deputy Asst. Attorney General at DoJ and is a professor at UC-Berkley School of Law.

Over the weekend, Ravel told me via email that she thought Trump's attempt to fire Weintraub was "insane" and saw it as one more indication that the President has "no moral compass". Today, she offers more details on just how outrageous and unprecedented this effort is. We also discuss why Trump would want to make sure there was no Democrat in charge of the FEC, which had a 3 to 2 imbalance in favor of Republican members before Weintraub was theoretically removed last week.

"There were approximately 20, maybe more, complaints that had been filed against Trump at the FEC," Ravel explains today. "There were dozens of complaints related to the 2024 elections --- not only against Trump and Musk, who spent nearly $300 million dollars to help the President get elected --- but also complaints that Trump had filed himself against Kamala Harris, media outlets and the like. And that is undoubtedly the reason why Trump wanted to eliminate the chair."

"The FEC is not a biased commission," Ravel argues. "It is balanced in terms of party, and there's always been adherence to the law at the FEC, given that it was established during the Watergate scandal. That's the reason for the bipartisan structure."

The Commission's usual 3 to 3 partisan make-up has, in recent years, resulted in tie votes where no action is taken by the FEC. She tells me today that there were no instances, during her tenure, of a Republican Commissioner crossing party lines to vote with Democratic appointees, though the reverse was not unusual. Despite all of that, Ravel says she still believes in the institution even if it could benefit from reforms --- though not like this.

"I feel really strongly about the disclosure that is required by the law at the Federal Election Commission, because it's very important for the American public, when they are voting, or just generally, to know who is behind the campaigns. Who is spending billions of dollars in trying to influence certain things," she tells me. "I really do think that he was trying to subvert the FEC at a critical moment, because of all of the campaign finance violations relating to Trump and his supporters."

Tune in today for much more from Ravel!

Also today, after my discussion last week with financial journalist David Dayen about the Administration's efforts to kneecap the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, things got much worse for the embattled federal agency over the weekend. The CFPB was created in 2008 in response to the sub-prime mortgage scandal that crashed the economy. As the only federal agency whose prime mission is working on behalf of consumers, the Bureau has held Big Banks and sleazy Payday Lenders to account over its short life, returning tens of billions of dollars to ripped off customers in the bargain. So, of course, Republicans have been trying to shut it down since its inception.

Over the weekend, its new Acting Director, Russell Vought --- Trump's newly-sworn in Director of the White House Office of Management Budget (OMB) and a key architect of Project 2025 --- ordered "all" activity by the Bureau to cease, including "all supervision and examination activity." He has also killed the CFPB's web page (which now reads "File Not Found"), and ordered their D.C. headquarters closed as of today. Only an act of Congress can lawfully shut down the CFPB, but the lawless Trump Administration is trying to do so anyway.

In response, the union which represents some 1,600 workers at the CFPB filed two lawsuits on Sunday night. But will Trump follow the orders of any court that issues rulings he doesn't like? A post to Twitter/X by Vice President J.D. Vance on Sunday night suggested he might not. A federal District Court judge in Rhode Island on Monday found that the Administration has already failed to comply with "the plain text" of his previous "clear and unambiguous" order to release billions of dollars in federal grants and other funding that the OMB had attempted to freeze two weeks ago.

I hope ya'll are ready for a very real, very serious Constitutional crisis in the days ahead, when the Administration simply decides to stop following the orders of any court. Because it sure is starting to feel like that is exactly where this nightmare is ultimately going...

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CORRECTION, 10:05pm PT: On the show posted above, my guest Ann Ravel mentioned that she had heard FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub had been removed from her office by U.S. Marines, by force, after her unlawful firing by Trump. In fact, though Weintraub is challenging the removal, that story of her being physically removed from her office, appears to be entirely fake, circulated by Rightwingers who also claimed, in this false telling, that Trump had discovered Weintraub had committed massive election fraud in 2020 and 2024. Ann told me she hadn't seen that part of the false claim, but apologized a few hours after airtime via email for being "sucked into" the disinfo regarding the Marines removing Weintraub from the building. In fact, she touched base with Weintraub directly to confirm that that that part of the story was completely false. My apologies for the error!

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As detailed on today's BradCast, the avenues for massive corruption by the incoming Trump Administration are, shamefully, only beginning to come into view. The fact that our corporate media so utterly failed to make such possibilities clear --- or even to simply explain to the electorate what tariffs actually are and how they actually work --- is just one more indictment that we will spend decades paying the price for. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... The final uncalled seat for the U.S. House in the next Congress, following the November 5th election, has finally been called. Republican Rep. John Duarte conceded on Tuesday night to Democrat Adam Gray in California's 13th Congressional district. It was the closest race in the House this year. As of air time, just 187 votes separate the two out of more than 210,000 cast, as Dems flipped a third seat in the Golden State this year. That leaves Republicans with one of the slimmest House majorities in history, holding just 220 seats to Dems' 215. That said, with the resignation of Matt Gaetz, and two other GOP members set to step down if confirmed to be in Trump's cabinet, the margin for passage of any of his legislative agenda may be in question in the lower chamber in the early part of next year. Just one or two defectors, or members who are out sick, could make it impossible for Republicans to get anything through the House.

THEN... We've debunked the long-ago, many times discredited 2000 Mules film --- supposedly documenting massive fraud by Democrats to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump --- over and over again in the past several years. Both state and federal law enforcement authorities have done so as well. Even the publisher and distributor of the documentary film and its companion book have pulled both from distribution and offered an apology. This week, so did the fraudulent film's director and rightwing pundit Dinesh D'Souza. He issued an apology to one of the people seen on surveillance video in the film, which claimed the man was committing a "crime" by depositing "fraudulent votes" into a drop-box near Atlanta in 2020. In fact, the man was dropping off his own ballot, his wife's and those of his adult children who lived with him --- all perfectly legal in Georgia. In his apology, D'Souza (who was pardoned for his own ACTUAL election fraud crimes by Trump!) appears to blame his partners on the film, a long-ago discredited GOP "voter fraud" fraudster group called True the Vote, for misleading him about the footage they supplied for his use in the film.

FINALLY... Donald Trump has been vowing for the past year or more on the campaign trail to institute massive trade tariffs on foreign nations of anywhere from 10% to 1000% depending on his mood on any given day at any given event. He has also, for years, been lying to the American public about tariffs, claiming they are paid by the nation whose products are taxed upon import into the U.S. In fact, as our guest today explains, they are almost always paid by the consumer in some fashion and are likely to inflate prices to boot.

We're joined today by DAVID DAYEN, investigative financial journalist, award-winning author and Executive Editor of The American Prospect magazine. He offers both a primer on how tariffs actually work (and/or don't), and how Trump plans to use them to muscle concessions and favors from other nations, beginning with Mexico, Canada and China, our three largest trading partners from whom we import some $1 trillion worth of goods each year.

"The heyday of tariffs was the 1890s," Dayen explains. "But the way that Trump is going about it, you've got to think of these tariffs as more like economic sanctions." Sanctions that could come back to bite the U.S. via a trade war if those nations decide to slap their own tariffs on our goods in return.

Trump has claimed that his recently promised 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and new tariffs of 10% on goods from China are meant to stop the "invasion" of migrants and drugs into the U.S. But that explanation, charges Dayen, is dubious at best. They are more likely intended as "simply leverage" in advance of renegotiations of the USMCA, the slightly modified replacement for the NAFTA trade treaty that was struck between U.S., Mexico and Canada during Trump's first term.

But, as Dayen reported at The Prospect last week, "there's a second piece to Trump's tariff strategy" that involves corporate importers and exporters, rather than nations. That, as he explains today, is where Trump's ability to give away tariff waivers is set to be a wildly lucrative scheme that will open the door to perhaps unprecedented corruption and payoffs from corporate interests hoping to avoid the economic pain of tariffed goods.

In his explanation, Dayen cites the famous "Cantillon Effect" which "comes down to whoever is closer to power is going to have better success in business." And now, between Trump's hotels and publicly-traded social media company and, perhaps most disturbingly, his new cryptocurrency venture --- (which a Chinese entrepreneur currently under SEC investigation for fraud, market manipulation and other violations of U.S. law just dropped $30 million into, three weeks after the election) --- it is going to be open season to buy favors and favoritism galore from the new President.

"This is what oligarchies look like," says Dayen. "This is what Russia looks like. If you're closer to the king, you're going to do better. The next four years are going to reflect this tendency."

And, yes, as he argues today, "the mind boggles at the potential for corruption"...

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On today's BradCast we're hoping to help you get acclimated to the tsunami of "fraud" claims --- both real and fake, and what they mean and don't --- that are most likely about to come our way over the next few days and weeks...at least if Donald Trump loses to Kamala Harris in 2024 as he did to Joe Biden in 2020. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Pardon us, however, for beginning with a brief victory lap following our L.A. Dodgers' big World Series win last night, and a related sidebar as to what history tells us (or doesn't) about who is going to win the Presidential election based on who won the World Series.

Then, as to the coming "fraud" storm...among the many stories cited along the way today...

• A Minnesota woman this week was charged with three felony counts of voter fraud after forging her dead mother's signature on an absentee ballot to vote for Donald Trump.

• Six people were charged over the summer for submitting nearly two dozen fraudulent absentee ballots on behalf of a Republican City Council candidate in New York. How they got away with it and how they got caught. The candidate's 19-year old daughter was among those charged.

• In the battleground state of Michigan, election officials in August indicted four voters who allegedly voted twice --- first by absentee and then again at the polls --- in the state's Presidential primary earlier this year. Once again, as in all of these cases, they were caught and charged thanks to safe-guards built into the system. Of the more than 11.7 million votes cast in the state over the past several elections, according to Michigan's State Auditor General, 99.99% of ballots cast were NOT from double voters.

• In Mesa County, Colorado this week, officials announced they blocked an effort in the very Republican-leaning county to cast about a dozen absentee ballots, apparently stolen out of mailboxes in the Vote-by-Mail state. The state's signature-matching procedures uncovered the fraud scheme, though three fraudulent ballots slipped through the system before the crime was discovered. Mesa is the same county where former County Clerk, Tina Peters, was earlier this month sentenced to 9 years in prison on felony charges related to helping her MAGA friends break into the County's voting systems in the middle of the night after the 2020 election to copy proprietary software and distribute it across the Internet to other Trump supporters.

• Last month we reported on the story out of Arizona where both the RNC and the state Republican Party went to court to argue against the removal of some 98,000 voters from the state voting rolls who, due to a years-old glitch in Maricopa County's voter database, had no record of presenting Proof of Citizenship with their registrations, as required by state law. In that case, Republicans opposed the systematic voter purge that the state's Democratic Sec. of State didn't want to do, but felt he had to under state law. The Republicans correctly argued to the AZ Supreme Court that such purges, within 90-days of an election, were in violation of federal law. They made that argument after the SoS revealed that the majority of the potentially "non-citizen" voters to be removed were registered Republicans.

  Yet, this week, on Wednesday in Virginia, after a U.S. District Court Judge and federal Appeals Court last week blocked an attempt by the state's Republican Governor to purge some 1,600 registered voters under the premise that some might be non-citizens, the corrupted Republican U.S. Supreme Court majority allowed the unlawful systematic purge, ordered by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, to move forward. All three Democratic-appointed SCOTUS Justices dissented. One of the purged Virginians, a U.S. citizen who has lived there her entire life, called it "a very bad October surprise."

All of these stories today help us understand the difference between real and fake fraud claims; the difference between voter fraud and election fraud; how easily most such penny-ante fraud is caught and often prevented before it happens; and how Republicans this year, from Donald Trump on down through his minions and back up through his corrupted SCOTUS, are hoping to use phony or exaggerated fraud claims to help sow the seeds to steal the election, if necessary, as of Tuesday night.

Get ready! Because that is coming --- if Harris is declared the winner.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with horrific "welcome to the future" news out of Spain this week, where extreme drought was followed up with a year's worth of rain and deadly flash flooding this week that swept through one town in a matter of hours, killing more than 150 so far; and some words of warning about Tuesday's election from Sen. Bernie Sanders regarding our climate changed future in the event that Trump is allowed back into the White House in January...

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On today's BradCast: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would be weeping in their graves --- but they're still alive and joining many of us in calling out WaPo's cowardly billionaire owner today for kowtowing to a wannabe dictator who's not even in office yet. Thus is the shameful price --- and cost to American democracy and Freedom of the Press --- of American Oligarchy, 2024-style. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

Among our stories today, before opening up our phone lines for listeners to "endorse" the Presidential candidate of their choosing, just one week before Election Day in arguably one of the most critical elections in U.S. history...

• Last week, more than 20 absentee ballots were burned in an apparent case of arson inside of a U.S. Postal Service collection box in Phoenix, in the battleground state of Arizona. Today, hundreds of ballots were burned in a ballot drop-box in Democratic-leaning Vancouver, Washington as well as Democratic-leaning Portland, Oregon. The FBI is investigating and local law enforcement report they have identified a "suspect vehicle" thought to be connected to the incendiary devices used in both cases in the early A.M. hours on Monday.

• Last week, Donald Trump-supporting billionaire Elon Musk, the richest many on Earth, kicked off a "lottery" where registered voters in battleground states who sign his pledge would become eligible for a one million dollar give-away each day before next Tuesday's Election Day. The DoJ subsequently warned Musk that the stunt was likely an unlawful vote-buying scheme under federal law. On Monday, the Philadelphia District Attorney sued Musk for running what he is describing as an unlawful lottery in violation of Pennsylvania law.

• On Friday, the Washington Post --- with the now-laughable tagline "Democracy Dies in Darkness" --- announced it would not be making an endorsement in the Presidential race for the first time in nearly 50 years. It's billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos --- whose space travel company has billions of dollars of contracts with the federal government --- was reportedly behind the decision that undercut the legendary Watergate paper's own Editorial Board that was set to endorse Kamala Harris. The decision came just after the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times --- who happens to be a close friend of Elon Musk --- forced that paper to do the same. It is what noted U.S. fascism expert Timothy Snyder describes in his landmark 2017 book, On Tyranny, as "obeying in advance," which he strongly warns against as "Lesson One" when fascists threaten to take power. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer also has a few thoughts in response about the "billionaire cowards" at the two papers who are already "showing what life under a dictator is really like", even before Donald Trump's becomes President again (if he ever does.)

• With all of that in mind --- and a few more stories of note here or there --- we open up our phones for listeners to make their own endorsements today on air in this year's election. That, because The BradCast and our many affiliate stations --- many associated with the Pacifica Radio Network, founded in 1946 to, specifically, stand up against then-rising fascism --- are not owned, run or controlled in any way by billionaires or their corporations. The result: a lot of calls today, with endorsements for Harris, Trump and --- because our live-listener base largely draws from KPFK, our very left-ish flagship station here in Los Angeles --- for the Green Party's Jill Stein, as a protest vote against the Biden-Harris Administration's position on Israel. (Never mind how much worse a Trump Administration would be on the same issue...which leads to a few very lively conversations with listeners today!) Please tune in!...

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If you find you today's BradCast informative, entertaining or helpful, please let folks on Twitter know. I suspect we won't otherwise get much traction over there today for some odd reason. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

It's amusing how, in April of 2023, not long after he purchased Twitter, Elon Musk was asked by Tucker Carlson about "New Twitter's" role in the 2024 election. His response: "The goal of new Twitter is to be as fair and even handed as possible. So, not following any political ideology."

That. Was. Darling! Just over a year later, Musk has leveraged his site almost entirely on behalf of Donald Trump, flooding his nearly 3 million followers with out and out false claims, often echoing the disgraced former President, including blatant, evidence-free lies about election fraud by Democrats.

That's in addition to the, at least, $100 million that the world's richest billionaire has plowed into political action committees to support a second term for Trump. One such Musk-funded group is called Future Coalition PAC. It is currently running a wildly cynical set of ads targeting Arab and Muslim voters in the battleground state of Michigan, claiming that "Kamala Harris Stands With Israel". The very same Musk-bankrolled group is simultaneously running ads targeting Jewish voters in battleground Pennsylvania with the message "Two-Faced Kamala Harris Stands With Palestine".

Another of Musk's PAC's recently created a website called Progress 2028, tailored to look like an official Harris Campaign page, while pushing decidedly false messages. ("Let's remove barriers for undocumented immigrants who are undocumented!") Apparently, all of that is legal. Though the group is also sending out false text messages, seemingly impersonating the Harris Campaign, pushing voters to the Progress 2028 website. That may not be legal.

But it was on behalf of yet another Musk dark money super PAC, the one he calls America PAC, in which he's invested at least $75 million, that, he announced over the weekend, that he will be giving away $1 million dollars to one lucky person each day --- so long as the person is registered to vote in a battleground state and signed his petition in support of the 1st and 2nd Amendments. Noted election law professor Rick Hasen, following the first big, lottery style check Musk handed out on stage Saturday during a rally in Pennsylvania, details how what Musk is doing is "clearly illegal vote buying". That's right. While using wild lies to make the evidence-free case that Democrats are committing election fraud, Musk is committing actual election fraud on behalf of Trump, each and every day between now and Election Day. (Anyone home, DoJ?)

His million dollar giveaways to encourage voter registration (a violation of 52 U.S.C. 10307(c), barring "offers to pay...either for registration to vote or for voting") began on the same day that Musk lied to attendees at a weekend rally in PA about Dominion Voting Systems somehow stealing the 2020 election for Joe Biden. (Similar lies cost Fox 'News' more than three-quarters of a billion dollars last year in a record settlement with Dominion to end the voting technology company's defamation suit against the rightwing propaganda outlet hours before the trial was to begin.)

We're joined today by the perfect guest to discuss all of the above and more. EDDIE PEREZ was formerly a longtime official at Hart-Intercivic, one of the nation's few major voting machine companies. He then went on to work as the chief of Twitter's Civic Integrity unit, back before Musk bought the social media site...when they still had a Civic Integrity unit! Perez is now on the Board of Directors at the nonpartisan, nonprofit, Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Institute and penned an oped for MSNBC last week headlined: "I ran Twitter's civic integrity team. Elon Musk has no idea how elections work."

In addition to debunking a number of Musk's false claims (no, Dominion doesn't even have voting systems in Philadelphia, for example!), Perez speaks to how Twitter (now ridiculously renamed X) has changed since Musk's takeover, turning it into a den of far-right conspiracy theories, hate speech and other dangerous nonsense.

"The degree to which the entire platform has obviously fallen off the deep end is incredible," he tells me. "I think it's fair to say Musk has thrown out the window any kind of commitment to having actual facts about the reality of how elections are run. What we have right now is basically a referendum on whether billionaires and oligarchs are going to shape the public's understanding of how elections are run. Are they going to do that by spreading false rumors and flooding the airwaves? Or are we going to listen to election professionals? And are we going to have standards and journalistic facts to educate the American people about how their elections are actually run with integrity?"

What would Twitter have done in the old days, before Musk purchased it, if someone like Musk had spread the disinformation he is now using the platform to spread? "Twitter took it seriously," says Perez. "What would have happened is there are different ways we would redirect users to actual, credible information. You do that not through censorship, not through taking things down. If you had a post that made an obviously false claim about some election process or voting, you might see a label on that Tweet saying, 'Here's some more information' [with links to credible sites, like the National Association of Secretaries of State]. They took it seriously. We're not going to slash and burn and taken people's posts down. But if we see an opportunity to send them to good information from trusted sources, why not do that? That helps voters. That helps democracy."

Perez also offers a number of pieces of advice on how listeners and voters can push back against the even larger avalanche of lies that is absolutely going to begin spewing forth shortly, in the event that Kamala Harris defeats Trump this year.

"They need to get their answers from their local elections office. You need to check your ballot before casting it. If you have a by-mail ballot and you haven't returned it yet, I recommend turning it in to a drop-box. And when you see inflammatory images [on social media and elsewhere], ask yourself, 'What's the story behind this? What's the context?' And find out where it came from" before blithely passing it along to others.

We've got a lot to learn from Perez today! Please tune in for a very lively, informative and, yes, at times, maddening BradCast!

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