Six green card holders in Texas swept up in federal crackdown on illegal voting
Earlier on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas.
When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.
While six of those charged cast ballots in the 2024 general election, the impact of their votes was almost immeasurably small, given that two of them cast provisional ballots that were not counted, and 11,388,670 other Texans voted in that election.
Donald Trump, whose false claim that voting by non-citizens is rampant inspired the investigation, won the state by a margin of 1,558,347 votes over his nearest rival, Kamala Harris.
Of the four illegal votes that were apparently counted in error, three were cast by green card holders from Nigeria, India and Mexico, who might have wrongly thought they were eligible to vote, and just one by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.
Lawful permanent residents are not allowed to vote in federal elections, but they are permitted to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia and in some jurisdictions of three US states: California, Maryland and Vermont.
Still, the administration framed the criminal charges against the handful of ineligible voters in Texas as significant and even invited a Fox News crew to film the arrest of one of the green-card holders: a 27-year-old from Nigeria who allegedly voted in 2018, two years after becoming a lawful permanent resident.
The video was broadcast multiple times on the president’s favorite network on Tuesday.
“I was reliably told this never happens,” the Fox host Will Cain said with sarcasm after a report on the arrest. “We know now at least it’s happened seven times.”
Key events
Senator Chris Van Hollen calls for ‘mandatory safeguards’ on AI development
In a social media video released on Tuesday, senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat considering a run for the presidency, called for AI developers to slow down their work until government safeguards can be put in place.
“We are hearing extremely clear warnings from the people building frontier AI models about the risks,” Van Hollen said. “The people building this technology are concerned about the loss of human control. We need to pump the brakes until we have rules in place to stop this technology from doing grave harm. And that includes implementing mandatory safeguards and a comprehensive testing regime.”
“Make no mistake, putting these federal guard rails in place does not absolve the AI corporations from the harm done by their products,” he continued. “They must be held accountable under our existing civil and criminal laws. That said, the government has a duty to prevent grave harm from happening in the first place.”
“We need Congress to act. It’s not enough to leave it to Donald Trump. Yesterday he called into a conference of Silicon Valley bigwigs and said that concerns about AI safety are a hoax,” the senator added.
“The Silicon Valley bigwig investors and tech oligarchs that have bankrolled Donald Trump back into the White House didn’t do it because they all became MAGA overnight,” Van Hollen said. “They did it because there was an implicit deal. In return for their support and for funding his vanity projects like his obscene ballroom, they wanted something in return – a free hand on AI policy.”
Trump plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs withheld by Biden over killing of civilians in Gaza
As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The aid package, first reported by the Washington Post, includes 20,000 Mk84s as well as 20,000 BLU-117s, US officials told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing — in which American taxpayer dollars are given to Israel which in turn uses it to purchase the weapons from US weapons makers.
As soon as Trump returned to office in 2025, he lifted a hold on one shipment of MK-84 bombs to Israel imposed by the Biden administration in 2024. In the first months of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, the Biden administration had sent thousands of the 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.
American-made one-ton bombs have been used to hundreds of times in deadly strikes in Gaza and Lebanon. The New York Times reported in late 2023 that Israel had routinely dropped MK-84 bombs in areas of Gaza it had designated as safe for civilians.
Trevor Ball, a former explosive-ordnance-disposal technician for the US army who studies open-source images of civilian harm caused by US weapons, told the Post that the Israeli military uses MK-84 bombs to destroy entire buildings in pursuit of suspected militants. “If Hezbollah or whoever is in a building, an MK-84 will bring down the whole building,” Ball said.
“I don’t believe the U.S. taxpayer should continue to arm Netanyahu’s government with deadly military equipment,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor and a Guardian US columnist, wrote on Bluesky in response to the reported arms sales.
“I believe Netanyahu is a war criminal and that his government has committed genocide in Gaza. This doesn’t make me antisemitic.”
Congressman Adam Smith, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, expressed outrage on Tuesday at a new estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran cost American taxpayers approximately $38 billion in just the first five months, through 1 August.
“The CBO’s findings underscore two important points,” Smith said in a statement. “First, Trump’s disastrous war against Iran has exacted a staggering toll in terms of lives lost and wounded in action, as well as in the waste of hard-earned taxpayer dollars; and second, there is an overwhelming lack of transparency and level of incompetence that have together been the hallmarks of this administration. This report is based on the information the CBO has been able to analyze. Yet even the CBO has not had access to the full accounting of losses and damage to equipment and infrastructure, munitions stockpiles, materiel, and force posture.”
“The CBO analysis also highlights the impact of Trump’s failed policy on the domestic and global economies, including increased inflation,” the congressman from the state of Washington added. “Again, the Trump Administration has refused to provide all relevant information needed to make a full assessment, information that Congress and the American public need and deserve, meaning that this cost is likely even higher.”
Andrew Roth
A bill co-authored by Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who died earlier this year, that would give Donald Trump broad authority to tariff Russia and its trading partners will be put forward for a vote this week in a high-stakes legislative battle that could provide new sanctioning authority to the US president at a crucial moment in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The bill is facing considerable pushback not only from Ukraine-sceptic Republicans, however, but also from prominent Democrats who say that the bill will give undue tariff power to the US president that could then be abused and turned against US allies.
Congressional staffers have described frenzied last-minute lobbying in the halls of Congress as the vote approached for what one Democratic staffer called the “one opportunity that we have to help Ukraine before they enter the slow winter”. The bill passed a vote in the House rules committee on Monday, and is due for a rule vote on the House floor on Tuesday afternoon, then a general vote on Wednesday.
The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 would target Russia’s energy and defense industries, as well as the country’s “shadow fleet” of tankers skirting existing oil sanctions, and would give Trump new authority to slap 100% tariffs on top purchasers of Russian oil, including China and India.
But Trump’s use of tariffs against US partners such as Canada and Mexico have made expanding his powers a controversial aim – even for senior Democrats who have been stalwart backers of Ukraine. They are led by the representative Gregory Meeks; the top Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee; the representative Don Beyer of Congress’s joint economic committee; and Richard Neal, the ranking Democrat on the House ways and means committee.
In a statement, they said the legislation would do “more harm than good”. “This bill would dramatically expand presidential tariff authorities while failing to mandate sanctions on Russia, both of which are unacceptable,” they said. “These flaws would raise Americans’ prices while undermining support for Ukraine in the long term.”
Six green card holders in Texas swept up in federal crackdown on illegal voting
Earlier on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas.
When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.
While six of those charged cast ballots in the 2024 general election, the impact of their votes was almost immeasurably small, given that two of them cast provisional ballots that were not counted, and 11,388,670 other Texans voted in that election.
Donald Trump, whose false claim that voting by non-citizens is rampant inspired the investigation, won the state by a margin of 1,558,347 votes over his nearest rival, Kamala Harris.
Of the four illegal votes that were apparently counted in error, three were cast by green card holders from Nigeria, India and Mexico, who might have wrongly thought they were eligible to vote, and just one by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.
Lawful permanent residents are not allowed to vote in federal elections, but they are permitted to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia and in some jurisdictions of three US states: California, Maryland and Vermont.
Still, the administration framed the criminal charges against the handful of ineligible voters in Texas as significant and even invited a Fox News crew to film the arrest of one of the green-card holders: a 27-year-old from Nigeria who allegedly voted in 2018, two years after becoming a lawful permanent resident.
The video was broadcast multiple times on the president’s favorite network on Tuesday.
“I was reliably told this never happens,” the Fox host Will Cain said with sarcasm after a report on the arrest. “We know now at least it’s happened seven times.”
Chris Stein
The House of Representatives shot down an attempt to impeach Donald Trump on Tuesday, though many Democrats supported keeping the effort alive.
By a 232-147 vote, with 47 lawmakers voting “present”, the chamber tabled the impeachment effort proposed by Democratic congressman Al Green, a fierce Trump critic who was censured by the House for disrupting a speech the president gave shortly after returning to the White House, and recently lost his primary. Green had proposed impeaching Trump over the killings of US citizens by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) during his second term, and accused the president of trying to create an “authoritarian regime”.
“President Trump has used ICE and CBP to suppress the First Amendment rights to free speech and a free press; violate the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and protections against unlawful searches and excessive force; and defy the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection by allowing and encouraging racially targeted arrests, unjustified detentions, and unjustified killings,” his resolution read.
The House impeached Trump twice during his first term, but the Senate acquitted him both times, and the question of whether to impeach him again is a sensitive one for Democrats as they eye a return to the majority in Congress in the November midterm elections. In advance of the vote, the party’s House leaders released a statement saying they would vote “present” on Green’s effort, effectively abstaining, saying that none of the investigative work necessary to successfully impeach the president has been done. They vowed to “continue our fight to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, while committing to holding the crooks accountable using every tool available to us beginning on day one.”
The motion to table Green’s resolution was supported by 213 Republican-aligned lawmakers and 18 Democrats, while 147 Democrats were opposed. The “present” votes included 46 Democrats and one Republican.
Trump says Kennedy Center will not be renovated at all unless his name is added to memorial for assassinated predecessor
Donald Trump is taking the ruling on Tuesday by a federal judge that his name can not be added, in any form, to the exterior of the Kennedy Center, which is a memorial to the late president, about as well as you might expect.
Writing on his social media platform, Trump said that adding his name to the memorial for the assassinated 35th US president was a non-negotiable demand and the performing arts center would be closed immediately and not renovated at all if the US supreme court did not intervene to overturn the order against that issued by district court judge Christopher Cooper.
After Cooper reiterated his previous ruling “that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone”, Trump wrote that the center would be closed immediately and what he described as “a very large and complex” renovation “cannot begin until such time as” Cooper’s ruling on the name is overturned by an appeals court.
“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump wrote, in his usual idiosyncratic style, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
The ruling by Cooper, who was nominated by former president Barack Obama, made it plain that he sees no scope for reconsidering his decision that adding Trump’s name would simply be illegal.
Four months ago, this Court declared that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone. It came to this conclusion for a simple reason: The federal law that created the Kennedy Center permitted no other result. In 1983, Congress amended that law to guarantee “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” 20 U.S.C. § 76j(b)(1). The Court ruled that the decision by the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees to rename the institution in honor of President Trump violated that congressional prohibition and others. And the Court ordered the permanent removal of the President’s name from the front portico of the main building, as well as any other physical or digital signage or official materials.
“Yet the drama at the Kennedy Center continues,” Cooper added, before barring the Trump-appointed board from enacting a resolution to add Trump’s name to the center’s facade, calling it the Trump Kennedy Center and also naming the plaza outside the center for Trump.
“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing ‘renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump’ on the main building or renaming the campus the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza.’ Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Donald Trump today blasted the supreme court’s ruling which blocked his long-sought executive order which curbs mail-in voting. The president called mail-in voting – which he has used on several occasions to cast a ballot – “a laughing stock” across the world. He has routinely claimed, without evidence, that the voting method is prone to fraud. “The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The president suggested that the justices he nominated for the bench – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are not “the people I interviewed to serve” but “merely a shell of their original selves”.
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Todd Blanche, the attorney general, defended the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order. “He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said at a White House press conference. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last.”
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Blanche also dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch, who is close to Putin, and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May. “The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”
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However, Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the Trump administration and Kremlev. Congressman Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests. More here
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Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, said that Congress has “been asleep at the wheel” when it comes to AI regulation. Sanders decried the speed of the technology’s evolution at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today. The senator has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, and said that the pledges this week from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry,” Sanders added.
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A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s Trump-appointed board to restore his name to the building. The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza”. Earlier, the board voted to immediately close the institution citing safety and financial concerns.
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And on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets. A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. More here
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Earlier, FBI director Kash Patel clashed with lawmakers in a Senate judiciary committee hearing over … bestiality (among other issues). Senators from both parties questioned Patel about his department lowering hiring standards for FBI applicants with certain background histories. This includes those who have had sexual encounters with sex workers, theft from an employer or engaging in acts of bestiality. On the last one, the FBI director claimed this only includes people who were “trafficked” into having sex with an animal. More here
Senate blocks consideration of major cryptocurrency regulation bill
Chris Stein
Senate Democrats just blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets.
A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. Financial disclosures released over the summer showed the president had made $1bn from crypto, even as his administration adopted policies favored by the industry.
Though the measure’s Republican backed argued the guardrails represented a major concession, they weren’t enough for Democrats, who declined to provide the votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster.
“All President Trump wants is for the Senate to give him time to crime, and I won’t support any piece of legislation that enables him,” Democratic senator Ruben Gallego said after the vote, which he said Republican leaders forced even as negotiations to address his party’s concerns with the bill were ongoing.
“This legislation failed squarely because Republicans refuse to say no to the president. It takes 60 votes to pass a bill, and instead of spending their time twisting themselves into knots to appease President Trump, Republicans should have worked more closely with Senate Democrats to craft a bill that could pass with strong ethics provisions.”
Fellow Senate Democrat Adam Schiff said: “After more than a year of intensive negotiations with my Senate Democratic colleagues, Republican counterparts and the White House, the administration has made clear it is not willing to reach a deal that would put an end to the president’s profiteering through digital assets.”
He didn’t shut the door on cryptocurrency regulation entirely, saying “I remain open to continuing to work to get an ethics deal that will be acceptable to the American people and crack down on corruption by any and all public officials.”
David Smith
Steve Bannon spoke immediately after Bernie Sanders at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington earlier today, though the populist pair did not share the stage.
Bannon, host of the War Room podcast, called for an aggressive economic and technological “quarantine” of China, demanding the immediate expulsion of Chinese nationals from US research laboratories, an end to the training of Chinese engineers and technologists and the total severance of capital flows.
“Did our fathers and grandfathers, did they underwrite the Soviet Union?” Bannon asked. “Did they train Soviet Union scientists? Did they take Russian kids over here to college to let them go to the best universities and get the best degree? Did they have Wall Street slobbering to do their deals? Did they have every bank there to lend them money quicker than to lend anyone in this audience?
“The answer is they did not. They stood up to the Soviet Union and the first thing to stand up to them was to choke them off and that’s what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist Party. No deals, no agreements, you’re out of the AI business because we’re going to shut your ecosystem down.”
Demanding immediate executive action to isolate Beijing’s tech sector, Bannon said: “No chips, no black marketing chips, no free ride off American technology, no steal on American tech… To hell with the Chinese Communist Party.”
Only then, Bannon argued, can the US have the time necessary to consider the proper regulation of the AI sector. He delivered a scathing verdict on major technology corporations and executives, accusing them of gambling with public safety for private profit.
Bannon accused Silicon Valley of seeking to “socialise all the risk with the American people including potential bailouts” while keeping all financial upside. “The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” Bannon said, praising grassroots campaigns that previously defeated federal pre-emption bills aimed at blocking state-level AI regulations.
Bannon has long praised Trump as a historic figure and endorsed his lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But on Tuesday, while claiming that executive action is required rather than legislation by Congress, he made only a glancing reference to the president who has dismissed AI concerns as a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy”.
Attorney general dismisses possible investigation into Russian oligarch who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding
Todd Blanche dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May.
A reminder that a ProPublica report revealed that Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling the multi-day event in the Bahamas.
Trump Jr and his wife, Bettina, later confirmed Kremlev’s contributions to the celebrations and characterized them as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend”.
Blanche, today, was resolute that there would be no follow-up.
“The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters at the White House today. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”
Blanche added: “It’s fun to talk about this issue and the rhetoric around it. But I think all the relevant people involved, the president and his kids, have already addressed it. I don’t have any information. I don’t know this person either, so I don’t have any information about it beyond that.”
A reminder that Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the administration and Kremlev. Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests.
Blanche also said today that he doesn’t anticipate any extra work from the justice department to help educate voters about mail-in voting, given the confusion around the practice as litigation ricocheted through the courts.
“I haven’t seen any suggestion or any information or heard from secretaries of state that that that’s an issue,” the attorney general claimed. “Ballots are confusing in every election. The way they’re distributed, the way they’re talked about, that’s something that the state and locals handle very well every single election cycle for one reason or another. So no, that doesn’t concern me.”