Breaking: MAGA Election Denier to Pay for His Own Public Humiliation

Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.

An active-duty Air Force major who went on cable news and directly accused Donald Trump of violating the Constitution was arrested less than 24 hours later, making that the second time he’s been arrested for upholding his oath. Senate Republicans are quietly panicking that the growing backlash against data centers could cost them a crucial Senate seat in a reliably red state. A Department of Justice whistleblower is now saying the DOJ’s antisemitism probes into Ivy League schools were pretext to shake down colleges Trump doesn’t like. And failed Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and pillow magnate Mike Lindell says he’ll spend up to a million dollars of his own money proving what everyone already knows: he lost fair and square.

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Air Force Officer Arrested Again After Calling Out Trump’s Corruption

Major Jason Watson is a 17-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force. In July, he was arrested on the Capitol steps while calling for Donald Trump and JD Vance to be impeached over the Iran war. He even did it in full uniform, with a sign that read “Impeach. Convict. Remove.”

Watson recently sat down with CNN’s Erin Burnett and told her the president is “violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption.” He said Trump is “killing Americans” and called it unacceptable.

One day after that interview, Watson was arrested yet again. He’s now in pretrial confinement in Maryland. The Air Force says it’s over “allegations of continued misconduct,” but it won’t elaborate further.

Watson’s own attorney thinks the timing is particularly notable. A service member goes on national television, criticizes the commander-in-chief, and gets handcuffed within 24 hours.

Watson knew the risk going in, telling Burnett that nothing worthwhile is free, and that everything worth doing comes with a cost. That’s an airman putting his career, his pension, and his freedom all on the line to say publicly what many service members are probably thinking but too scared to say out loud. And the response from the institution he serves was to throw him in confinement. This also feels like a great time to remind everyone that while an airman upholding his oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic has been arrested twice, while no one named in the Epstein files has been arrested so far.

And here's why the Framers put the oath in Article Six of the Constitution instead of leaving it to whoever happened to be in charge. They bound every officer of this country to the document itself, never to a man, because they'd just finished fighting a war against the alternative. A government that jails somebody for keeping that oath has already surrendered the thing the oath was written to protect.

Republicans Fear Data Center Backlash Will Cost Them a Key Senate Seat

An internal memo from Republicans’ Senate campaign arm that was recently leaked to ABC News shows the GOP is genuinely worried that Republican Senator John Husted of Ohio is in danger of losing reelection to Democrat Sherrod Brown. Their own internal polling shows Husted in a dead heat in a state Trump comfortably won just two years ago. Husted’s biggest obstacle isn’t inflation or the war, but AI data centers.

Brown has made his opposition to data centers a core piece of his campaign. The Republican memo begrudgingly admits Brown’s rhetoric is brutally effective, saying Husted’s support for data centers is an “anchor” hanging around his neck. The memo even warns that if Husted loses and the defining narrative is that data centers were to blame, politicians across the country will avoid them like the plague.

The reason for all the data center hate in Ohio is pretty clear. The Buckeye State already has more than 200 data centers, which is the fifth most for any state in the country. These facilities are known to eat up valuable farmland, guzzle freshwater resources and put a sever strain strain power grids all for a negligible number of long-term jobs relative to their size. And this is all while Ohioans are watching their utility bills continue to climb.

Husted has tried proposing rules that would require data center operators pay for their own power. Ohio’s GOP governor also paused new tax breaks for the AI data center industry in May. But none of that has shaken Ohioans’ perception that Husted gave Big Tech corporations a free ride while making everyday residents pay more.

Trump is still all-in on data centers, telling anyone who will listen that local officials should welcome data centers because of the jobs and additional property tax revenue. He did however admit that the industry could use “a little public relations help.” He’s not wrong: a Gallup poll from earlier this year found 71 percent of Americans oppose new data centers in their own backyard.

Outside of Ohio, Democratic governors in New York and Pennsylvania have signed orders limiting data center construction. And even in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott — who is in a tight reelection race of his own — ordered an audit of data centers and paused new grid approvals after facing pressure over utility prices. Voters across the country are united against an effort that promised jobs and prosperity and instead delivered higher utility bills and dirty water.

We've broken this pattern before. Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act in 1935 to tear apart the utility trusts that had rigged the whole system so insiders collected the profits and ordinary families paid the freight. The lesson from 1935 is the lesson right now, which is that when an entire industry needs the government to keep hiding its costs from the public, the problem was never public relations.

DOJ Whistleblower Says Trump’s Antisemitism Crusade Was Pretext to Defund Universities

A longtime career Department of Justice civil rights attorney named Haley Van Erem has went public with a whistleblower complaint to Congress. She’s arguing that the Trump administration’s antisemitism probes last year targeting Ivy League universities like Harvard, Brown, and Columbia were all a pretext for Trump’s political retribution agenda.

The complaint comes just days after a federal judge tossed out the DOJ’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard. The judge found the allegations relied on incidents that were, in his words, too isolated and episodic to prove Harvard committed systematic violations of civil rights law.

Brown and Columbia didn’t fight back and instead settled with the DOJ. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million over a three-year period while Brown agreed to put $50 million toward workforce development in Rhode Island. Neither university admitted to any wrongdoing.

According to the whistleblower complaint, the administration was inspired to go after the universities after a New York Post article about antisemitism at medical school graduation ceremonies went viral. In most presidential administrations, a single article isn’t enough to trigger a federal civil rights investigation. Not for this one.

Van Erem’s complaint alleges that when investigators found no actual civil rights violations at Brown University, a top Trump administration official in the Department of Health and Human Services quietly agreed but said there was “no way” they’d let that conclusion stand. Instead, officials pushed hard for a settlement until they eventually got one.

Van Erem added that DOJ investigators were told to interview Middle Eastern studies professors — particularly Muslim faculty members — not as a part of a fact-finding mission but just to see if they’d say anything revealing. That sounds a lot more like a fishing expedition than an honest inquiry.

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told the head of the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division that her office was committing “large-scale fraud.” He acknowledged that while there can be antisemitism on college campuses, the DOJ’s probe was a political operation aimed at harassing professors, chilling free speech and stripping universities of federal grants they’d already applied for and earned fair and square.

Van Erem left the DOJ last year because she didn’t want to participate in what she calls politically motivated investigations built on nothing. She’s now asking three separate inspectors general across the federal government to get to the bottom of the matter.

Back in 1957, in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court threw out a contempt conviction against a professor whom a state attorney general had hauled in to answer for the content of a lecture. The Court's warning was that scholarship withers in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, and that atmosphere is precisely what this administration set out to manufacture.

Election Denier Mike Lindell to Pay for His Own Public Humiliation

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who is a longtime 2020 election denier, recently lost Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary by more than 45,000 votes in a double-digit blowout. In Minnesota, candidates only get an automatic recount if the winner’s margin of victory is under a quarter of a percentage point. Lindell’s margin isn’t anywhere close to that, which means that he has to fund his own recount if he wants one.

Lindell still hasn’t conceded his race and said he’s willing to pay for a recount from his own pockets. He’s aware that such an effort could cost anywhere from $825,000 to as much as $1 million once he factors in hiring investigators and hiring observers to witness recount efforts firsthand.

The pillow manufacturer’s financial state is already questionable, given that he was reportedly late paying approximately $48,000 in property taxes last year. He also still owes voting machine company Smartmatic more than $56,000 from a defamation judgment, which has accrued daily fines the longer he refuses to pay it. A jury also ruled against him in his lawsuit against a Dominion Voting Systems, putting him on the hook for another $2.3 million. Dominion itself sued Lindell for $1.3 billion before reaching a confidential settlement in July.

Lindell claims this recount isn’t really about his own campaign, but rather a “gateway” to eliminating electronic voting machines. This is of course the same conspiracy theory that’s already ruined him financially with both millions of dollars in court judgments and declining MyPillow sales.

Trump endorsed Lindell’s campaign, and said during a recent gala at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club that nobody has worked harder for “free and fair elections.” This is obviously due to Trump and Lindell’s shared belief that Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election despite dozens of court rulings — including ones issued by federal judges Trump himself appointed — saying otherwise.

Robert La Follette pushed Wisconsin to adopt the country's first statewide direct primary in 1903 for one reason, which was to take the choice of nominees away from party bosses in back rooms and hand it to ordinary voters. Lindell just lost one of those primaries by eleven points, and now he wants to spend a million dollars convincing people that the machinery of self-government can't be trusted.

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