Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Very quickly, help us reach the people who really need these stories by clicking the ❤️ and restacking this newsletter. It only takes a second and helps immensely.
The White House just blocked reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday morning, hours after a federal judge ordered the administration to restore their credentials. In Ohio, a Republican senator is under fire over taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from a billionaire donor who was once Jeffrey Epstein’s former financial adviser. Election officials in Texas discovered that an error from a state agency left roughly 100,000 voter registration applications sitting unprocessed with the registration cutoff deadline less than two weeks away. And Democrats have filed a lawsuit to prevent the Trump administration from deploying armed federal agents to polling places in November.
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Trump Blocks Reporters from White House in Defiance of Judge’s Order
On Wednesday evening, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly — a Donald Trump appointee — ordered the White House to temporarily restore access to CNN, MS NOW and Politico while their First Amendment lawsuit continues to play out in court. Those are the three outlets Donald Trump banned from the building with a social media post last week.
But by this morning, it looked like White House security either didn’t get the message or just didn’t care about the ruling. All three outlets reported that their journalists were turned away when they presented their credentials.
Politico reported that one of its journalists was blocked from entering the White House and had his credentials seized by security. That happened despite the judge telling the Trump administration to allow those outlets’ reporters to keep their usual access while litigation unfolded.
CNN reported that reporter Betsy Klein and one of the network’s photojournalists were denied entry to the White House grounds around 6 AM with no explanation. One CNN producer did manage to get into the building using their pass, though the Associated Press also reported that a CNN journalist said she’d been blocked from entering out on Thursday morning. CNN said it would keep trying to get its employees inside the White House given the ruling.
MS NOW White House correspondent Laura Barrón-López told the Guardian that a Secret Service officer informed her that her press credentials were “still coming up as disabled” when he scanned them. He then confiscated her badge and told her she had to leave the premises.
Barrón-López added that she couldn’t tell whether this was a deliberate act of defiance against the court order or simply “incompetence or a lag in the system.” Either way, the White House is defying a federal judge’s order to let these reporters back in the building, which should mean the administration is in contempt of court.
When the Supreme Court told Richard Nixon in July of 1974 to hand over the Watergate tapes, he did. 16 days later, he resigned from office. That's what the rule of law should looks like in a free society. A sitting president shrugging off a federal judge and continuing to keep members of the press locked out is when we've stopped being a republic and become something else.
Swing State GOP Senator Dogged By Billionaire Donor’s Ties to Epstein
Les Wexner, the 89 year-old Ohio-based billionaire behind an empire of mall brands like Victoria’s Secret, has been a reliable donor to both parties for decades, especially in the Buckeye State. But now his name carries significant baggage, given that Wexner was once Jeffrey Epstein’s financial adviser.
Wexner’s ties to Epstein are now a major issue in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race, which may not only decide which party controls the chamber for the next two years, but could end up being the most expensive Senate contest of 2026.
The billionaire donor, who has made pains to distance himself from his former client, donated roughly $116,000 to Republican Senator Jon Husted between 2001 and 2025, going all the way back to when he was a state legislator. Husted has previously been speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives and a state senator before being elected secretary of state and lieutenant governor. Last year, Republican Governor Mike DeWine appointed him to fill Vice President JD Vance’s old Senate seat.
Former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, who is running against Husted in the general election, has made Wexner’s ties to Epstein a core piece of his campaign strategy. Brown has run at least three TV ads this cycle attacking Husted for accepting more political donations from Wexner than any other current member of Congress.
Brown’s campaign has highlighted a $3,500 check Wexner wrote to Husted in July 2025. That check came just 10 weeks before Husted joined almost every other Senate Republican in voting no to Democrats’ effort to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. One of Brown’s ads uses a segment from Wexner’s February deposition before a congressional panel, where he confirmed that he’d been a longtime donor to Jon Husted’s various campaigns.
Husted’s campaign accused Brown in its own ads for accepting money from people mentioned in the Epstein files. That list includes Wexner’s wife Abigail, former Treasury Secretary and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The Federal Election Commission database shows Brown never took money from Les Wexner , and none of the donors labeled as “Epstein associates” in Husted’s ads were accused of crimes.
Husted is also pushing back on Brown’s claim that he “voted to cover up the Epstein files.” A campaign spokesperson said “there has only been one vote” that actually matters, which was the November vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed the Senate unanimously. She defended the senator’s previous “no” vote as “procedural.” The Husted campaign also stated the senator gave the remaining money from Wexner money still in his account — which was roughly $34,300 — to an anti-human trafficking charity.
Wexner also testified under oath that he never personally lobbied Husted or anyone else to block the release of the files, and he’s insisted that he was “duped by a world-class con man.”
The Epstein issue remains front-and-center in Ohio. The Epstein Reading Room traveling exhibit, which displays more than three million pages of Justice Department files, is on tour and is scheduled to stop in Ohio on Oct. 7, less than a month before voters head to the polls.
David Garrett, who is executive director of the Institute for Primary Facts — the nonprofit organization behind the exhibit — told ABC News the group wants to “show these elected officials and the candidates that the public is interested in this topic, and the public is demanding justice for survivors and the public is demanding accountability, no matter how rich and powerful the perpetrators and enablers of these crimes are.”
Epstein survivor Annie Farmer has been traveling with the tour. She said she was just 16 years olf when Jeffrey Epstein first abused her and her sister Maria in the 1990s. Maria alleges she was assaulted in 1996 in New Albany, Ohio, where Epstein had a house while working for Wexner. While under oath, Wexner — who also lived in New Albany at the time — said he’d never heard of Maria Farmer until her name showed up in the news.
The fallout over Epstein is also showing up in several other key midterm races. In Texas, Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico met with Epstein survivors and criticized his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, for not doing the same. In Nebraska, independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn has accused Republican Senator Pete Ricketts for dragging his feet on supporting the release of the files.
Husted was recently heckled as a “pedophile protector” during a campaign stop at a coffee shop in Norwalk, Ohio. Early voting in the Buckeye State is in less than two weeks, and Brown is showing no signs of letting up on his attack.
Teddy Roosevelt warned Congress more than 120 years ago that corporate money pouring into campaigns would result in them buying the government itself, and two years later he banned those contributions outright. Annie Farmer is asking the same question today. When the most expensive Senate race in America is determined by a billionaire's checks were meant to buy, it shows how thoroughly that warning's been forgotten.
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Roughly 100,000 Texas Voter Registrations Went Unprocessed Due to State’s ‘Error’
With the midterm elections now just weeks away, election officials in Texas — whose high-profile Senate race could also decide control of the chamber — have discovered that roughly 100,000 voter registration applications have remained unprocessed due to an error by the Department of Public Safety (DPS).
Votebeat obtained an email sent to county officials confirming that DPS never sent along applications that voters submitted through its online driver’s license portal. State officials said the submissions in question produced incomplete records, which kept them from being passed along to various county registrars. They haven’t said when this error started, what information was missing from the applications, how many voters were affected or what even caused the problem what caused the problem.
According to KXAN reporter Adam Schwager, there were more than 40,000 voter registrations affected by the error in Collin County (part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area), 32,000 in Travis County (which houses the Democratic stronghold of Austin), 9,000 in Brazoria County (which lies south of Houston), 8,100 in Hays County and 5,000 in Cameron County. Schwager added those counties make up more than 12 percent of Texas’ population, and that if the rest of the state’s counties were affected by the error at similar rates, that could amount to as many as 750,000 registration applications that need to be processed before the cutoff.
That portal is important for Texas, as the state doesn’t currently offer standard online voter registration. But after several voting rights groups sued in September of 2020, Texans renewing a driver’s license or state ID or updating their address online have been able to register to vote through that portal. DPS officials told lawmakers last year that roughly six million Texans registered to vote using that portal between 2020 and 2024.
The secretary of state’s office discovered the issue last week, when county officials noticed a spike of “older” registration applications suddenly coming in from DPS through the state’s voter registration system. State elections director Christina Adkins told counties her agency was “actively investigating this issue to determine the source of these historical records.”
Adkins told VoteBeat on Tuesday that DPS had identified the incomplete records and that the state was working quickly to make sure the fixes that DPS made weren’t messing up daily files between now and Election Day.
Texas counties will now have to process those old applications without overwriting newer information that the affected voters may have submitted themselves since. The state says it can conduct that check for counties that work directly in its system. Counties that use their own software won’t be so lucky, and they’ll have to sort through the records themselves. This is all happening while the clock ticks down to the October 5 deadline.
Secretary of State office spokesperson Alicia Pierce insisted affected voters can still have their ballots counted. She stated that if an affected voter did register, their provisional ballot will still be counted.
Texas is not only electing a U.S. senator in November, but the Lone Star State is also deciding on who will be governor for the next four years. Incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott is currently in a tight reelection race against Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who has been slightly leading in recent polls.
Texas clung to its discriminatory poll tax until the 24th Amendment and the federal courts finally abolished in the 1960s. The lesson of that whole era was that you don't need a mob at the courthouse door to keep people from voting. Instead, a simple paperwork failure that leaves 100,000 registrations in the lurch two weeks before the deadline does the job just fine, whether it was intentional or not.
Dems Ask Court to Stop Trump from Sending Armed Agents to Polling Places
On Wednesday evening, Democrats petitioned a federal court to stop the Trump administration from sending armed federal agents to polling places during the November midterms. Plaintiffs include the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Governors Association. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, also joined the suit.
The lawsuit warns that the administration “stand[s] willing and able to send agents into polling places,” and points out that doing so would amount to illegal voter intimidation and would directly violate existing federal statute.
The Trump administration has repeatedly suggested the idea in public. The president himself has floated it on several occasions. Attorney General Todd Blanche has also publicly endorsed sending federal agents to the polls. Earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could conduct arrests at polling places. And this week, FBI Director Kash Patel told a Senate panel under oath that any suggestion he wouldn’t send FBI agents to voting sites was “just another lie.”
The Democrats are demanding a court order to prevent armed officers from being anywhere “in the vicinity of open polling places, including drop boxes, curbside voting locations” or any site where ballots are collected, counted or certified. They filed the suit requesting those protections from the time early voting starts all the way through the post-election ballot-curing period.
Plaintiffs pointed to a current federal law that bars anyone “in the civil… service of the United States” from sending armed or agents or military personnel to polling places. Democrats also referenced Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which expressly prohibits the government from engaging in voter intimidation.
“[D]ispatching armed federal agents to the polls — or even threatening to do so — is forbidden by federal law,” the lawsuit read. They insisted that voters shouldn’t be arrested or even approached at the ballot box as that has the potential to scare them away from expressing their constitutional rights.
Democrats have plenty of reason to file this lawsuit. Since Trump’s second inauguration, his DHS has spearheaded aggressive ICE crackdowns, including a two-month stretch in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Federal agents have killed immigrants, bystanders and protesters alike. This could mean naturalized U.S. citizens could think twice about showing up to vote in person if armed federal agents are there.
“[B]ecause no voter can know in advance whether agents will be waiting at his or her polling place, the Polling Place Policy chills voting everywhere, not only where ICE and FBI agents actually appear,” the lawsuit read.
This is just the latest legal challenge. Last week, civil rights groups, labor unions and the NAACP filed a separate lawsuit, arguing that the administration’s ICE raids and rhetoric about immigrants have already created an atmosphere of intimidation around the midterm election.
The law those Democrats are leaning on was written all the way back in February of 1865 in the final weeks of the Civil War, by a Congress that understood an armed man standing near a ballot box is a clear threat no matter the color of their uniform. 160 years later, we're back in federal court asking a judge to enforce that same law. That alone should tell you exactly how far the ground has shifted under this democracy.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. If you haven’t yet, tap the ❤️ and hit restack so we can get these stories in front of more readers.
