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“Billionaire investor Leon Black, who for years paid Jeffrey Epstein for tax and financial advice, is facing scrutiny over his relationship with the late convicted sex offender after walking out of a closed-door interview with House investigators last month,” PBS reports.
“Black refused to answer questions about nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) he signed with women less than an hour into questioning.”
CBS News: House panel probing Epstein asked Leon Black about birthday book, their friendship.
“Donald Trump’s social media company has discussed charging Wall Street traders and investment firms as much as U.S.$100,000 a month for faster access to the U.S. president’s posts on his Truth Social platform, according to people familiar with the matter,” Reuters reports.
“Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, has in recent weeks also pitched a discounted plan of U.S.$60,000 per month if the firms sign up for a three-year plan.”
“Mike Lindell is running for governor in Minnesota, but he isn’t even registered to vote there,” Mediaite reports.
“Lindell scored President Donald Trump’s endorsement on Wednesday and has maintained a small lead in the polls.”
“AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, appeared on Friday to have cut off contributions on its political web portal to House Democrats who voted this week to end U.S. aid to Israel, punishing them financially for a stance it strongly opposed,” the New York Times reports.
“That group included 15 House Democrats whom AIPAC had endorsed for re-election in November.”
“Newly-declassified documents touted by President Donald Trump during his address on election security Thursday cast doubt on some of his claims about ‘shocking vulnerabilities’ in the country’s election infrastructure,” ABC News reports.
“While Trump claimed during his address that the nation’s election systems are vulnerable to ‘hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,’ the intelligence reports released by the White House concluded overall that the main infrastructure used to conduct elections in the United States ‘would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.'”
CNN: What Trump’s newly declassified documents do – and don’t – say about threats to U.S. elections.
“Nebraska Senate candidate Cindy Burbank secured the Democratic nomination in May. On Friday, she submitted a request to the office of Nebraska’s secretary of state to be taken off the ballot — but a legal challenge could ensue,” NOTUS reports.
“Burbank’s campaign website says she ran to ensure that Sen. Pete Ricketts, the incumbent Republican, could not prop up a ‘stooge’ Democratic candidate in William Forbes, an anti-abortion pastor who voted for President Donald Trump. By announcing plans to drop out, Burbank hoped to clear a path for independent candidate Dan Osborn, who received the state Democratic party’s endorsement and has the best chance to beat Ricketts in November.”
“President Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada Friday after the northern neighbor’s raging wildfires caused hazardous air quality from Minnesota to North Carolina,” the New York Post reports.
Said Trump: “We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein.”
“The Trump administration notified Israel it is sending dozens more refueling planes to the country ahead of a potential expansion of military operations against Iran, three U.S. and Israeli officials said,” Axios reports.
“Why it matters: After he was presented with several new military plans in a Situation Room meeting Tuesday, President Trump is considering a massive offensive in Iran that would be wider in scope than the current strikes around the Strait of Hormuz.”
Bloomberg: Fears mount of U.S. and Iran escalation after sixth day of clashes.
New York Times: “In their early months, both wars were fueled by a novel military strategy that rose to prominence after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It posited that by simultaneously attacking with precision weapons on multiple fronts, the U.S. military could paralyze its enemy and achieve a swift, low-casualty victory.”
“As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars dragged on, the military’s faith in this new approach began to wane. By 2007, a new theory of warfare — summed up in the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine — took hold.”
“The strategy preached that too much firepower, poorly applied, would only produce more enemies.”
Wall Street Journal: “The Pentagon has spent the past few months amassing a small army of bankers, consultants and hired specialists. Their stated task: vet contractors’ operations, invest in production lines and more quickly expand the U.S. military arsenal.”
“At the military’s Office of Strategic Capital, officials plan to lend more than $200 billion over the coming years. They are targeting companies in more than 30 sectors, from missile production to telecom networks. Lending targets need not directly serve the military as long as their business is considered important to national security.”
“Deploying that massive sum is a daunting task for the four-year-old office, which lent no funds before 2025. Pentagon officials say that Wall Street specialists will help open the spigot.”
“When President Trump tried to undermine and overturn the election results in 2020, he ran into stiff pushback — not just in the courts, but from many officials in his own government,” the New York Times reports.
“He made sure there would be little room for such dissent when he returned to the White House. Those seeking to join Mr. Trump’s second administration had to pass a key litmus test: Did they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump?”
“With like-minded allies now positioned in key roles throughout the government, Mr. Trump has trained the full arsenal of the federal government on one of his most persistent obsessions: sowing doubt about the security of the country’s election systems.”
“House GOP leaders released text Friday for a bill to fund the vast majority of the federal government from the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1 until after the midterm elections — bypassing the bipartisan appropriations process and daring Democrats to pick a shutdown fight months before voters head to the polls,” Politico reports.
”Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday he plans to put the legislation on the floor next week.”
Axios: Mike Johnson’s government funding gambit.
“Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials on Friday with prison time if they did not comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to change election policies, while reiterating many of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the security of American elections,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Mullin pledged to ‘dig in just a little bit deeper’ than a prime-time speech that Mr. Trump gave on Thursday, when the president claimed without concrete evidence that American elections were rife with ‘hacking, manipulation and corruption.’ The secretary largely stuck to similar talking points, repeating the president’s unverified claim that the government had found hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls in at least four states. Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Mullin offered any specifics on how they derived those numbers, and officials in at least two of the states said their voter rolls were properly maintained.”
“Mr. Mullin also repeated claims that foreign actors could exploit vulnerabilities identified in election systems to change votes, despite offering no evidence that such a breach has ever occurred.”
The Guardian: DHS secretary doubles down on Trump’s baseless 2020 election claims.
“President Donald Trump said he’s urged Sen. Darline Graham, the younger sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, to run in South Carolina’s upcoming special primary and pledged his ‘complete and total endorsement’ if she enters the race to take her brother’s spot on the ballot,” CNN reports.
CBS News: Darline Graham in serious discussions about running for Lindsey Graham’s seat.
“Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School who worked to craft the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, will not appear before the House Oversight Committee for his scheduled transcribed interview Monday,” Politico reports.
“Fighting between the U.S. and Iran has expanded, with the American military striking a broader range of targets and moving jet fighters into the Middle East while Tehran launches attacks across the Persian Gulf,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The fighting is focused on control of the Strait of Hormuz but this round raises the risk of a return to a larger war. The U.S. is hitting bridges and other targets in Iran’s interior to increase pressure across Iran to force an end to attacks on Gulf shipping, after a deal to open the waterway collapsed last week. Iran has responded with broader and deadlier attacks.”
“A return to a wider conflict would put upward pressure on oil prices—which have already risen more than 10% this week—and weigh on the global economy, risks President Trump has made clear concern him. Iran also faces a massive rebuilding challenge and a population deeply unhappy with the government.”
“But down the road, there’s no chance that Senator Fetterman could win a Democratic primary — you just understand that. And Democrats need to understand: if the Senate comes back 50-50 after the election, and there is a reasonable chance that could happen, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Fetterman switches. Because if he wants to return to the Senate, he’d have a chance to win a Republican primary in Pennsylvania.”
— James Carville, in an interview on CNN, saying it’s inevitable that Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) switches parties.
“Josh Shapiro is making his biggest midterm play yet — with a likely eye on 2028,” Politico reports.
“The Pennsylvania governor is pouring $3.3 million into a coordinated campaign launching this weekend to help Democrats in the nation’s biggest swing state flip four congressional seats and secure a governing trifecta in Harrisburg for the first time in three decades.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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