Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing eight articles of impeachment scathingly and painstakingly detailed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) inside a 34-page resolution.

Three of those articles allege violations of the War Powers Resolution by waging an undeclared war against Iran.

From there, the resolution blames Hegseth for setting the stage for the bombing that killed more than 120 children in Minab by ignoring laws meant to minimize civilian casualties, engaging in the extrajudicial killing of more than 220 people, suppressing the free speech of his political opponents, kidnapping a foreign sovereign leader, and fighting an unlawful war in Yemen.

Here’s what to know.

Articles I-III: War Powers Resolution

The resolution accuses Hegseth of violating three separate sections of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 in his waging of the Iran War.

Professor Jamie Rowen, who teaches legal studies and international law at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, called these three articles a striking affirmation of congressional power that Massie’s predecessors allowed to fall into disuse.

“I have never seen something so formal that actually tries to assert Congress's authority to declare war,” she noted.

Calling it a “really compelling political document,” Rowen added: “Even if presidents have gone against this over the past many decades, I saw it as an assertion of congressional authority that would rebalance power between the branches of government.”

Citing the three separate provisions of the law underlines the president’s obligation to seek reauthorization even after receiving Congress’s permission.

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Article IV: Ignoring Laws That Minimize Civilian Casualties

More than 120 children died in the U.S. strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran.

Hegseth paved the way for this tragedy through his contempt for the rules of engagement, this article alleges.

“He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that effected the systemic deterioration and removal of Department of Defense infrastructure that Congress had mandated by law to limit collateral damage to civilians and non-military objects during military operations,” the resolution states. “While doing so, Secretary Hegseth also cultivated a war-making culture at the Department of Defense which he boasts as being dismissive of ‘stupid rules of engagement’ with preference for ‘maximum lethality, not tepid legality.’”

Professor Rowen opined that this was perhaps the “most important article of impeachment” for her as a scholar of international law.

“It educates the public about the fact that there was a specialized agency within the Department of Defense that was designed to protect civilians — and that Congress intended to have that,” she said.

Among the actions cited in the resolution, Hegseth sought to repeal a law creating civilian-protection systems and reversed implementation of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan.

“Basically, Hegseth — through his actions in defunding those agencies, through his statements about not following international law and through firing the lawyers — says we will openly violate international law,” Rowen said. “And Massey is saying, I believe that is an impeachable offense.”

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Article V: Extrajudicial Killings

The United States has killed at least 221 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, purporting to justify the attacks by claiming that the victims were suspected drug traffickers.

Rep. Massey’s resolution calls the program illegal and anathema to a civilized society.

“Secretary Hegseth arrogated to himself and the Executive Branch the roles of judge, jury, and executioner and asserted a unilateral power to determine who may live and who may die,” the resolution states. “Such a power is foreign to the rule of law, repugnant to the legal traditions and fundamental values of the United States and the Western world, and contrary to United States law and customary international law.”

Professor Rowen sees Massey’s “tea party bona fides” shining through this article of impeachment.

“So what Pete Hegseth did was direct people to murder people on boats in the Caribbean, and Thomas Massey lays it out,” Rowen said.

By designating suspected drug traffickers as terrorists, Rowen said: “The military was able to designate these people murderable, and that goes against domestic law. It goes against international law.”

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Article VI: Suppressing Free Speech

On the surface, this article of impeachment is about Hegseth’s attempt to retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) for accurately reminding members of the military and the intelligence community that they have a right and obligation to refuse illegal orders.

As the author of the book “Worthy of Justice,” Professor Rowen said that this article of impeachment is about something much broader: respect for the troops and veterans.

“They sacrificed themselves for this country,” Rowen said. “To treat a veteran the way that Pete Hegseth treated Mark Kelly is so dishonorable.”

Kelly won his First Amendment lawsuit seeking to block retaliation by the Pentagon for his protected speech, and a criminal prosecution against him and five other lawmakers collapsed before a grand jury.

But she noted that Hegseth’s “contempt for freedom of speech” extends much farther than his failed attempt to silence the Arizona senator, Navy captain and astronaut.

“There was a massive walkout by all media outlets because they were asked to basically sign an oath of fealty — again, contrary to our freedom of association and freedom of press — to say that they would not speak to people who were disclosing information the Pentagon didn't officially approve of,” Rowen said.

A federal judge rebuked that attempt, too.

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Article VII: Kidnapping of a Foreign Sovereign Leader

Rep. Massie’s account of the raid that abducted Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York for prosecution is blistering.

“Using the powers of his office, Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth directed the Department of Defense to carry out an unprecedented military operation — code-named ABSOLUTE RESOLVE — to capture and kidnap President Nicolas Maduro, the leader of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Venezuela — an act of war against a sovereign country executed under the guise of narcotics law enforcement, though in actuality intended to assert U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil reserves,” this article begins.

Professor Rowen marveled at the language used by the highly conservative tea party stalwart.

“It's amazing it wasn't written by a pink-hatted, self-declared woke person,” she said.

Politics aside, Rowen found that the pronouncement was “important.”

“It says that international law matters, and that the United States following international law matters, and that the Secretary of Defense breaking international law matters, and that holding him to account through impeachment is an answer to that,” she said. “No one else is holding him to account for that behavior. There isn’t an international court that is going to do something about this, and so to actually look at accountability through the domestic impeachment process is another lever of power that I’m impressed Massey is using.”

Article VIII: Unlawful War in Yemen

The final article of impeachment against Hegseth foregrounds a global conflict that has received scant media coverage.

“Using the powers of his office, Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth directed the Department of Defense in a manner leading to the deaths of an estimated 224 civilians, as well as approximately 500 to 600 Houthi fighters, through the initiation and direction of Operation Rough Rider,” the resolution states. “The operation comprised more than 1,100 strikes against targets in Yemen over approximately 52 days. In less than eight weeks, there were nearly as many civilian deaths in Yemen as United States military actions had caused in that country during the preceding twenty-three years.”

The resolution details conversations between Hegseth and senior Trump officials about the operation.

According to the resolution, Vice President J.D. Vance, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and then-Acting Chief of Staff to the National Security Advisor Joe Kent all favored delaying the operation, finding no imminent threat to the United States, but Hegseth pushed ahead in order to establish “deterrence.”

“Even though there is no protecting Americans to do it, we are just going to use force to show force,” Rowen said. “This is the reason we have international law to rein in people like that.”

Read the resolution here, and watch the full interview at the top of this newsletter.

So observed during a Substack Live conversation earlier today about Attorney General Todd Blanche’s threats to investigate Democratic lawmakers who try to hold Donald Trump’s allies accountable. Trump demanded action, and Blanche paid lip service to it, before quickly retreating from that language.

During a wide-ranging conversation, Dave Aronberg and I discussed the type of investigations Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) may have had in mind when he warned Trump officials to “lawyer up.” (Learn more about the possible congressional investigation into now-former chief of staff Susie Wiles here.)

We also unpacked the significance of the fourth high-profile resignation from the Trump Justice Department in less than a week and delved into the articles of impeachment that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Totaling 34-pages, the impeachment resolution is comprised of eight articles. Massie accused Hegseth of three violations of the War Powers Resolution in Iran, ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties, engaging in extrajudicial killings, suppressing free speech, kidnapping a foreign sovereign leader (i.e. Nicolás Maduro), and leading an unlawful war in Yemen.

All Rise News will have more detailed coverage of the impeachment effort this week.

Read the resolution here.

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The top civil attorney for the Trump Justice Department who spearheaded the defense of illegal tariffs and the administra…

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The history-making outcomes of the 2026 midterm elections are almost too many to count.

For the first time since 1932, the state of Kansas will send a Democrat to the Senate: Adam Hamilton. Senator-elect Annie Andrews will be the first Democratic senator for South Carolina in nearly three decades. Senator-elect Troy Jackson of Maine has ended the three-decade political career of outgoing Sen. Susan Collins, and James Talarico will be the first Democratic senator to represent Texas since the 1980s.

Then, there may be the biggest shocker of all in Mississippi, where Scott Colom is on track to unseat Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

To quote the late, great Nina Simone, in a very different context, “Mississippi Goddam.”

Colom would be the first Black senator elected in that state since 1875, and he’s already flipped a county named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate General, slave trader and founder and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His emotional, must-watch closing ad showed him visiting the home of Medgar Evars, the assassinated civil rights activist.

If Colom wins, and it’s looking increasingly likely, it will be important to study what helped lead to his victory beyond the nationwide rebuke to Donald Trump.

A former prosecutor, Colom had been on track to be nominated for a federal judgeship in 2023, but Hyde-Smith blocked his nomination. Colom is now on the cusp of unseating her, and one of his party’s most recognized leaders, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, reportedly recognized from early on that Colom could secure that outcome. There are likely several reasons for that, including Colom’s talent, nationwide backlash to the Iran War, and a referendum on the corruption of Trump, his family and his enablers.

On the legal front, Colom hammered one issue repeatedly on the campaign trail: Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional tariffs.

Check out a video breakdown about how Colom seized upon voter outrage about the second-order effects of Trump’s tariffs on Legal AF’s All Rise News playlist.

Paid subscribers can watch it — and other videos — ad-free below.

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Harmeet Dhillon went from Trump’s 2020 election denier to 2026 election interference operative, losing all 27 civil actions to compel states to turnover their voter rolls that were adjudicated. During her brief tenure, she criminally charged journalist Don Lemon for reporting on a public protest, and she failed to indict Cassidy Hutchinson for daring to testify against her boss. She led a division of the agency dedicated to the protection of civil rights, but now, she’s gone — reportedly, not entirely of her own volition. (CBS reports that Trump didn’t like Dhillon’s performance on “60 Minutes.”)

Ex-U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones led what may have been the silliest criminal investigations in Justice Department history — in essence, a MAGA conspiracy theory positing that Barack Obama, James Comey, James Clapper, John Brennan and a host of other Trumpian scapegoats colluded with the rest of the Deep State in a plot against the President. More than 130 subpoenas have been wasted chasing this phantasm and four prosecutors to date have left as the probe failed to launch, including its now-former leader.

They’re the first two defections. At least two other senior officials have followed. More are certain to come.

During a Substack Live conversation, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said that they may be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

“Their abuse of the rule of law while they were in the department and they could go the way of Donald Trump’s first batch of dirty lawyers who he set on attacking the results of the 2020 election in court, and they went down in flames,” Glenn Kirschner noted.

What does accountability look like for the MAGA lawyers leaving the Trump DOJ?

Watch our full conversation at the top of this newsletter.

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Michael posed that question to me about the cascade of high-level departures and defections following the Democratic Party’s blowout of Trump’s Republican Party during the midterm elections.

Indeed, I was.

Here are three of the most high-profile exits to date — save for ex-Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, whose ouster wasn’t announced at the time of our conversation:

• Harmeet Dhillon, the ex-Trump election lawyer who gave the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division an Orwellian inversion, left after losing 27 consecutive voter roll cases and making “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” a target of her agency rather than its objective.

• Ex-U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, the architect of the so-called grand conspiracy investigation, had his office send out more than 130 subpoenas in pursuit of Trump’s enemies, only to see the probe in shambles as three other prosecutors quit. Now, he’s gone, too.

• John Eisenberg was the former assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s national security division, which was part of John Bolton’s prosecution. He was also involved in the White House’s handling of Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelensky during his first term’s Ukraine scandal, Politico reported.

Check out our conversation about the speed of these changes at the top of this newsletter.

For more of Popok’s solo analysis, you can watch the full video on the Legal AF website.

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Winter is coming for Donald Trump’s Department of Revenge after a shellacking in the midterm elections, and the government knows it.

Exhibit A for that proposition is the sudden departure of Harmeet Dhillon, the former Trump campaign lawy…

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Shortly after the American people delivered a resounding judgm…

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The Donald Trump era is over.

After a historic midterm thrashing, the U.S. Congress that Steve Bannon compared to the Russian Duma will no longer be a rubber stamp for his authoritarianism. Democrats have a commanding majority in the House, where they will hold the power of the purse, and a strong majority in the Senate, where they will decide who qualifies for a lifetime judgeship.

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war and levy taxes like tariffs. Trump usurped that power, and his party didn’t care. The next Congress might not be so blithe.

Then, there’s subpoena power: Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the soon-to-be chairman of the House Oversight Committee who co-led the Epstein investigation, appeared to be downright giddy about using it.

“Lawyer up,” Garcia wrote in his two-word statement reacting to Trump’s electoral rout.

With impeccable timing, Trump’s lawyers will head to court a day and a half after his electoral rout to try to erase his other verdict: the 34 felony convictions dealt to him by a unanimous New York jury for business fraud for covering up hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in order to influence an election.

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‘That was the mandate’

On Capitol Hill, Trump can expect relentless investigations of himself, his family and his staff.

Democratic members of the House and Senate dug into Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, but now they have subpoena power. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) didn’t have that when he pursued a follow-the-money probe that traced Epstein’s assets in New York, Florida, Eastern Europe, Russia and around the world, but Wyden no longer needs a willing Republican to help him pull that thread.

Exit polls showed that corruption was the top issue for midterm voters, and the Democrats will read that as a mandate to investigate Trump’s many self-enrichment schemes, including his more than $1.5 billion cryptocurrency business, pay-for-pardon pipeline, gifts from foreign governments, and corporate bounties for his personal projects.

“That was the mandate because people were tired of the corruption,” former Florida State Attorney told All Rise News. “Even though Trump himself has unprecedented immunity from the Supreme Court, his family, his friends, and members of his administration do not.”

Then, there’s Trump family members and cronies. Elon Musk will likely become the poster boy for money in politics after his $500 million bet on Republican candidates went up in smoke, and a long-awaited reckoning could be coming for his gutting of the federal workforce under DOGE and SpaceX’s throttling of Starlink to undermine Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s illegal war.

There is no shortage of other scandals for Democrats to investigate: Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev footed the bill for the multimillion-dollar wedding bash for Donald Trump Jr. in the Bahamas. Don Jr.’s ex-fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle reportedly asked a Trump donor to pay off her $100,000 American Express debt in return for favors. Ex-Trump lawyer Alina Habba received $50 million to allegedly help a Venezuelan billionaire get a pardon. (Habba and Guilfoyle deny the allegations.)

According to reports, Trump is fuming at Habba over those reports — because he didn’t receive a cut of the money, not because of any concerns of unseemly foreign influence peddling.

Meanwhile, Habba’s new husband Turhan Mildon — a Turkish tycoon who’s close to his country’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan — has been feuding with ex-Trump envoy Ric Grenell over a missing multimillion-dollar donation to the Kennedy Center. Habba accused Grenell of stealing the money, and investigative reporting traced the donation from a Congolese government account. Mr. Mildon serves as an advisor to Congo’s president.

So far, Trump’s so-called border czar Tom Homan has kept dodging Congress members’ questions about the $50,000 in a paper bag that he accepted during an FBI sting operation, but now his cooperation won’t be the only avenue for his questioners to get to the truth.

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‘Truth serum’

Before the election, Trump floated the idea of mass pardons to the New York Post’s columnist Miranda Devine.

“Everybody who worked for you?” Devine asked.

“I would not even think about it. I’d do it,” Trump replied. “I did it for J6.”

Even setting aside his boast about his clemency for Jan. 6th insurrectionists and cop assailants, Trump’s announcement could easily backfire if he follows through with it.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Aronberg said, explaining that such a move would complicate any plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment. “If you start pardoning people, it could end up becoming a truth serum in a later congressional hearing.”

As of press time, Democrats hold at least 54 Senate seats and are expected to pick up roughly 250 seats in the House of Representatives. The House requires a simple majority for impeachment, but a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate is required for removal.

The Trump Justice Department still has not withdrawn an appeal seeking to block any certification of any Senate victory by Democratic candidate Mary Peltola. A district court judge dismissed the original lawsuit, and it is widely expected to fail on appeal — if the race itself doesn’t make the lawsuit moot. Shockingly, Democratic candidate Scott Colom holds a narrow lead over the GOP incumbent in deep-red Mississippi, and mail ballots are expected to keep coming in until Tuesday. A Supreme Court ruling from earlier this year allowed the counting of late arriving ballots in that state and could contribute to one of the midterm’s biggest upsets.

That could be enough to impose real restraints on Attorney General Todd Blanche’s targeting of Trump’s political enemies. House Democrats already have an investigation of a whistleblower’s complaint reporting that local prosecutors were pressured to rush through a case against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Majority status will allow them to investigate that rather than simply request information.

If Blanche continues doing Trump’s vindictive bidding, Aronberg believes that impeachment will become more plausible.

“Blanche […] is going to read the room, and I think that you'll see fewer of these,” Aronberg predicted.

Before becoming Attorney General, Blanche served as Trump’s defense attorney alongside Emil Bove during the New York criminal trial. Trump retained different appellate attorneys from the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Meanwhile, Blanche — who lost the original case in court — will almost certainly brace himself for a new era of checks and balances in Washington, as his successors try to erase the criminal record of his boss.

Look out for live coverage of Trump’s appeal tomorrow on All Rise News.

Is the Trump era over? What investigations come next? What will happen to the separation of powers and the repairing of the constitutional order? Will there be a chance to impeach Todd Blanche as his vindictive prosecutions collapse, and should the public believe Trump’s claim to have accepted these results?

Here are some morning-after thoughts — with more to come.

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During a conversation on Substack Live, and I explained why the latest decision makes it a whiplash inducing 24 hours for California election workers.

On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump DOJ’s attempt to force California officials to sequester the ballots based on discredited claims that they were sent to “likely” noncitizens. In theory, the ballots only would be set aside pending an investigation to confirm the citizenship of the recipients.

In practice, a judge found, the voters would have been disenfranchised because such an investigation couldn’t be completed on time.

But the Ninth Circuit’s en banc majority found that, while the government cannot compel state election authorities to sideline the ballots, officials could “request” that they do so on pain of prosecution.

Lead dissenting Judge Mary Murguia said that, in reality, the “request” was an attempt at impermissible intimidation over a prosecutorial legal theory that the same court rejected last week.

“I would deny Defendants’ emergency motion to stay because the district court properly attempted to put a stop to Defendants’ efforts to intimidate election workers into abandoning lawful state election procedures through spurious threats of prosecution,” Murguia wrote.

Read the full order here, and watch the video at the top of this newsletter.

Two of the intended recipients were reportedly election lawyer Marc Elias and a DSCC official.

As former federal prosecutor explained during a Substack Live, that’s a big deal.

“They are saying, ‘Mark Elias, we are going to indict you,’” he said, noting that target letters typically go out at the end of an investigation to give someone an opportunity to reverse a “foregone conclusion.”

As for its scale, he noted that the sheer number of target letters would typically be reserved for a “mob takedown.”

As the Times reported, the alleged ballot stacking that aides for Democratic candidate Mary Peltola and DSCC officials stand accused of is common and legal. The timing of the letters, and the revelations of their existence, fell the same day that Donald Trump openly called for Elias to be prosecuted. It also falls on the heels of a string of dozens of humiliating defeats for the Trump Justice Department from district court judges all the way up to the Supreme Court.

One federal judge said that the Trump DOJ’s pattern of last-ditch election litigation smacked of “attempted election interference.”

During a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed the latest revelations, the legality of ballot-stacking, the Supreme Court’s smackdown of the government’s California litigation, the rise of “Fake-Ass” U.S. Attorneys, and more.

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The Supreme Court immediately denied the Trump Justice Department’s request to sideline 20,000 California ballots based on discredited claims that they were sent to “likely” noncitizens.

Not a single justice noted a dissent.

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Pro-democracy electorates have rejected authoritarian rulers this year in Hungary, Serbia, and Brazil.

Israel appears to be on the cusp of ending Benjamin Netanyahu’s more than 18-year tenure as Prime Minister, which he has used to consolidate power, weaken the country’s judiciary, and attempt to outrun growing domestic and international criminal liabil…

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The Trump Justice Department’s star witness against the Southern Poverty Law Center is a former neo-Nazi and suspected tax cheat.

For decades, the former neo-Nazi worked as an informant for the SPLC, providing the legendary civil rights group with information about the National Alliance, one of the most dangerous extremist organizations in the United States. He called it “God’s work,” and the information that he provided exposed the National Alliance’s financial improprieties — and helped law enforcement bust the group’s bomb lab.

Suddenly, everything went south: The SPLC’s informant program shuttered. He lost his girlfriend, who was the SPLC’s director of the Intelligence Project. Then, the Internal Revenue Service started knocking on his door concerning three decades’ worth of unpaid income taxes. His payments from the SPLC alone over 16 years added up to roughly $1.2 million — or roughly $75,000 per year.

Identified in court papers only as F-9, this former neo-Nazi struck an unusual cooperation agreement with the Trump Justice Department to help take down the legendary civil rights group.

“For its part, the government seems willing to overlook F-9’s extreme biases, self-serving motives, and personal and professional misconduct, including covertly taking SPLC records and privileged information,” the SPLC wrote in a motion this week.

According to a new filing, F-9 openly discussed the possibility of “shredding” evidence, and the SPLC wants a judge to issue an order to preserve it.

In an interview with All Rise News, investigative journalist Phil Williams, the founder of Confront the Hate, discussed the explosive new filing with me.

Read it in full here.

Watch the video interview here, and check out the full All Rise News playlist here. Paid subscribers can watch several of the videos ad-free below.

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In a blistering new motion to dismiss, the ACLU — which represents a coalition of voters and advocacy groups — asked a federal judge to send a message about the Trump administration’s “bizarre, eleventh-hour stunt suit.”

“The U.S. Department of Justice may wish to have a junkyard brawl with a partisan political campaign in the days before an election. But in the absence of anything approaching a federal claim, it cannot do so in federal court,” the motion states. “The Court should immediately dismiss the United States’ frivolous, election-eve lawsuit and consider sanctions for this continued abuse of the judicial process.”

During a conversation on Substack Live with All Rise News, the ACLU’s deputy executive director Yasmin Cader said that it wasn’t a request that the group made lightly.

“I can tell you as an attorney who practices regularly in federal court and in state court, that is something that you rarely, rarely ask for,” Cader said, adding that attorneys reserve such a request for the “most egregious of circumstances.”

In this case, the ACLU argues that the circumstances warrant strong action.

“The Department of Justice’s desire for a political confrontation is no substitute for a legitimate legal theory, and it cannot justify holding Alaskans’ votes hostage,” the group wrote. “The most important thing that this Court can do to promote the integrity of Alaska’s election is to immediately and forcefully dismiss this lawsuit. And this Court would do American democracy and the rule of law a further service by considering Rule 11 sanctions against the attorneys who signed the pleadings in the name of the United States Department of Justice.”

One of those attorneys is Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the third most powerful official in the Trump Justice Department.

A longtime Trump ally, Woodward represented Trump’s criminal co-defendant Walt Nauta and multiple key witnesses in the classified documents case, and his law firm received roughly $1.4 million from Trump’s political action committees for that legal defense. Woodward has inserted himself in numerous politically charged cases of interest to the White House in a manner that’s unusual for senior Justice Department officials, who typically don’t involve themselves in individual lawsuits or prosecutions.

In the video, the ACLU’s senior official discusses a broad range of topics, including The New York Times reporting on the campaign of Mary Peltola, the state-level Alaskan litigation that led to the other Dan Sullivan’s placement on the ballot and why — from a legal perspective — the Frontier State doesn’t care whether he’s running in “good faith.”

Asked about Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s (R) announcement that he would consider trying to withhold certification of the election if Peltola wins, Cader responded to the governor directly: “We'll see you in court if something like that were to happen.”

She also explained why, even as Trump’s campaign of attempted election interference accelerates, she maintains her optimism as Tuesday draws closer.

Read the ACLU’s motion to dismiss in full here.

Watch the conversation in full at the top of this newsletter.

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In a highly unusual maneuver, Attorney General Todd Blanche personally intervened to rehabilitate the Trump administration’s debunked voter fraud claims in Nevada and charged four people with misdemeanors.

The Trump administration has been reeling from collapse of the Department of Homel…

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In the middle of his fiery ruling rejecting the Trump Justice Department’s “attempted election interference” in California, a federal judge warned that the federal government’s t…

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That was how Andrew Weissmann described the testimony that Mark Meadow’s former top aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered to the Jan. 6th Committee in June 2022.

Her account of Donald Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election made her a target of a failed prosecution effort that a grand jury rejected on Tuesday.

In a Substack Live, we discussed the latest humiliation for the prosecutorial arm of Trump’s government — for whom “no true bills” are no longer a rarity but a routine occurrence.

That kicked off a broader conversation about how the agency that Andrew Weissmann served for decades no longer looks, sounds, or acts like the “Justice Department.” Lawrence O’Donnell has aptly called it Trump’s “Department of Revenge,” and it’s increasingly described in pro-democracy circles as the Trump regime. Trump’s lawyers are increasingly facing a legitimacy problem, as a growing number have been disqualified by federal courts.

Bilal “Bill” Essayli, the face of Trump’s election interference campaign in California, was disqualified for a second time on Tuesday.

The hourlong conversation ran the gamut, culminating in a discussion about reporting in The New York Times concerning an alleged dirty tricks campaign in Alaska to sow confusion about the candidacy of Dan Sullivan. It’s an embarrassing story for Mary Peltola and one that Trump has been trying to seize upon to gin up doubt about a critical Senate race that Republicans seem poised to lose.

“Of course, I think it’s an absolutely terrible idea,” Weissmann said. “By the same token, do I think that the Republicans and Democrats routinely engage in hardball politics where they get spoiler candidates to run where there’s no chance that that person would ever run, but the whole idea is to siphon off votes? It happens all the time, and the law does not prohibit it.”

Watch the full conversation at the top of this newsletter.

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Dogged by corruption scandals, a right-wing leader faces an unexpectedly stiff electoral challenge, and defeat can leave him particularly vulnerable to criminal prosecution.

To cling to power, the head of state accelerates his attacks on democratic institutions.

Does this narrative describe the final days of Donald Trump’s first term in the United States, the failed coup d’etat of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the last days of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s decade-long tenure, or the state of play as Israelis head to the polls in historic numbers for the first reckoning for Benjamin Netanyahu since the catastrophic security failures of Oct. 7, 2023?

For pro-democracy observers, the pattern fits all of those global right leaders and more — and Trump’s endorsement doesn’t go so far in propping up the global right as it once did.

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‘Nowhere to go’

Last week, Trump announced his endorsement of Netanyahu, and all of the usual indicators of measuring its impact yawned. The gambling markets barely budged, and the polls kept inching in the direction of opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot, who heads the center-right Yashar party hoping to unseat him. For many, Trump’s endorsement evoked a déjà vu experience for those who recalled the White House stumping earlier in the year for Orbán, who lost in a landslide. By press time, exit polls showed opposition parties ahead with no clear winner and a strong performance by Arab-majority parties in Israel.

Prominent journalist Noga Tarnopolsky, one of the most seasoned correspondents covering Israeli and Palestinian politics, saw signs of desperation from Netanyahu’s camp.

“We're getting serious indications that he has made every effort to reignite the war with Iran and that Donald Trump is the one stopping him,” she said in a video interview. “Similarly, in the West Bank, it appears that the government really and truly is trying to ignite some kind of conflagration.”

Despite several headlines warning of that risk, Israel made it to election day without one of those catastrophic scenarios.

Like the former leaders in Brazil, Hungary, and the United States, Netanyahu could be facing a legal tsunami if he’s unseated, including an ongoing corruption trial, an investigation into his administration’s ties to the Qatari government, and an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court that could complicate any plans for safe harbor from his domestic problems.

“He has nowhere to go because Netanyahu is indicted as a war criminal in every country that is part of the International Criminal Court,” Tarnopolsky noted.

Other right-wing leaders have contingency plans ready in the event of criminal prosecution: Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of his putschist father, escaped the shadow of a potential money laundering investigation in Brazil by fleeing to the United States on Tuesday, one day after he conceded the election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who unseated Orbán earlier this year, accused his predecessor of treason on the campaign trail and raised the possibility of prosecuting him for other alleged offenses.

Talk about golden parachutes: Trump reportedly raised the prospect of backing Orbán for U.N. Secretary-General.

Elsewhere around the world, authoritarian minded rulers are being shown the door: Serbian voters unseated Putin-backed strongman Aleksandar Vucic on the same day as Flavio Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil.

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‘The power to change history’

Pro-democracy organizations in the United States are drawing the connections between overcoming autocracy abroad and at home.

“Next week’s midterm elections will be a defining test of our democracy,” Democracy Defenders Action’s Susan Corke wrote in a statement. “After two years of democratic backsliding, repeated assaults on the rule of law, and congressional leaders too often unwilling to check presidential power, many Americans are asking whether the damage can be undone and whether people have the power to change history. This weekend, voters in Serbia and Brazil gave their answer: it can and we can.”

If Israelis elect a new prime minister, change will likely be slow. Eisenkot, the main opposition leader, leads a centrist coalition and has declared his opposition to a Palestinian state, but he also has denounced settler “terrorism” in the West Bank, alleging that it is effectively state-sponsored. Eisenkot has promised to clamp down on settler violence and establish an independent commission into the security lapses of Oct. 7th.

Many Israelis are also hoping that an Eisenkot government will repair damage to democratic institutions wrought by Netanyahu-backed laws weakening the country’s judiciary, which Tarnapolsky described as a “putsch.”

“I think any government that comes into being will initially focus on those very, very internal matters and only later be able to address [...] diplomatic matters or matters beyond the border,” Tarnapolsky said. “This is all on the assumption that there’s no further attacks on Israel. If Israel is attacked again in an interim period or in the first few months of a new government, that could completely shift this equation and that’s not impossible.”

She predicts any change will require longer than a political cycle of work.

“If Israelis vote to oust this government — and in fact vote to give themselves a chance to recreate the state of Israel — I think we're talking about the work of a full generation,” she told All Rise News. “I don't think we're talking about six months or even one term in government.”

Watch the full conversation about Israel’s elections, democratic rebounding and the diminishing returns of a Trump endorsement in the video below.