Good morning, and happy Friday. Thanks so much for joining me.
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The Logger Who Compared Collins To An Arsonist
Troy Jackson was a logger in Allagash, Maine, before he led the state Senate. Now he’s the Democrat coming for Sen. Susan Collins’s seat. She’s held it for nearly 30 years.
Last year Trump needed votes to get his big ugly bill onto the Senate floor, and Collins gave him one. It got there 51 to 49. Three days later she voted against the bill itself, but it passed anyway. By the estimate she herself cited when she voted no, it cuts $5.9 billion from Maine’s Medicaid over 10 years. Trump robs sick people to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and Collins helped hold the door.
At their first debate Tuesday night, she defended that procedural vote. If she hadn’t “allowed the bill to go to the floor,” she said, she couldn’t have gotten her rural health fund into it. Jackson answered: “Senator Collins is like an arsonist who helped set the fire, and then she wants credit for bringing a cup of water to put it out.”
He’s right, and she knows it. She wrote last year that her fund “is not sufficient to offset” what the bill does to Medicaid.
Then the moderator asked whether Collins would stand with Trump if he comes to Maine. He asked twice. She never said yes. That’s where Trump is now—a senator from his own party won’t promise to stand beside him.
The logger is narrowly ahead of Collins, and Trump’s Senate majority is on the line.
Bronx Man Beats ICE’s Falsified Paperwork In Court
Angel Jesus Almonte was on a Bronx street on May 6 when masked ICE agents chased him and cuffed him face down on the sidewalk. They said he looked like the man they wanted—who is five inches shorter and 70 pounds lighter.
Minutes later, the same team arrested Jeury Concepcion, a teenage US citizen. He needed stitches in his head. The Trump regime later claimed Concepcion “was NOT arrested by ICE.” A federal judge says he was.
ICE kept Almonte locked up for 51 days. Then Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee, put the agents under oath, and their own team leader conceded, “it’s very easy to see they’re two different people.” Brown ordered Almonte freed that day.
On Monday the judge put the rest in writing. Brown explained that ICE wrote its warrant after the arrest. The supervisor who signed it had searched five federal databases and found no record of Almonte, but the warrant swore those databases showed he had no legal right to be here. Agents “falsified official records trying to conceal their illegal actions,” Brown wrote.
Almonte is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, still facing deportation. Brown ruled his arrest illegal anyway. He called Concepcion’s illegal too, and gave ICE until October 26 to answer.
Judge Tells Trump’s Lawyers: Show Me The Memo
For 13 months, Trump has had the military blowing up small boats it says are running drugs. No arrests, no trials—and more than 230 people are dead as a result.
Ask Trump’s people what law lets him do that, and the only legal document they’ve ever pointed to is a secret Justice Department memo. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, has read it. In August he wrote Trump and said that the US is attacking people “far beyond” who the memo says it can legally target. “They are murder victims,” he wrote.
The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued to get the memo out. On September 30 federal Judge Paul Engelmayer found the Pentagon’s been treating the memo as “effective law and policy” for the strikes—and an agency can’t run based off a secret law. He also threw out two of the three secrecy privileges the regime claimed for it.
The judge then ordered the regime to show him the memo by October 14. Trump decided for himself that the killing is legal. Now every person who has touched that memo has to be named, under oath.
Trump Says His Own Money Men Aren’t His
Here we are only weeks out from the midterms, and two men who run Trump’s political money spent part of the home stretch working for a government led by Putin’s friends.
James Blair oversees MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump fund that had $415 million in late August. Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager, advises it. The New York Times reports both were in Bosnia last week, each paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to advise the pro-Russian government of a Serb-run region there. It’s run by the party of Milorad Dodik, a convicted strongman and Putin ally.
On Wednesday Trump wrote that the two “do not work for me, other than as outside consultants.” Two days earlier he said he’d pay for his ads “with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.” He raises it and they spend it. Don’t tell me they don’t work for him.
That government has paid Trump’s people before. I went into the foreign-agent filings. Trump pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor jailed for corruption, in February 2025. About six weeks later Blagojevich had a contract with that same regional government and a written goal: get the US to drop its sanctions—the financial penalties on Dodik. Trump’s Treasury dropped them on October 29, 2025. The filings show a $700,000 payment to Blagojevich’s firm from that government, dated that day.
A government run by Putin’s friends keeps paying the people around Trump, and it got what it wanted from Trump’s Treasury. If Democrats win the House, they can subpoena the records and put the people who took the money under oath.
We have just 25 days left until the midterms, and Trump’s political money men spent part of the home stretch in the Balkans, getting paid to advise a foreign government. Here, we don’t answer to other countries, advertisers, or billionaires. The only person I answer to is you.
When I find a $700,000 payment in a foreign-agent filing, I don’t have an owner to call first or a sponsor to warn. I print it. And I’ve got more exclusive investigations coming before Election Day. Republicans in tight Senate and House races are not going to like them.
That’s what a paid subscription buys, for you—and for every reader who can’t afford one. You also get my campaign analysis three mornings a week and a seat next to me on election night, live on Substack starting at 8:30 PM Eastern. That’s when we will find out the results together. Spend these 25 days in the fight with me—and help power what’s next:
Before you go, tap the ❤️ like button and restack this edition, so it gets in front of someone who’s convinced we’ll lose the midterms.
Onward!
Scott
Troy Jackson told a sitting senator to her face she’s like an arsonist. Who else do you think is like an arsonist?
Which governor’s race are you watching most closely, and why?
Happy Friday, everyone. If today’s edition made you angry, here’s where to put it. Four letters, about a minute each:
Impeach Pete Hegseth. More than 230 people killed in boat strikes, and the only legal cover is a secret memo.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-impeach-pete-hegseth/
Tell Congress to start drafting articles of impeachment against Trump. His Treasury lifted the sanctions, and $700,000 landed the same day.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-begin-drafting-articles-of-impeachment-against-trump/
Keep a Trump donor’s private road out of Yosemite.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-yosemite-giveaway
Ban Flock’s license plate cameras.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-ban-flock-mass-surveillance-cameras/
This is the final stretch, and I am glad you are still here. Twenty-five days. We do not get through them without each other. I could not have made it this far without you. Let’s finish strong.