Thanks so much for joining me today. With all of Trump’s chaos, I’m glad to have some great news for you, along with more of our investigations. This edition focuses on how the regime keeps trying to shut doors, and people like us keep standing in their way.
Before you read on, would you tap the ❤️ like button and restack this? The White House launched its own TV feed this week so you’d only hear their version. Your restack puts ours in front of someone who absolutely needs it.
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The Bribery Probe Kash Patel’s FBI Buried
In August 2019, GOP Senator from Maine Susan Collins stood beside Martin Kao, the CEO of a Hawaii defense contractor, and took credit for an $8 million Navy contract for his company. ProPublica uncovered that his company’s research never produced anything the military wanted to buy. American taxpayers footed the bill anyway.
Four months later, Kao illegally moved $150,000 of company money into a political group backing Collins’s reelection. He did it through a front dressed up as a scholarship charity. We pulled the federal election file. The group told regulators it had no reason to suspect a thing. Its lawyer was Cleta Mitchell, who later helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.
Kao ended up going to prison. This week ProPublica revealed he’d handed the FBI a 50-page roadmap naming members of Congress he said helped him trade campaign cash for government contracts. He told agents Collins once said to him, “You’ve seen me deliver.” Her office denies it, and the FBI says an earlier look found nothing on her.
By late 2024, agents wanted a full bribery probe. Then Trump came back to the White House, and Kash Patel’s FBI purged the anti-corruption squad. Michelle Ball, who helped take Kao’s confession, was fired over her work investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The probe died in that same purge. Ball is now suing.
Fire the investigators and corruption walks, but this time it didn’t stay hidden. Collins’s Democratic opponent Troy Jackson calls it “corruption of the highest order.” Maine gets the final word in 40 days.
At The UN, Trump Said It Out Loud
At the UN on Tuesday, Trump bragged to leaders from nearly 130 countries about the oil deal he got after US forces seized Venezuela’s president in January. “It was a war,” he said. Then: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
The Trump regime says the deal gives the Pentagon a 35% stake in a company that holds 100-year drilling rights to around 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. American troops did the fighting, and the Pentagon got a piece of the oil company.
The regime also promised that this deal would help deliver lower gas prices. This week, the national average for gas sat just shy of $4.50, pushed higher by Trump’s war with Iran.
Plenty of people at the UN weren’t buying it. Brazil’s president, speaking just before him, said Venezuelans should decide their own future. In his final General Assembly address, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the superpowers their power “isn’t so super.” When Trump went after Cuba, Cuba’s diplomats stood up and walked out.
Americans aren’t buying it either. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll out this week, only 17% approve of how Trump’s handling the cost of living. He went to the UN to look strong and failed miserably.
Trump Banned Three Newsrooms. Even Fox Said No.
Last Friday, Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House grounds. He didn’t name a single false story, of course. He just didn’t like their coverage of him. The next morning, Secret Service officers took press passes away from reporters at the gate, following through on the kind of media crackdown we’ve always expected.
Trump now warns that “other Fake News Media Outlets” will follow. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News agreed to fight back for once—refusing to run all shared TV cameras at his events until further notice. The New York Times and The Washington Post piled on, holding back their photos of Trump’s events for a day.
It backfired further on Monday, when the White House streamed its own helipad ribbon-cutting. You couldn’t hear Trump over the helicopter. It was wonderful.
Early Thursday, Judge Timothy Kelly—the same Trump appointee who gave former CNN reporter Jim Acosta his pass back in 2018—ordered the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” their passes. The regime claimed their reporting threatened national security, but Kelly noted most of the reporters behind the stories it flagged didn’t even hold one.
If Trump gets to pick who covers him, he gets to pick what you hear. The networks paid him millions to drop his lawsuits and bowed to him for a decade. His own judge needed one night.
Republicans Can See November Coming
Fox News’s latest polling has Democrats ahead by 7 in the race for Congress. NBC found more voters calling their ballot a rebuke of the sitting President than at any point in its midterm polling since 1998. And this week Fox’s political analyst pointed to polls suggesting a “blue wave,” then shifted 17 House races toward Democrats.
Republicans see it too. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana says he never would’ve believed he’d be spending his time helping candidates in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home weeks early in an act of desperation, which also pushed a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth past Election Day.
Then there’s the Iran war. In March, a House vote to end it failed. It kept coming back. On September 15, Dem Rep. Seth Moulton’s resolution to end it passed the House 220-204, the third time this year the House has passed one. This time, Iowa Republicans Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks voted yes, with farmers back home paying more for diesel and fertilizer—among everything else.
Miller-Meeks’s Democratic opponent, Christina Bohannan, wasn’t fooled. Miller-Meeks “voted 5 times for the Iran War,” she said, and only noticed how angry her own voters are “weeks before an election.”
Two Republican candidates distanced themselves from the war this week, one calling for a quick end. And Florida’s GOP nominee for Governor, a longtime Trump loyalist, scrubbed most mentions of Trump from his website. That isn’t a change of heart. It’s fear. They’re right to be afraid. There are only 40 days until the midterms. Every second is a chance for us to make sure we win.
I can speak freely because there is no corporate influence here. No advertiser who can threaten to pull ads unless we take it easy on Trump. No billionaire who can pull funding. No press pass to dangle to make us beg for access. Something we have never done—not once—over the past decade.
That same independence is what allows us to run one of the biggest pressure campaigns on Congress ever. More than 863,000 letters on the desks of senators and House members since November 2024, millions since 2016. That’s on top of our social media Watchdog Coalition, where we take on Trump’s propaganda generating billions of impressions every month. So we are never just preaching to the choir.
For the next 40 days we want to do everything we can to turn Trump into a lame duck. But we can’t do it without you. Thanks to those who have become paid subscribers, we are able to dig further, work harder, and spend more time organizing.
If you haven’t joined us yet, please help fuel our movement by becoming a paid subscriber today. Let’s win this:
Before you go, tap the ❤️ like button and restack this. Somebody you know only heard the regime’s propaganda this week. Let’s make sure our truth is louder than their lies.
Onward!
Scott
A donor told the FBI he traded campaign cash for help in Congress, and the probe died anyway. Should Susan Collins have to answer questions under oath?
Forty days out, what’s one thing you’re doing between now and Election Day?
They are running. Johnson shut down the House for 7 weeks to protect Hegseth, and a judge just threatened Blanche with contempt for hiding Epstein files. Flood Congress on all 7:
Roberts: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-impeach-supreme-court-chief-justice-john-roberts/
Hegseth: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-impeach-pete-hegseth/
Yosemite: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-yosemite-giveaway
AI Ban: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-pass-the-ban-on-ai-we-cant-control/
45M Acres: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trump-from-destroying-45-million-acres-of-our-national-forests/
USFS: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-illegal-plan-to-destroy-the-us-forest-service/
Epstein: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-demand-acting-ag-blanche-release-all-of-the-epstein-files-now/
I’m from a state that pretends this stuff is too complicated for regular people. It isn’t. A contractor cut a $150,000 check, a senator posed for the contract photo, and the investigators who had the file got fired. That’s the whole story.
The White House built its own TV feed so you’d only hear their version. Then they banned three newsrooms and a judge they appointed said no by Thursday. Share this before the feed swallows it.
Forty days. If you’ve been waiting for a sign that they’re scared, Miller-Meeks voting to end the war “weeks before an election” is the sign.