Trump’s Senate Nominee Walked Out On His Own Press Conference. Here’s Why.

The DOJ charged an Olympian, then admitted there was no crime. A judge the regime tried to remove refused to go. And Virginia gave 66,085 people their vote back.

The Justice Department spent six weeks trying to put a 67-year-old Olympian in prison. On Friday it admitted the crime never happened.

That’s the top of today’s free edition, but it isn’t the only story like it. A judge the regime tried to remove from a case told them no. A governor handed back voting rights to 66,085 people. And Trump’s Senate nominee walked away from a microphone rather than say whether he’d been paying his son-in-law.

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Some of this came out of court filings, some out of a video most people never saw. Paid subscribers make all of it possible, and they get my exclusive analysis on the Senate race in Georgia today. Join us and get the full rundown:

THE CASE THEY BUILT DIDN’T HOLD WATER

David Hearn is 67 and paddled for the United States in three Olympic Games. On June 19 he stopped his bike at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, touched a piece of lining that had already come loose, and National Guard troops and Park Police held him for five hours.

US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro said he’d been seen forcefully and violently pulling up the bottom liner with both hands. A grand jury indicted him July 2. He was facing up to ten years.

Then the Department of the Interior turned over documents it hadn’t turned over before. The damage, it found, came from a flawed installation by the contractor and the rush to finish before the America 250 events around the Fourth of July. Inspectors even found damage in the middle of the pool, where no vandal would bother to crawl.

Pirro’s office moved Friday to dismiss the charges. Hearn’s attorney Steve Levin didn’t take it graciously: “The government’s approach was ready, shoot, aim. The federal government owes Mr. Hearn an apology.”

Trump said they went in with a box cutter. The Justice Department never even accused Hearn of carrying one. Then it dropped the case on a Friday afternoon, when they thought nobody was looking.

PICKED BY SEVENTEEN JUDGES. FIRED IN 54 MINUTES.

Seventeen federal judges in Seattle ran an application process, interviewed the finalists, and unanimously picked Roger Rogoff to be US attorney for the Western District of Washington. He was sworn in July 15, walked to the office, and was sitting in the lobby waiting for a meeting when an email arrived telling him Trump had removed him. After only fifty-four minutes on the job.

Rogoff sued six days later. The case first went to Ricardo Martinez, a Bush appointee—but Martinez had helped pick Rogoff, so he stepped aside and sent it on. It landed with Stanley Bastian, chief judge of Washington’s Eastern District, an Obama appointee confirmed by the Senate 95 to 0.

The Justice Department didn’t want Bastian to decide. Its lawyers asked the Ninth Circuit to move the case, and asked Bastian to step aside if it wouldn’t, arguing his regular work as a visiting judge in Seattle disqualified him. He refused Thursday in three pages without a hearing, wrote that the government offered “no binding authority” requiring recusal, and quoted the oath he took to administer justice “without respect to persons.”

Rogoff is asking for his office back. Trump asked for a different judge. He didn’t get one—the judge he’s stuck with already told him no.

66,085 VIRGINIANS JUST GOT THEIR VOTE BACK

Virginia takes your vote for life over one felony conviction. One of three states left that still does it, and the only way back in is for the governor to personally sign off on you.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger has signed off 66,085 times since January.

Those Virginians can now register to vote, sit on juries, run for office, and work as notaries. Former GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin gutted the review process in 2022 and restored fewer than 10,000 people in four years. Spanberger passed that in six months. Her team rebuilt the process, threw out Youngkin’s requirement that applicants first prove they’d paid every fine and fee, and started going out and identifying eligible Virginians instead of waiting for them to apply.

She called the old rule “a shameful relic of our Jim Crow past,” and is asking voters to kill it outright on November 3—with an amendment that would take the decision out of the governor’s hands for good.

Early voting starts September 18. All 66,085 of these Virginians can be registered before it does.

MAGA MIKE COLLINS RAN FROM HIS OWN PRESSER

Mike Collins is Trump’s Senate nominee in Georgia, running against Sen. Jon Ossoff. On Thursday he stood outside Monroe County Hospital in Forsyth to talk about rural health care and took questions at the end. That turned out to be a mistake.

CNN’s KFile reported on July 16 that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has used a large social media following to push antisemitic conspiracy theories, nazi imagery, calls to deport Muslims, and material promoting the white supremacist group Patriot Front. Scheer was at the primary victory party, and he was in the family photo on the campaign site until Collins removed it after CNN’s reporting.

Ossoff has asked Collins to say whether he ever paid Scheer for work, and to release his office’s communications with white supremacists. Collins hasn’t answered either. His campaign put out a statement saying he condemns antisemitism “no matter the source,” which is a sentence that manages to say nothing about his son-in-law.

Asked about it Thursday, Collins said “we’ve fully addressed that” and pivoted to Ossoff. Reporters tried again. He thanked them for coming and walked away from the podium while somebody called after him: “You don’t want to talk about your son-in-law at all?”

He can end a press conference. He can’t end the questioning.

Nobody puts these stories in one place for you. So we read the court papers, watch the tape, and write it all up so anyone can understand it. Then we get it in front of millions of people who’d never have heard about it. And we get people organized—writing to Congress, calling their offices, making enough noise that these members can’t pretend nobody noticed. More than 800,000 letters sent and countless calls made since November of 2024.

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Onward!

Scott

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