I was scrolling headlines when I saw Jackie’s name.

It wasn’t the kind of headline I expected.

Jackie was dead.

For a second, I thought surely I had missed something obvious. The last time I’d checked in on the Big Bear nest, Sandy and Luna were growing feathers. They were getting past that fuzzy little alien stage and beginning to look like actual eagles.

Jackie was Jackie. Shadow was Shadow.

Everything was fine.

Or it had been when I left.

Then my life got a little loud.

I was writing books. I stepped away from reporting for a while. I wasn’t keeping an eagle cam running on an extra screen the way I had during other nesting seasons.

While I was off tending to my own life, a whole story unfolded without me.

Jackie fell ill. She was rescued and taken to a rehabilitation center. People watched and waited while veterinarians tried to understand what was wrong with her. They hoped. They prayed. They studied every update, hopeful for some little scrap of good news.

And then she was gone.

I sat there reading tribute after tribute to a wild bald eagle in California, crying over an animal that never knew I existed.

That probably sounds a little ridiculous.

Unless you’ve watched an eagle nest.

Then you know.

Jackie and Shadow weren’t the first eagles to do this to me.

That was a pair living on a wooded hillside above the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh.

The Hays eagles.

I can’t remember the exact moment watching them became a ritual. I only know that eventually nesting season meant I had another family to check on.

Mom.

Dad.

Eggs.

Pips.

Breakfast deliveries.

Nest changes.

Storms.

Tiny gray heads peeking out from beneath enormous wings.

I was especially attached to Dad.

Nobody had to give him some grand, majestic name. He was Dad. That was plenty.

When he disappeared in 2023, it wrecked me. I knew he was a wild eagle. I knew nobody could tell me where he had gone or whether he was coming back. Knowing all that didn’t help one damn bit.

More than a year later, a photographer spotted him near the Hays territory and recognized him by the little things longtime watchers knew to look for.

Dad was alive.

By then another male had come along. The nest had changed. The story had kept moving.

And Dad had been out there somewhere all that time, living a life none of us could see.

That may have been the first lesson these cameras taught me.

You don’t get to decide how the story goes.

The camera lets you see.

That is all.

There’s no script. No producer. No guarantee the egg will hatch, or the chick will survive, or the parent who flies away in the morning will come back before dark.

Some days, nothing happens at all.

And still, you watch.

The Hays nest also had one of the best communities of watchers I ever found.

I rarely said much. I lurked, mostly.

But those people taught me an enormous amount about eagles simply by paying attention alongside them.

I could leave the stream running while I went shopping, come home, check the chat and figure out what I’d missed. Somebody had seen the fish delivery. Somebody had marked the nest exchange. Somebody knew exactly when the pip appeared and they had documented it for the rest of our viewing pleasure because then I could rewind and see it for myself.

Thousands of strangers, most of whom would never meet, were keeping track of the ordinary movements of a wild family.

There is something beautiful about that.

Especially on the internet which usually wants something from us. It wants us to post. React. Argue. Perform. Pick a side and holler about it.

The eagles didn’t want a thing.

They went on being eagles while we sat together and watched.

After the Hays nest changed, I eventually found my way to Jackie and Shadow. They were already famous by then, which was part of the appeal. I knew people would be watching. I knew somebody would keep notes. If I missed something, chances were good that somebody somewhere hadn’t.

Before the northern nesting seasons got going, I sometimes watched a nest in Miami.

That is how spring began arriving at my house.

Somewhere south of me, an eagle would lay an egg. Soon the season would make its way north. Watching the Miami nest while I waited felt a little like listening to Christmas music too early because you can’t help yourself.

It wasn’t here yet.

But it was coming.

Once nesting season arrived, the cameras became part of the house.

I didn’t sit and stare at an eagle for twelve hours a day. I just left the window open.

At work, an iPad might sit sideways on a stand beside my desk, the livestream playing while I reported the news.

At home, it might be a laptop on the table beside the bed. An iPad on the nightstand. Sometimes the television, because Clint wanted to watch too.

I’d be working and glance over.

Nest exchange.

I’d walk through the room.

Fish.

I’d look up because somebody was suddenly raising hell.

Intruder.

At night, I’d fall asleep with the eagles sleeping in the room with me. In the morning, I might wake up just in time to see somebody bring home breakfast.

Somehow, this became normal.

Technology deserves plenty of the blame it gets for pulling us away from the natural world.

But it gave us this window, too.

We could watch a life as it happened, before anybody edited out the slow parts.

And trust me, there were slow parts.

Hours of absolutely nothing.

A bird sleeping.

A bird rearranging a stick its mate had apparently put in the wrong damn place.

Wind.

Snow.

More sleeping.

Then an egg would crack.

A tiny head would appear.

A parent that had sat through weather that would send most of us into hibernation would begin tearing microscopic pieces from a fish and placing them carefully into a mouth no bigger than the end of your finger.

And there I’d be, holding my breath in an office or a bedroom hundreds of miles away.

During some of my heaviest reporting years, I shared those moments with my readers.

My feeds could be full of politics, investigations, anger and whatever fresh insanity the day had delivered.

Then, right in the middle of all that:

Breakfast is served.

Here are some eagles.

I did that on purpose.

I figured everybody could stand to step out of the churn for a minute.

Maybe you only stopped scrolling long enough to pass the post. Maybe you watched thirty seconds. Maybe you stayed for the whole five-minute clip.

For however long you stayed, the world got quiet.

There was nothing to argue about. Nothing for sale. Nobody asking you to be furious.

There was only a family doing what families do.

Building a home.

Taking turns.

Feeding babies.

Standing guard.

Hunkering down through storms.

Losing eggs.

Sometimes losing babies.

Trying again.

And again.

And again.

Maybe that’s why Jackie’s death hit me as hard as it did.

I hadn’t been there for her final weeks.

In my mind, I’d left them at a perfectly ordinary place.

Two growing eaglets.

Jackie.

Shadow.

Spring moving toward summer.

Then I opened the news and learned that the story had gone on without me.

The stories always do.

Dad taught me that years ago.

He disappeared, and I grieved him. Then one rainy morning, long after I had decided I knew how his story ended, he flew back into somebody’s camera frame.

Jackie will not.

She is gone.

People all over the world are grieving an eagle who never knew their names.

Shadow is still out there.

Sandy and Luna had already flown beyond the camera’s reach, beginning lives we may never get to see.

The nest is still in its tree above Big Bear Lake.

And the camera is still pointed at a world that never needed us to watch it.

We needed it.

We needed that little window.

We needed the reminder that somewhere beyond the headlines and deadlines and algorithms and all the glowing rectangles demanding every spare second of our attention, another world has been carrying on all along.

Somewhere a bird is carrying a stick home.

Somewhere another is settling onto an egg.

Somewhere a parent is standing guard while its mate sleeps.

Somewhere an eaglet is opening its wings and feeling the wind catch beneath them for the first time.

And somewhere, thousands of strangers are sitting quietly together on the internet, waiting for something to happen.

Maybe nothing will. And that is okay.

That is worth seeing, too.

Because most of a life is made of the ordinary things.

Breakfast.

Home.

Family.

Bad weather.

Showing up again tomorrow.

And sometimes losing something you thought would always be there, then waking the next morning to find the sun had the nerve to rise anyway.

Sooner or later, somewhere south of wherever spring happens to be, an eagle will lay an egg.

A tiny crack will appear.

Somebody will notice.

Somebody will type it in the chat.

And all over the world, people who have never met will lean a little closer to the screen.

I’ll be one of them.

Some moments I shared along the way:

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Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most powerful venture capital firms in America, and it has bet heavily on the business of watching Americans. The firm led Flock Safety’s $150 million Series D in 2021 and led another $275 million investment in March 2025 that valued the Atlanta surveillance company at $7.5 billion. Flock’s automated license plate readers now sit on poles in thousands of American communities, photographing passing vehicles and filing the plate, make, model and color into a database that participating police agencies can search later, a network I wrote about last month.

The same firm also led the $12.5 million seed round for Toka, an Israeli-founded cyber intelligence company, in July 2018. Four years later, Haaretz reported from internal company materials that Toka had built tools capable of locating internet-connected cameras inside a target area, gaining access to them, watching their feeds, and manipulating or erasing live and archived video while avoiding the ordinary forensic signs that anything had been altered.

That shared investor became an internet story this month, and the headline practically writes itself: the people funding the cameras are also funding the people who can hack cameras. There is no indication Toka has access to Flock’s network or that anyone has used its technology to alter Flock footage, but frankly, the documented relationship is strange enough without adding anything to it.

Andreessen Horowitz helped finance the rapid expansion of one of America’s largest police surveillance networks while also spending eight years backing a company whose business includes compromising surveillance and communications systems for governments. And Toka is no longer some distant Israeli cyber company Americans can file under “interesting, but over there.” In February, it announced that it had officially transitioned into a U.S.-based company headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, after more than 60 percent year-over-year growth in 2025, with customers in 13 countries and rising demand from U.S. and allied government partners. Its own website lists suspect surveillance, video and vehicle forensics, SWAT support, systems access and collection, data exfiltration, covert entry and close access operations among its capabilities.

Apparently “cyber intelligence company” now covers quite a bit of territory.

The shared investor is what got me looking. It is not what kept me there. Once I started pulling on that thread, the story became much bigger than an interesting venture-capital connection. It became a question about how quickly surveillance infrastructure is expanding while the rules, safeguards and public debate limp along behind it. Eventually that thread leads all the way from an investor portfolio to a woman sitting on an interstate with her hands outside a car window while police point guns at her.

There is one documented place where these two worlds came particularly close together: Las Vegas. Ben Horowitz, the a16z co-founder, personally helped finance technology purchases for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department through its nonprofit foundation, including products from Flock and drone manufacturer Skydio, both a16z investments. Horowitz has described the arrangement himself: Flock detects and geolocates a wanted plate, and a Skydio drone can be dispatched to the area. There is nothing secret about that vision. It is the sales pitch.

Public records obtained by TechCrunch show that in August 2023 Horowitz also offered to fund Toka technology for the department. Officials had questions about price and compatibility and wanted the product run through internal governance review before officers even received a demonstration. The deal never happened, and Toka told TechCrunch that Las Vegas police have never been a client or user of its products.

Still, the documented arrangement is peculiar enough. One venture capitalist helped a police department acquire surveillance technology from companies his own firm backed, then offered that same department technology from a company specializing in covert access to camera systems. “Nothing to see here” would be an unfortunate choice of phrase.

Horowitz’s defense is straightforward: governments move slowly, budgets are tight, technology can save lives, and private money gets useful tools into departments faster. Police accountability advocates have told TechCrunch that routing those purchases through police foundations works against transparency and competition. When privately financed surveillance arrives before the public budget process forces a debate about it, the public’s first meaningful encounter with the policy can come after the equipment is already installed. Deployment first, democratic debate later, a sequence historically famous for producing careful public deliberation.

And Horowitz has no intention of treating Las Vegas as the end of the experiment. On an a16z podcast, he said he was not going to stop funding purchases, while Sheriff Kevin McMahill said Las Vegas intended to prove the model worked so other municipalities could follow.

Part of the problem with the Flock debate is that Americans are still talking about it as though it is one clever camera bolted beside a road. Flock’s security record alone makes that picture considerably messier.

Independent researcher Nick Gaines took its equipment apart last year and found vulnerabilities serious enough to land in the National Vulnerability Database. One, CVE-2025-59407, involved a digital key stored in the software alongside the password needed to access it, roughly the software equivalent of hiding a house key under a mat labeled “key.” The database displays a CISA-contributed severity score of 9.8 out of 10, critical, though NIST has not assigned a score of its own.

Another vulnerability left administrative functions exposed without authentication, including one capable of enabling a developer mode that could give an attacker already on the same wired or wireless network command-line access to the device. Flock said exploiting the research required physical access to the hardware and intimate knowledge of how it worked. Gaines later documented more than 900 hits on a public map of Wi-Fi networks associated with Flock devices whose wireless hotspots appeared active in the field.

That does not turn every roadside camera into an open Wi-Fi hacking target. It does make “physical access” considerably less comforting than it sounds.

Then came the practical version. In December, 404 Media found at least 60 Flock Condor pan-tilt-zoom cameras whose live feeds and administrator panels were sitting on the open internet without passwords. Someone who found an address could watch live video, download a month of archived footage, change settings and run diagnostics. A reporter in Bakersfield watched himself through one while colleagues hundreds of miles away watched too. Other exposed cameras looked over parking lots, bike paths and a playground.

Flock said the cameras had been misconfigured and fixed, and that its central cloud platform was never breached. Fine. We are still left with dozens of live surveillance cameras accidentally exposed to the internet, which is not an especially inspiring footnote in an argument built heavily around trusting the infrastructure.

Security is one problem. Governance is another.

In August 2025, Flock CEO Garrett Langley published a statement acknowledging that some of the company’s previous public statements about federal access had “inadvertently provided inaccurate information.” He disclosed limited pilots with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations, acknowledged that Flock had not created distinct federal permissions and protocols sufficient to ensure local compliance, and announced that the pilots had been paused.

The admission came amid scrutiny in Illinois, where Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias had ordered a sample audit covering 12 local law enforcement agencies. His office said Flock lacked adequate safeguards for data sharing, that CBP access to Illinois cameras violated state law and, remarkably, that Flock’s own leadership had been unaware the CBP pilot was operating. Giannoulias ordered the access cut off statewide. Evanston deactivated all 19 of its cameras and terminated its contract within days.

Flock changed its controls afterward. Good. The sequence is still worth remembering: the network grew first, the holes in its governance became obvious later, and the rules changed after journalists, auditors and public officials started pulling on them.

Welcome to governance.

And then there is the plan to put the cameras on wheels.

A Flock presentation prepared for the Georgia Attorney General’s office in August 2025, obtained through a public records request by Dunwoody resident Jason Hunyar and published by 404 Media this month, describes a proposed partnership with dashcam company Nexar covering roughly 350,000 devices used in Uber, Lyft and delivery vehicles. The partnership never went forward, but the proposal itself is the point: Flock considered turning privately owned moving cameras into another layer of plate collection.

That is fundamentally different from mounting readers on poles. Poles stay put. You can see them. A mobile network travels through neighborhoods, apartment complexes, parking lots and side streets that may never have been part of any local debate over surveillance cameras.

Apparently somebody at Flock’s answer to “how many cameras?” was: have we considered everyone’s windshield?

There is another reason Nexar matters. In September 2025, 404 Media reported that a hacker compromised the company and pulled terabytes of dashcam video, including footage recorded near sensitive U.S. military and intelligence sites.

The breach was independent of Flock, but it puts a very real failure mode beside the proposal Flock considered. Nexar had already built an enormous moving network of cameras collecting footage wherever its drivers went, and somebody got in.

Every new camera creates more data. Every database creates another target. Every integration creates another place where credentials can leak, configurations can fail, employees can misuse access or someone outside the system can simply break in.

Eventually “that isn’t supposed to happen” becomes less of a safeguard and more of a recurring genre of press release.

Flock has explored unusual datasets in other directions too. In May 2025, 404 Media reported from leaked audio, internal slides and Slack messages that the company was developing a people-lookup product called Nova designed to let police “jump from LPR to person” using plate data alongside data brokers, open sources and, during the exploratory phase, breached databases. Employees objected internally to using hacked data.

Two weeks later, Flock said Nova would not supply dark-web data and would instead use public records, open-source intelligence and plate data. That is a meaningful reversal. It is also revealing that the much broader idea existed inside the company in the first place and became public through a leak.

Human misuse requires even less imagination. Last week the Savannah Police Department fired four sworn officers and two civilian employees after an internal review found Flock searches involving personal acquaintances and family members, along with one case in which an officer gave an outside agency unauthorized access. All six cases were referred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for independent criminal review. The department’s audit tool flagged 127 searchesout of roughly 39,000 run this year.

Flock’s position is that finding misuse demonstrates why audit trails work, and audit trails are unquestionably better than a system where nobody can tell who searched for what. They also document something worth knowing: people with access do misuse it.

Intentional misuse is only half the problem, because nobody has to abuse the system for it to put a gun in someone’s face.

On August 6, Brookfield, Wisconsin police stopped traffic on Interstate 94 in Waukesha County and conducted a high-risk felony stop on a silver SUV after a Flock camera flagged it in connection with a Milwaukee homicide investigation. Video shows multiple officers with weapons drawn and a passenger holding their hands outside the window.

When Brookfield contacted Milwaukee police, MPD said it no longer needed the vehicle or the people inside, and everyone was released. Milwaukee told FOX6 the incident was not a Flock problem but a personnel problem: staff had failed to remove the wanted-vehicle alert.

That is precisely the problem.

The camera flagged the plate it had been told to flag. The alert behind it was stale. The guns came out anyway.

Los Angeles found the same problem at scale. The LAPD Office of the Inspector General issued a 98-page audit dated July 10 after reviewing two months of plate-reader alerts. Officers acknowledged 161 accurate plate matches on vehicles that later investigation determined were not stolen. During the same period, plate-reader alerts contributed to recovering 337 stolen vehicles.

Not every false alert became a traffic stop. But the audit found that inaccurate alerts often stemmed from records that had not been properly cleared after a vehicle was recovered, and that officers frequently failed to verify alerts before acting on them. Hot-list hits may result in high-risk stops involving backup officers, supervisors, air support and commands for occupants to exit vehicles. The inspector general warned that inaccurate records affect liberty interests, erode trust and create potential legal and financial liability.

That same week, Los Angeles let its three-year Flock agreement expire rather than renew on the existing terms, with the department’s chief information officer citing concerns about civil liberties, privacy and the data being collected. The city has not ruled out Flock permanently and has been negotiating a replacement contract that would give it legal ownership of the data and restrict the company’s ability to share it.

Which brings me to the part I cannot get past, and it is the part that separates this from every other privacy fight of the last twenty years.

I can refuse Facebook. I can delete an app, revoke location permissions, reject cookies, decline to put a smart speaker in my house and throw my phone directly into the Gulf of America if I am sufficiently committed to the bit.

I cannot meaningfully opt out of driving past a government camera on a public road.

There is no box to uncheck. The plate passes the camera and the detection exists. The overwhelming majority of people generating those records are not suspected of anything. They are going to work, taking children to school, visiting a doctor, sitting in a church parking lot, buying groceries.

You know, existing.

Consent matters here precisely because those people have done nothing to draw government suspicion. If surveillance becomes unavoidable simply because a person uses a public road, privacy has been quietly redefined as something a citizen may exercise only by staying home. That is not consent in any sense worth the word. It is a condition of leaving the house.

And it works this way because surveillance used to contain friction. Following someone required officers, cars, hours and a target worth spending all of that on. Technology removes the friction. Once cameras collect automatically and databases make the results searchable, the government no longer has to decide who is worth following before the surveillance happens. It can collect first and decide who it cares about later.

That inversion deserves far more public argument than it has gotten.

People spend enormous energy worrying about Big Tech, and plenty of that worry is justified. Google can know where I went. Meta can infer what I care about. Amazon can build an uncomfortable profile of what I buy.

But Google cannot arrest me. Amazon cannot obtain a warrant for my house. Meta cannot put me in handcuffs.

The state can.

That asymmetry means government surveillance deserves at least as much scrutiny as the commercial kind and probably more. Yet Americans who raise the question are increasingly told they are attacking police themselves.

They are not.

An officer can sincerely believe Flock helps him recover stolen cars and find dangerous people. His wife can sincerely believe it makes their community safer. They can both be right about those benefits, and I can still believe the network should not exist at this scale. Those positions do not cancel each other out.

The difficult cases are exactly where civil liberties matter. Nobody needs a constitutional principle to stop the government from doing something useless.

What almost nobody in this argument enjoys saying out loud is that a free society cannot prevent every crime.

It cannot catch every criminal, predict every attack, recover every stolen object or eliminate every danger. Getting closer to any of those goals almost always requires giving the state more information, more access or more authority over people who have done nothing wrong.

We accept limits elsewhere because the alternative is obvious. We would not accept police searching every house on a block because one resident might be hiding stolen property. We would not accept government opening everyone’s mail because a small percentage might contain contraband. We would not install microphones in every living room because terrible things sometimes happen inside homes.

Those restrictions make some investigations harder.

We accept the cost because maximum crime-solving efficiency has never been the organizing principle of a free country. Privacy is not a courtesy citizens receive whenever it happens not to inconvenience an investigation.

Nobody bolts a sign to city hall reading WELCOME TO THE PANOPTICON.

It happens incrementally.

A plate reader here. A gunshot detector there. A drone overhead. A facial recognition pilot. A camera network. A database. An analytics layer. A federal sharing agreement. A person-search tool. Maybe, someday, a few hundred thousand privately owned dashcams collecting plates while their owners go to work.

Every step arrives with a specific use case and a reassuring explanation, and many of those explanations are true.

Then somebody connects the systems.

And none of that requires Toka at all, which may be the most important point in this entire story.

The question is not whether Toka is secretly inside Flock. As far as anyone has shown, it is not. Toka instead shows how far surveillance technology has already traveled past the modest proposition Americans were originally asked to accept when plate readers began appearing beside roads.

One company builds infrastructure that detects and searches movement. Another sells governments covert access to cameras and connected systems. The same venture firm decided both were worth funding. One of its founders personally put portfolio surveillance technology into a major police department and later offered that department Toka’s technology too.

The Toka deal did not happen.

The technology did not disappear with it.

Toka now has its headquarters in Maryland and says demand from U.S. government partners is climbing.

The better question is what limits we intend to place on this infrastructure before technology finishes eliminating every practical barrier that once made surveillance difficult. Once a country accepts that ordinary movement should be recorded automatically because the information might prove useful someday, there is no obvious technological stopping point.

There are only policy stopping points, and those require somebody to actually say no.

To be fair, people have started to.

Flock says its network now spans more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Against that, a tally cited by the Washington Examiner counts roughly 98 localities that have canceled, rejected, declined to renew or deactivated Flock systems since 2021, about 23 of them this year.

Not all are rejecting plate surveillance itself. Some are simply replacing Flock with competitors like Axon, which is a different fight over essentially the same form of surveillance.

At the federal level, Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett introduced H.R. 9800 in July to bar federal agencies from buying or accessing systems like these. Texas Congressman Keith Self introduced H.R. 9716 days earlier, which would require a warrant before federal agencies query state or local surveillance data. Both are sitting in committee.

Flock, for its part, says it supports legislation establishing guardrails and points to more than 40 court decisions it says support warrantless use of plate readers in public spaces.

So the argument is finally happening in public, one city council and one bill at a time, roughly where it should have started rather than where it ended up.

The infrastructure is already enormous and still expanding. The constraints are arriving afterward.

That is the actual scoreboard.

I want murderers caught. I want kidnapped children found. I want stolen cars recovered and officers home at the end of their shifts.

I also want to live in a country where leaving my driveway does not automatically create a government-searchable record of where I went simply because technology made one cheap enough to collect.

Sometimes those goals will conflict, and when they do, the conflict deserves an actual public argument rather than an automatic victory for whichever side says safety first.

Because if safety always defeats privacy, privacy does not survive as a right.

It survives as a temporary technical inconvenience.

And technology is getting very, very good at removing those.

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Anthony Fauci came to Capitol Hill Wednesday under subpoena and left without answering a single substantive question. Minutes after being sworn in before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the man who ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades told senators that on the advice of counsel he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He then did it 111 times across hours of questioning about COVID-19 origins, American-funded coronavirus research in China, gain-of-function work and the pandemic decisions that reordered life in every household in the country.

Fauci blamed the refusal on Chairman Rand Paul, accusing the Kentucky Republican of a years-long campaign to see him prosecuted and of releasing his private diary to that end, and saying the hearing was built to maneuver him into a statement that would justify Paul’s public promises to put him behind bars. He noted decades of prior cooperation with Congress and said he was acting on advice of counsel. He has consistently denied committing any crime.

What makes Wednesday extraordinary is not simply that a congressional witness invoked the Fifth. It is that this witness already holds a sweeping presidential pardon covering much of the conduct Congress summoned him to discuss.

In the final hours of his presidency, Joe Biden granted Fauci a full and unconditional pardon reaching any federal offense he may have committed from January 1, 2014 through the date of the pardon, along with anything arising from or related to his service as NIAID director, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or COVID-19 Response Team, or as chief medical adviser to the president. That window swallows the entire pandemic and the years of research funding decisions that preceded it.

The Fifth Amendment protects a witness against compelled testimony that could expose him to criminal prosecution. But as Congress’s own Constitution Annotated states, an accepted pardon “obviates a Fifth Amendment objection” as to the pardoned offense. Citing Brown v. Walker, the 1896 Supreme Court decision, it explains that once a witness has been pardoned he can no longer invoke the privilege with respect to that offense, because the prosecution risk the privilege exists to guard against has been removed.

Sen. Josh Hawley made the point in the bluntest way available to him. The Missouri Republican opened by asking Fauci what day of the week it was, what color tie he was wearing, and what color the carpet in front of him was. Each time, Fauci recited the same scripted refusal. Hawley then told him he had no Fifth Amendment rights left at all because he had been pardoned, quoted the same line of precedent back at him, and said what the committee was watching was not constitutional law but contempt for the Senate and for the American people.

The pardon does not erase the Fifth Amendment in every conceivable circumstance. It covers federal offenses within its scope, not unrelated conduct, not offenses outside its time period, not potential state exposure. But that limitation only sharpens the question left sitting on the table Wednesday: what specific unpardoned criminal exposure did Fauci believe a truthful answer to each of those questions would create? Those are arguments his lawyers could make if the contempt fight proceeds.

As the hearing wound down, Paul and Sen. Ron Johnson turned to a familiar congressional precedent: Lois Lerner. The former IRS official at the center of the tea party targeting scandal appeared before the House Oversight Committee in 2013, delivered an opening statement denying wrongdoing, and then invoked the Fifth rather than answer questions. The committee later concluded that she had waived the privilege by speaking first, and the House ultimately held her in contempt.

Lerner does not resolve Fauci’s case. It does show how ugly this procedural fight can become. The Justice Department later declined to prosecute her, concluding her general declarations of innocence had not waived the privilege, and no court ever ruled on the merits. A Congressional Research Service review records both sides: the House concluded Lerner had waived the Fifth, the U.S. attorney concluded she had not. Fauci’s decision to deliver an opening statement before refusing questioning gives Paul a version of that same waiver argument. His pardon adds a separate issue Lerner never presented.

Fauci’s silence left hours of allegations sitting in the congressional record without a substantive rebuttal from the only man positioned to give one. Paul walked through documents and through the diary he released last week. Sen. Rick Scott raised the criminal case against David Morens, Fauci’s longtime senior adviser, who has pleaded not guilty to federal charges involving records. Sen. Bernie Moreno demanded an apology to Americans penalized under pandemic mandates. Others pressed him on natural immunity, treatments, research funding and the gap between his public statements and his private writing. At one point Paul had one of Fauci’s attorneys removed from the room for repeatedly interjecting. The answer never changed.

Democrat Ranking Member Gary Peters responded largely by attacking the investigation itself, arguing Paul was burning committee time relitigating COVID rather than examining present-day public health preparedness, and challenging how the majority had run the inquiry. Other Democrats defended Fauci’s career and questioned the legitimacy of the proceeding. That is a political answer to Paul’s investigation. It is not an answer to the documents Republicans put into the record.

Next week’s vote will not decide whether Paul’s allegations about COVID are true. It addresses something much more concrete. Fauci appeared under subpoena and asserted the Fifth. Paul denied the assertion of privilege and directed him to answer, telling him he was standing on privilege despite the existence of the pardon. Fauci kept refusing. Paul then told him the committee “has scheduled a vote next week” on a resolution certifying his contempt, and warned there would be repercussions.

A contempt resolution would not convict Fauci of anything, and Lerner is proof that a congressional contempt finding does not guarantee prosecution. But the pardon ensures this fight will not look like hers. Congress now has to confront whether a witness can invoke the privilege against self-incrimination over questions about federal conduct for which he has already been pardoned. It arrives the day after the government formally rewrote the rules on the category of research at the center of the dispute.

For five years the question between these two men was whether Anthony Fauci told Congress the truth, a fight The Daily Dots has traced through the paper trail and through the declassifications this spring.

Biden pardoned him for much of what Congress wants to know. Fauci still refused to talk. Now Congress has to decide what it can do about it.

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Anthony Fauci returns to Capitol Hill Wednesday morning to answer questions about the kind of high-risk biological research that has followed him through years of congressional hearings. The day before he was set to take the witness chair, the federal government redrew the line around that research entirely.

The Department of Health and Human Services and the State Department released the United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research on Tuesday, July 28, carrying out the executive order on biological research safety President Trump signed in May 2025. The framework prohibits federal support for what the government now calls dangerous gain-of-function research, or DGOF, conducted in the United States or abroad. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the government is replacing “weak oversight with clear, enforceable safeguards.” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who helped develop the policy, said research capable of creating extraordinary biological risks now gets the highest level of scrutiny.

It is not a blanket ban on every experiment a scientist might loosely call gain-of-function. Research that falls squarely in the dangerous category cannot receive federal money. Research that might fall into it, what the policy treats as potential DGOF, can still move forward after a new third-party review, and the administration says vaccine, therapeutic and diagnostic work continues under the new safeguards. Separately, the policy cuts off federal funding for research in countries and at institutions that lack adequate biosafety and oversight standards.

The distinction matters because the definition of the phrase has been the whole fight between Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul for five years, and it sounds like semantics only until you see how much rode on it.

Under the framework adopted in 2017, heightened review applied to proposed research reasonably anticipated to create, transfer, or use an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen. The threshold was narrow by design. To qualify as a potential pandemic pathogen, an agent had to satisfy both of two conditions: it had to be likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations, and likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant illness or death in humans. Both prongs, or the heightened review never triggered. That system replaced a funding pause the government imposed in 2014 after a series of laboratory biosafety incidents.

That narrow threshold became the backbone of Fauci’s defense. He told Paul at a May 2021 Senate hearing that the National Institutes of Health had never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and by that October his own agency’s second-ranking official told Congress the EcoHealth Alliance work had in fact met the definition, a sequence The Daily Dots documented in full earlier this year. Fauci has maintained he was speaking in the government’s regulatory sense of the phrase rather than the looser scientific one, and NIH has separately told House investigators the project did not meet the criteria of either the 2014 pause or the 2017 guidance.

His own writing shows the term was not always used that narrowly. In an October 2012 commentary in the journal mBio, Fauci discussed the H5N1 transmissibility experiments as gain-of-function research plainly and by name, and argued the voluntary moratorium on that work should stay in place until the risks and benefits had been weighed openly, with the general public among the stakeholders in the decision.

The line Washington drew this week starts somewhere else. Rather than requiring a pathogen to clear both pandemic-potential prongs first, the May 2025 order defines dangerous gain-of-function research as work on an infectious agent or toxin that could result in significant societal consequences and that seeks or achieves one or more of seven outcomes: enhancing harmful consequences; disrupting immune response or the effectiveness of an immunization; conferring resistance to useful treatments or helping an agent evade detection; increasing stability, transmissibility or the ability to disseminate; altering host range or tropism; enhancing the susceptibility of a human host population; or generating or reconstituting an eradicated or extinct agent.

The government is once again trying to answer a question it has argued over for more than a decade. At what point does the value of learning what a pathogen can do stop outweighing the risk of teaching it how to do it?

None of this settles whether the EcoHealth work at Wuhan met the regulatory definition in force at the time, and none of it establishes that federally funded research caused the COVID-19 pandemic. What it does is move the argument past the semantic fight that consumed the earlier hearings. Paul subpoenaed Fauci last month after he declined to appear voluntarily, and has spent July releasing tranches of Fauci-era records, following declassifications this spring that put the funding question back in front of the public.

The question in front of the committee Wednesday is no longer only whether two men were using the same words differently. It is whether the old system drew the line in the right place, whether that line let risky work slip past heightened review, and whether the government knew enough about what it was funding to recognize when the risk had changed. Fauci spent years helping shape the government’s answer.

He also enters the hearing room in an unusual legal position. Before leaving office, President Joe Biden gave Fauci a full and unconditional pardon covering any federal offenses he may have committed from January 1, 2014 through the date of the pardon, along with anything related to his service as NIAID director, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President. The pardon removes the threat of federal prosecution for conduct it covers, which can also eliminate the Fifth Amendment basis for refusing to answer questions where that pardoned conduct is the only source of criminal exposure. It does not protect him from anything he does now.

Paul drew that distinction himself before the hearing, saying the pardon covers a ten-year window in the past and does not reach what happens once Fauci raises his right hand and testifies under oath. A lie to Congress, Paul said, would be a new felony, committed in real time, with no pardon waiting to cover it. Because the pardon reaches conduct during his government service, some argument is expected over exactly where its edge falls.

That leaves Fauci with something he has not had in his previous confrontations with Paul: broad protection from federal prosecution over much of the conduct Congress wants to ask him about. What he does with that protection, and how directly he answers now that he has it, may matter as much as anything the committee puts to him Wednesday morning.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of the most influential and visible scientific officials in the federal government’s response to COVID-19 for years as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, becoming a public face Americans were told to trust on masks, pandemic restrictions, and the Moderna vaccine his agency helped develop. That record is now facing new scrutiny less than a day before Fauci is set to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News his department spent roughly eight months retrieving Fauci’s personal diaries from eleven separate servers where they had been “sequestered and secreted” before handing them over to Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson for release. Kennedy said on air that Fauci suffered a serious health event roughly five months after his January vaccination, that it was “one of the adverse events that NIH, CDC, and FDA said are expected from the vaccine,” and that Fauci “never told anybody” while privately being treated.

I went looking for that documentation myself.

I found it in the diary’s original, unredacted release. In an entry dated June 19, 2021, Fauci describes a health scare of his own. Two days after acute chest pain sent him for a CT scan, and after an initial radiologist alarmed him by flagging a lesion that looked like lung cancer, Fauci writes that other physicians considered the more concerning lesions likely benign. One finding, though, wasn’t in dispute. “I had a pulmonary infarct in the right lowest segment that was definite,” Fauci wrote, adding that a Johns Hopkins radiologist who reviewed the scan agreed it was “the only definite thing on the film,” and recommended Fauci begin the blood thinner Eliquis immediately.

That passage does not appear in the diary package currently posted on Sen. Paul’s Senate website. Paul’s office published the 1,141-page document on July 25. NPR reported the file was taken offline the following Monday evening and reposted Tuesday morning with redactions. A copy obtained before the takedown, and an archived snapshot of the original file preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, both show the June 19 medical passage in full. The version now live on Paul’s Senate website has that section blacked out.

The timing lines up almost exactly with what Kennedy described. Fauci’s diary places his second Moderna dose on January 19, 2021, which puts the June 19 infarct at exactly 151 days later, almost precisely five months. Where the record and the accusation diverge is causation. The diary entry itself, in the pages surrounding June 19 and 20, makes no mention of Moderna, no mention of vaccination, and contains no statement from Fauci or any of his doctors linking the infarct to his vaccination status one way or the other. Kennedy’s claim that Fauci suffered, and concealed, a vaccine-caused injury is Kennedy’s characterization of the episode, not something the primary document itself states. It’s also worth noting that the clotting syndrome U.S. regulators were actively watching for that spring, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia, was tied domestically to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and typically appeared within days of vaccination, not months, while the federal studies that did track pulmonary embolism after mRNA vaccines found no safety signal. None of that determines what caused Fauci’s own infarct, but it means the available evidence doesn’t support Kennedy’s stronger claim that a pulmonary infarct was, at that time, an established or expected Moderna side effect.

There’s a narrower, more answerable question left over. Under Moderna’s emergency authorization, vaccination providers were required to report serious adverse events to VAERS regardless of whether they believed the vaccine caused them. Whether Fauci’s infarct met the EUA’s definition of a serious adverse event is itself part of the unanswered record. The Daily Dots found no contemporaneous public disclosure by Fauci of the infarct, and a manual search of the public VAERS database using his approximate age, sex, region, vaccine, and dose produced no report that could be clearly identified as his. That doesn’t establish no report was ever filed. VAERS records are deidentified and often incomplete. But it leaves a specific, checkable question no one has answered: was Fauci’s June 2021 pulmonary infarct ever reported through the federal vaccine-safety system designed to collect and flag serious adverse events following vaccination, and if not, why not.

That unanswered reporting question lands differently when Fauci’s own medical episode is read against what he was writing privately about vaccine safety and policy in the months that followed.

By August, the administration was preparing to recommend additional vaccine doses broadly. On August 15, Fauci wrote that the White House team was trying to fashion a coherent message justifying boosters “to everyone who wants one regardless of age or underlying condition,” even as he acknowledged that the evidence of waning protection against hospitalization and death remained unclear and confounded. Jeff Zients wanted a sharp public message, Fauci wrote, but that was difficult “given the paucity of data.”

Three days later, Fauci described the policy itself as requiring what he called “majestic leaps,” anticipating where the evidence was heading and acting even though “the data were not absolutely firm.” In the same August 18 entry, he recorded President Biden immediately focusing on a specific unresolved safety problem: FDA could determine that the risk-benefit calculation for boosting people around age 18 was unfavorable because of myocarditis risk compared with their risk of hospitalization from COVID. Myocarditis following mRNA vaccination was by then a recognized adverse event under active federal surveillance, particularly in younger males.

Two days later, Fauci recorded another disagreement. Vaccine expert Paul Offit believed the administration “may have jumped the gun” on boosters, while virologist Vincent Racaniello argued they were not justified without evidence of waning protection against hospitalization. Fauci disagreed. His private summary of the risk-benefit calculation was strikingly categorical: boosters, he wrote, “are safe and to put it in plain terms it can help, and it certainly cannot hurt.”

The internal disagreement did not stay confined to scientific debate. By September, Fauci’s diary shows the White House attempting to keep FDA, CDC, and CDC’s outside vaccine advisers from drifting apart as they considered booster eligibility. On September 21, Fauci wrote that Zients had been calling him multiple times a day asking him to “continue to mentor Rochelle” Walensky so that CDC and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices did not “veer too far off the FDA recommendations and our ultimate intent.” The discussions, Fauci wrote, included the myocarditis concern.

Two days later, ACIP voted 9-6 against recommending boosters for adults whose occupational or institutional exposure put them at higher risk. Fauci’s account of what happened next is extraordinary. He wrote that he repeatedly called and texted Walensky and “literally begged her to override that decision,” adding that “the whole team in the department and the White House is counting on my influence on her.” The next morning he recorded the result: “Alas! Rochelle listened to me. She overruled the recommendation of the ACIP.” CDC’s own historical record confirms the underlying procedural fact: ACIP voted against that recommendation, and Walensky declined to adopt that portion of the committee’s decision and issued the broader recommendation herself. Fauci’s diary does not establish that Walensky lacked her own independent scientific basis for reversing the panel; it establishes that Fauci and the White House were actively working to produce that outcome and that Fauci later credited his own persuasion for it.

None of those entries proves Moderna caused Fauci’s pulmonary infarct, and they shouldn’t be used to pretend otherwise. What they do complicate is the cleaner picture presented to the public of vaccine policy simply following settled evidence wherever it led. Fauci’s own diary describes something much less tidy: unresolved safety questions, incomplete data, decisions made in anticipation of evidence that hadn’t yet firmed up, White House concern over maintaining a coherent policy, and a direct effort to steer the government’s own advisory process toward what officials had already decided was their “ultimate intent.”

Against that record, the unanswered question surrounding Fauci’s own June 2021 infarct isn’t whether coincidence alone proves causation. The question is why a serious medical event occurring five months after his own Moderna vaccination, serious enough to prompt immediate anticoagulation, left no public trace at the time and, so far, no VAERS report that can be identified, while the same diary shows how intensely the government was managing vaccine safety, policy, and public confidence around him.

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For the second time in seven days, the Southwest Power Pool asked Washington for emergency authority to pull additional generation onto the grid as extreme heat bore down across the central United States.

The Department of Energy issued the latest order July 26, authorizing SPP to dispatch specified generating units and, if necessary, call on backup generation as a last resort before or during an Energy Emergency Alert Level 3, the stage at which firm service interruptions can become necessary to protect the system. The order runs through August 3. The authority gives SPP additional generation options when operating margins become dangerously thin.

DOE issued a similar order July 20, also at SPP’s request, during an earlier stretch of hot weather. That same afternoon, SPP’s western balancing area briefly reached EEA-3 after the operator had warned of high peak loads, potentially low output from wind and other variable energy resources, and possible increases in resource outages. SPP did not order controlled service interruptions, and conditions improved within hours. The federal order expired the following night.

SPP currently reaches a peak load of about 56 gigawatts. Its 2025 transmission plan projects that could climb to roughly 109 gigawatts within the next decade, nearly double today’s peak, driven by electrification, manufacturing growth and economic development. SPP’s board approved an $8.6 billion transmission expansion last year, including 949 miles of new 765-kilovolt lines, to build capacity for that growth.

Data centers are a named part of the broader demand surge SPP is preparing to accommodate. After federal regulators approved SPP’s new High Impact Large Load process, the organization said it was responding to a rising number of customers seeking to connect major loads including AI-driven data centers and manufacturing projects.

SPP’s High Impact Large Load program is designed to streamline those connections, while a related service called CHILL lets qualifying projects obtain conditional access to the grid sooner in exchange for accepting possible curtailment during periods of system stress. The workaround addresses a basic timing problem: SPP says major transmission upgrades can often take six years or longer to complete.

Nationally, the grid entered summer in better shape than a year ago. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s 2026 summer assessment found record resource additions had strengthened summer readiness, including substantial new solar and battery capacity along with some new natural gas generation. The number of regions rated at elevated risk of shortfalls under abnormal summer conditions fell from six in 2025 to three regions and one locality this year. SPP was not among them. In May, SPP itself said it had a high likelihood of meeting summer demand and remained confident it could keep the lights on for the roughly 20 million people its member utilities serve.

NERC’s national assessment also flagged accelerated demand and the rapid growth of large loads as challenges that could strain reliability even as new resources come online. Summer peak demand projections increased by more than 11 gigawatts from last year’s forecast.

SPP is now planning a transmission system for demand that could rise to nearly twice its current peak while simultaneously working to connect the large power users contributing to that growth. At the same time, extreme summer conditions have already pushed part of its system to EEA-3 and prompted two requests for federal emergency authority in seven days.

That does not mean data centers caused either emergency. Heat, high demand, resource availability and variable generation were the immediate concerns identified by grid officials. But the overlap is getting harder to ignore. SPP is preparing for a future in which electricity demand could nearly double, with AI data centers among the enormous new customers seeking access to the system, while the grid it has today can still find itself operating close enough to the edge that emergency tools become necessary.

SPP has approved $8.6 billion in transmission construction to prepare for that future. Building it will take years. The demand is not necessarily going to wait.

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On November 1, 2020, Anthony Fauci took a phone call from President Trump and wrote it down afterward. The president told him the country could not stay locked down. Fauci recorded the exchange in his diary and added a parenthetical to himself: “(I never said that we should lock down).”

Three weeks earlier, speaking to students at the College of the Holy Cross, Fauci had said the opposite in public. “I recommended to the President that we shut the country down,” he told them. “That was a very difficult decision, because I knew it would have serious economic consequences.”

Both are Fauci describing his own conduct, seven months into the pandemic, three weeks apart.

That pattern runs through the 1,141 pages of diary entries released Friday by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, along with separate packages on outside cash awards and a Customs and Border Protection investigation. Fauci is scheduled to testify before that committee under subpoena on Wednesday morning.

Most of what has circulated from the release since Friday concerns Fauci’s preoccupation with his own standing, and that material is real. The awards package released alongside the diary documents it in detail. So does the diary, which returns to his fame week after week while the death toll climbs in the same entries. It is also the version of this story that every outlet ran within hours, and a few of the specific claims being made about it do not survive a check against the documents. What follows is narrower and almost entirely uncovered. It is the set of places where the contemporaneous record and Fauci’s own later account of himself do not line up, and where the gap can be shown rather than argued.

Start with the closures, because they reached further into ordinary life than anything else the federal government did in 2020.

The March 15 and 16 diary entries record Fauci pressing for what he calls a more aggressive mitigation strategy. He writes that he spoke with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio about closing the city’s schools, and that de Blasio decided based on what Fauci had been saying publicly. He records a similar call with Ann O’Leary, then chief of staff to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in which the state’s school closure decision followed his television appearances. He describes the federal fifteen-day guidance that came out the next day as reflecting his own push toward more aggressive measures, including closing bars and restaurants where community spread existed.

He was still describing it that way six months later. In a CNN special that aired April 3, 2021, Fauci told Sanjay Gupta, “We gave the strong recommendation that we really shut things down as best as we can.” Asked how hard a sell it had been, he said they were sitting around the Resolute Desk talking to the president about it, and that he thought Trump accepted it pretty well.

Then on July 25, 2022, on The Hill’s program Rising, journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon asked him whether he would recommend locking down schools if he had to do it over again. “First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” Fauci answered. He redirected to the CDC as the agency that made recommendations through its epidemiologists, and told her to go back and look at his statements that everything possible should be done to keep schools open and safe.

The escape hatch is the word lockdown. Fauci can argue it means a total national stay-at-home order, and that what he pushed in March 2020 was a fifteen-day mitigation package. That defense is not frivolous. What it cannot cover is his own October 2020 sentence, which used the broader phrase and attached it to a specific recommendation he says he made to the president. Or the November 2020 parenthetical, written privately, which shows the narrower self-description was already in place two years before anyone asked him about it on television.

The same shape appears in a place nobody has looked, and this one is new.

In mid-November 2020 the country was being told the presidential transition had been walled off. President Trump had not conceded, the General Services Administration had not issued the ascertainment that unlocks formal agency access, and on November 16 Biden told reporters that “more people may die if we don’t coordinate.” The claim was not that coordination was difficult. It was that it could not happen.

On November 15, incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain went on NBC’s Meet the Press. Chuck Todd asked whether there had been “any even informal contact” between the Biden advisory board and the White House task force, and specifically whether there had been informal contact between the president-elect and Fauci. Klain answered: “Unfortunately, Chuck, we can’t. We can’t until we get that GSA ascertainment that authorizes us to contact government officials. And so, we can’t have any of those kinds of contacts until we get to that stage of ascertainment.”

Fauci’s diary says Klain called him on November 13. Two days before. The entry records Klain asking for suggested candidates to run the CDC, and lists five names Fauci put forward, beginning with Rochelle Walensky, along with Klain’s view that one of them would fit better at the Food and Drug Administration.

That week, Fauci sat down with USA Today’s editorial board and was asked why he had not been engaging with the president-elect’s people. He said it was a sensitive period and that he had tried to stay out of the political aspects of it. “To be honest with you,” he added, “I believe that the Biden people including Ron Klain understand that and don’t want to put me in a compromised position.”

Ascertainment came on November 23. The next day Biden said publicly that his staff had spoken with Fauci and that he had been very, very helpful.

That created a problem, and Fauci wrote down both the problem and his solution. “I had told he press that I had not heard from the Biden team since my conversations with Ron Klain were supposed to be confidential since over the past several days Ron has contacted me about my advice for CDC Director and FDA Commissioner,” he wrote, the typographical errors his own. “I recommended Rochelle Walensky for CDC. Ron called he and liked her.” Then a last line that trails off unfinished: “In order not to have a contradiction with Biden, I have told CNN (Kaitlan Collins, Jim Acosta, etc.) GMA”

It appears on released page 223, physical page 493. CNN reported that evening that Fauci was talking with Biden transition aides, describing the contacts as preliminary conversations.

The next morning he wrote: “Ron just texted me and said that they decided on Rochelle Walensky for CDC director on my recommendation!!” The transition did not announce Walensky until December 7.

That same day, live on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Fauci was asked who on Biden’s team he had spoken with and when he would meet the president-elect directly. He named Klain and said “we do not talk about the nuts and bolts.” Five days later he told WTOP the conversations had been about “things that might be thought about in the future, nothing specific, nothing substantive, more or less just a touch-base.” Three days after that he told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett they had not been “substantive.”

Not the nuts and bolts. Nothing specific. Nothing substantive. Against a diary listing five candidates for one federal agency, a second steered toward another, and a text naming the winner twelve days before the country was told.

Which brings this to the exchange the hearing is actually about.

On May 11, 2021, Fauci told a Senate committee that the National Institutes of Health “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Three years later, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak was asked by Rep. Debbie Lesko whether NIH had funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan through EcoHealth Alliance. His answer: it depended on the definition, and if she meant the generic term, then yes, they did. Tabak added that generic gain-of-function work goes on in many labs, is not regulated, and in his view poses no threat.

Fauci has since said he was using the narrower regulatory category governing enhanced pandemic pathogens. He did not say so at the time, in answer to a question that was not narrow. And his own diary shows him using the term the other way. In a February 2020 entry he writes that Wuhan researcher Shi Zhengli had been working for years in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, adapting the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor.

He has also described the narrowing himself, on the record. In a transcribed interview released by the House COVID select subcommittee, Fauci told investigators that when he is asked whether something is gain of function, he is referring to the operative definition under the federal review framework. “That’s my definition. That is the regulatory operational definition,” he said. “And as we were talking about before, other people use the word ‘gain of function’ this, ‘gain of function’ that, and everybody’s got their own interpretation of it.”

Those same early entries are the origins material, and they need care, because this is where the release is most often oversold.

On January 31 and February 1, 2020, Fauci records a series of urgent conversations. Scientists including Kristian Andersen raised concerns that features of the virus, particularly the furin cleavage site, might not have arisen naturally. A conference call was convened. In Fauci’s account of it, aside from two participants who favored natural origin, the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and because of Shi’s history he wrote that they could not let it go.

By April 17, 2020, at a White House briefing, asked directly about suggestions the virus was manmade or had come from a Chinese laboratory, Fauci said evolutionary virologists had examined the sequences and found the mutations totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human. In a May 2020 interview he said the evidence was very strongly leaning toward the virus not having been artificially or deliberately manipulated.

Fauci told Congress under oath in June 2024 that he had always kept an open mind. The diary shows him privately calling the lab-leak discussion preposterous in September 2021, writing in October that there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that a lab leak had occurred, and referring in November to three prominent proponents as the three stooges.

The diary entry now circulating widely as evidence that Fauci celebrated his own fame while the death toll climbed is printed in Paul’s release as May 21, 2020. It records roughly 234,100 global cases and 9,800 deaths. Those are March numbers. Global cases in late May 2020 were near five million. The entry also sits between the March 20 and March 22 entries. It appears to be a typographical error in Paul’s release, and the pandemic context around that page is very different from the one being described.

A February 8, 2020 entry in which Fauci privately estimates a case fatality rate of 0.2 to 0.3 percent is being offered as proof that he inflated the danger publicly weeks later. His own March 5 entry undercuts that, recording a CDC modeled range running to one percent precisely because the denominator was unknown.

And in the Customs and Border Protection package, a June 2021 border stop involving 132 undeclared vials has been described as a biological smuggling incident. CBP’s own assessment was that the vials likely contained a fly species commonly used as a model organism in research.

Fauci is expected in SD-342 at 8:30 Wednesday morning, under the subpoena Paul issued in June after he withdrew from a voluntary appearance. Paul’s investigation has focused on the origins of the virus, federally funded gain-of-function research and federal records, and on whether documents his committee has obtained square with what Fauci has told Congress.

No response to the diary release from Fauci or his representatives could be located.

None of what is above requires anyone to prove that Fauci lied, and the strongest material in the release does not depend on it. What the documents show is narrower and more durable. Again and again, a broad question was answered with a word he was using, by his own account, in a narrower sense, and the narrowing was never disclosed. He did not recommend locking anything down, if lockdown excludes closing schools and bars. The conversations were not substantive, if substantive excludes naming the next CDC director. NIH did not fund gain-of-function research, if gain-of-function means only the regulated category. He always kept an open mind, if an open mind is compatible with calling the other side the three stooges.

On released page 223, he wrote down what he had told reporters, why it did not match, and what he did about it. That is the one place in 1,141 pages where he explains the Fauci method himself.

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Former President Joe Biden has abandoned his lawsuit to keep audio recordings of his interviews with memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer away from the House Judiciary Committee, filing a notice of voluntary dismissal Friday in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

This is a separate case from the one I covered last week. As I reported, a divided D.C. Circuit panel ruled 2-1 against Biden on July 20 in Heritage Foundation v. DOJ, the FOIA lawsuit Heritage and the Oversight Project have pursued since 2024, which Biden intervened in to block disclosure. That ruling denied Biden’s request for an injunction pending appeal and extended an existing administrative injunction through August 3, giving him time to seek further review. That case is still open, and the Heritage Foundation still isn’t getting the recordings yet.

Friday’s dismissal is different. Biden separately sued DOJ in May to stop the department from handing the same recordings to the House Judiciary Committee, which intervened in that case as a defendant. His attorneys voluntarily dismissed that lawsuit without prejudice on July 24, clearing the way for DOJ to turn the material over to the Republican-led committee. The Heritage FOIA case runs on its own separate timetable.

The recordings date to 2016 and 2017, when Biden sat for interviews with Zwonitzer for his memoir “Promise Me, Dad.” They later surfaced as evidence in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, an investigation that ended without charges. Hur’s report described the recorded conversations as “often painfully slow,” citing what he called significant limitations in Biden’s memory during the interviews.

Biden had argued the nearly decade-old conversations amounted to private diary entries that ended up in government hands only because of a criminal probe that produced no charges. The D.C. Circuit majority in the Heritage case rejected that argument last week. Rather than continue his separate challenge to disclosure to the House Judiciary Committee, Biden walked away from it.

The Daily Dots stays free to read. Work like this takes real hours — if it’s worth a few dollars a month, a paid subscription keeps it coming and keeps it free for folks who can’t swing it. No wall, no guilt: read it, share it, we’re square.

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New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill will not turn over the personally identifying records the Justice Department has demanded on roughly 6,600 people who told her state they were not U.S. citizens and were registered to vote anyway. That refusal has turned a state registration failure into the central exhibit in a national fight over whether states should be the only ones checking their own voter rolls.

The numbers came from New Jersey itself. In a statement Tuesday, Sherrill said a serious software error in the state’s Motor Vehicle System registered roughly 6,600 people between June 2023 and June 2024 who had answered “no” when a keypad asked whether they were U.S. citizens while applying for driver’s licenses or state identification cards. A preliminary analysis found that fewer than 400 of the people newly registered through that error went on to vote. They registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state, she said, and there is no evidence so far that any election was swayed. Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January, ordered the registrations removed, directed her chief counsel to investigate, and said her new Motor Vehicle Commission administrator had begun replacing the vendor. The failure occurred under her predecessor, Democrat Phil Murphy.

The vendor disputes her account. IDEMIA, the French identity-technology firm that has worked with the Motor Vehicle Commission for more than four decades, told The Epoch Times that the files it transmitted accurately recorded the “no” answers on citizenship, that the same applicants had indicated “yes” to wanting to register, and that the state Division of Elections is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility. The company went further in a statement to NOTUS, saying the Division of Elections flagged the same batch of 6,600 files over missing party-affiliation information in June 2024 and questioning why the registrations were approved anyway. If IDEMIA’s account is correct, state officials had already flagged problems involving those files two years ago, although it is not clear that they recognized the citizenship issue at the time.

The Justice Department moved the same day Sherrill went public. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, gave the state five business days to produce full names, dates of birth, nationalities, residential addresses and registration dates for all 6,600, plus the times, locations and mail-ballot certifications for the roughly 400 who voted. Dhillon told a federal court she would notify the judge in the department’s existing litigation against New Jersey, where DOJ is already seeking the state’s full voter rolls.

Sherrill refused Thursday, telling reporters her administration is not in the practice of handing that kind of personally identifying data to the federal government and accusing the administration of wanting to weaponize the disclosure. The Justice Department’s answer was that federal law prohibits any noncitizen from voting in a federal election.

The pressure to pass the SAVE America Act is not coming only from Republicans. Jamel Holley, a former Democratic New Jersey assemblyman who was an original co-sponsor of the legislation creating the DMV registration program, called on Congress to pass the bill, said the problem extends well beyond the 6,000-odd cases already disclosed, and urged an immediate pause on new DMV voter registrations until stronger safeguards are in place.

What the bill would actually do reaches past its headline requirements of proof of citizenship at registration and photo identification at the polls. The House-passed text requires every state to submit its complete, official list of federal voters to the Department of Homeland Security for comparison through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, within 30 days of enactment. States already operating under a qualifying DHS agreement could satisfy the requirement that way instead. Anyone flagged gets notice and a chance to produce documentary proof of citizenship before removal. The bill also directs federal agencies to answer a state election official’s request for eligibility information within 24 hours, and requires DHS to consider immigration removal proceedings when its process turns up a noncitizen unlawfully registered for a federal election.

An ABC News report published Friday described the bill as mandating that states pull private information from the Social Security Administration, state identification cards and other sources to identify noncitizens. That overstates the text. What states must do is submit their rolls to DHS. Drawing on those additional sources is written as permissive, states “may utilize” them, and the bill expressly bars information provided by the Social Security commissioner from being the sole grounds for removing anyone from the rolls. The distinction matters. The DHS voter-list comparison is the mandate. Use of Social Security information as an additional data source is optional, and it cannot by itself justify striking anyone from the rolls.

The legislation matters more now because of what has happened in the courts. As The Daily Dots reported in June, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan set aside the administration’s expanded SAVE system after finding that DHS and the Social Security Administration had unlawfully combined and repurposed personal data in violation of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The original SAVE program survived; the version rebuilt for bulk voter checks did not. Judge Indira Talwani separately blocked the federal citizenship-list and mail-ballot provisions of President Trump’s second election executive order, though her injunction covers only the 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued, and only this election cycle.

Neither ruling is settled. DHS appealed Sooknanan’s decision to the D.C. Circuit, and when the agency asked her to pause it, she refused. Meanwhile Judge T. Kent Wetherell II in the Northern District of Florida ordered DHS to restore the bulk-upload and Social Security number search features for Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, holding that disabling them breached a court-approved settlement, and said plainly that he thinks Sooknanan got the law wrong. Two district judges, two contradictory orders, one agency caught between them. Passing SAVE would materially change that fight by authorizing voter-list verification through DHS in federal law rather than by executive action, though it would not foreclose the privacy, due-process and data-accuracy challenges certain to follow.

The legislative path has been its own long grind, and it moved twice this month. The House passed the SAVE America Act as S. 1383 in February, 218-213. The Senate took the measure up in March and never got past procedure: senators voted to proceed on March 17, then failed on cloture repeatedly through March 26, never reaching the 60 votes needed to close debate. Two later attempts to attach the provisions to reconciliation bills failed by the same 48-50 margin in April and June, and Majority Leader John Thune has said the votes are not there and that he will not move to break the filibuster to find them. House conservatives spent the summer trying to force the issue, as The Daily Dots reported, freezing the floor over whether to attach it to defense, spending or reconciliation bills. On July 15 the House passed H.R. 8595, the national security and State Department funding bill, 217-209, with the rule directing the Clerk to append the House-passed SAVE text during engrossment. On July 21 the House adopted a rule 214-211 directing the Clerk to run the same maneuver on the defense bill, appending S. 1383 to H.R. 8800 during engrossment. The following day the $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act passed 216-212 with the election legislation riding along. Senate Republican leaders have said the combined package will not survive their chamber intact, and senators are already drafting their own defense bill.

Two very different New Jersey numbers are now in circulation, and they should not be blended. The 6,600 is the state’s own count, tied to that specific June 2023 to June 2024 window. The other is 35,152, which came from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in letters sent to four states days before Sherrill’s disclosure, part of a review covering California, Nevada and Pennsylvania as well that DHS totaled at more than 250,000 potential noncitizen registrations. As reported here when the White House declassified its election records, the underlying methodology has been the sticking point throughout. DHS said it matched public voter records against federal immigration data on name, date of birth, address and Social Security number, producing 19,497 New Jersey hits, then described a broader preliminary pass reaching as high as 35,152. What the department has not explained is how it got from the first figure to the second, and it has not released the records behind either. Sherrill says the state asked for the evidence and received nothing back. Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state, Al Schmidt, said his state will review whatever DHS providesand evaluate the claims. Until that happens, 35,152 is an estimate, not a finding, and there is no basis to assume it overlaps with the 6,600 New Jersey identified on its own.

None of which changes what the state’s own audit found. People who told New Jersey they were not citizens were placed on the voter rolls, and hundreds of them voted. Supporters of SAVE call that precisely the failure a second, federal check exists to catch. Critics answer that automated matching produces its own errors, particularly for naturalized citizens whose records lag across agencies, which is why the bill requires notice and an opportunity to prove citizenship before removal and bars a purge based on Social Security data alone. Whether those guardrails are adequate is the argument the Senate has avoided having for five months.

Congress is not the only venue now. Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight subcommittee, and 18 Republican colleagues sent Sherrill a letter Friday calling the episode a catastrophic breakdown of the most basic safeguard in the election system. The 12 questions carry an August 21 deadline and ask whether any race was decided by a margin smaller than the number of improper ballots, whether additional ineligible registrations remain, and whether New Jersey will cooperate with DOJ and DHS. Van Drew’s subcommittee can convert that letter into a hearing. The White House had made the same argument three days earlier, calling the disclosure another reason to pass the bill.

For months the case for SAVE has lived in court filings, failed cloture votes and procedural maneuvers most voters will never follow. New Jersey just gave the argument 6,600 cases, then refused DOJ's demand for the names behind them.

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A newly surfaced Biden White House memo shows senior advisers presenting the outgoing president with a last-minute set of options that could have expanded Temporary Protected Status protections affecting more than 3.1 million noncitizens just days before President Trump returned to office, according to Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who released the document Thursday and detailed it further in an interview with Fox News Digital.

Temporary Protected Status is a humanitarian program that allows eligible nationals of countries experiencing war, natural disaster or other crises to remain in the United States, obtain work authorization and be protected from removal. It is intended to be temporary, but designations have a long history of being repeatedly extended for years, and sometimes decades, after they are first granted. President Trump spent much of his first term trying to end TPS designations for countries including Haiti, Nepal, El Salvador and Sudan, triggering litigation that delayed several terminations through preliminary injunctions.

That litigation history is central to the newly obtained memo. According to Schmitt, who obtained the document through his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, the memo said past litigation had succeeded in large part because the first Trump administration failed to build a sufficient factual record supporting its TPS terminations, “which is something that could be rectified,” according to Fox News Digital. The memo also disclosed that Biden’s senior team had received requests from a broad group of stakeholders: the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Senate Democrats including Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Catherine Cortez Masto, Dick Durbin, Mazie Hirono, Ben Ray Luján, Tammy Duckworth and Alex Padilla, along with mayors and immigration advocacy groups, all pressing the administration to act “before the end of YOUR Administration.”

The memo described the stakeholders’ stated rationale as protecting vulnerable migrants, including people in mixed-status families, from Trump’s planned mass deportations. The litigation strategy was not merely Schmitt’s characterization of the document. The memo itself said stakeholders believed the protections were likely to hold up in court and were prepared to litigate any Trump administration efforts to terminate or slow them down.

An appendix attached to the memo laid out the scale of what was being requested: 455,000 Venezuelans, 464,000 Nicaraguans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, and 1.5 million Guatemalans, along with tens of thousands more from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Sudan. Of that broader 3.1 million figure, roughly 2.1 million were tied to proposals for entirely new TPS designations for Guatemala and Ecuador, countries that had never before been covered by the program; the remainder involved redesignating or extending countries already receiving TPS protections.

The document itself carries an unusual detail. It is dated January 2, 2024, but repeatedly refers to Donald Trump as “president-elect” and cites remarks he made in October 2024, meaning the memo could not have been written before Trump won the November 2024 election. Schmitt’s office has described the year on the document as an apparent clerical error, with the intended date apparently January 2, 2025, roughly two and a half weeks before Trump’s inauguration.

The memo also noted that TPS applications took an average of six months to process, meaning many applications filed under a late Biden expansion could still have been pending when Trump took office. But pending did not necessarily mean unprotected. Federal law provides temporary TPS benefits, including protection from removal and work authorization, to applicants who establish a prima facie case of eligibility while their applications await a final decision, under 8 U.S.C. § 1254a.

The full package of proposed TPS actions affecting more than 3.1 million people was never carried out. Biden’s administration did not create new TPS designations for Ecuador or Guatemala. It did, however, announce extensions on January 10, roughly a week after the memo was circulated, covering about 900,000 existing TPS beneficiaries from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine and Sudan, according to NBC News.

The disclosure lands at a moment when the legal landscape around TPS has already shifted sharply in the Trump administration’s favor. On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe that federal law bars judicial review of nonconstitutional challenges to TPS designation, extension and termination decisions. The ruling sharply undercuts the litigation strategy the memo anticipated advocacy groups would use against the current administration, although constitutional challenges remain possible.

Schmitt has framed the memo as evidence that the outgoing administration was attempting to frustrate the immigration agenda voters had just elected Trump to carry out. He described the proposed actions as a "3.1-million-person deportation shield" and argued that the effort sought to trap the incoming administration in years of litigation.

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Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett has introduced legislation that would bar federal agencies from buying or tapping into automated surveillance systems like the license plate cameras built by Flock Safety, the Atlanta company behind a network of more than 80,000 cameras used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across 49 states. The bill, H.R. 9800, was introduced July 21 and referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Its official title says the measure would prohibit federal agencies from “purchasing or accessing automated surveillance systems that identify, track, or record individuals.” As The Daily Dots reported earlier this week, that network has grown rapidly while drawing scrutiny over warrantless searches, data sharing, false alerts and documented misuse by officers.

Burchett has been calling it the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, though that short title has not yet posted to the official congressional record. In a video statement, he framed the bill as a Fourth Amendment issue rather than an attack on law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies “have got to have tools to address these threats,” he said, but “taking our constitutional rights is not on the table.” He said he has been in direct contact with Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, his own successor in that office, about the cameras, and pointed to reports of officers misusing license plate data to track women for personal reasons rather than for investigations. “I find it pretty disgusting,” he said, adding that some of these systems function mainly as “revenue generators.”

The bill lands amid a fast-moving fight in Burchett’s own backyard. Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs said this week he has “serious concerns” about the rollout of Flock cameras in the county and called them “a threat to our privacy and civil liberties,” according to WVLT. The county commission is holding a special session July 27, after Commissioner Adam Thompson said residents had been left confused or unaware of the program and that the resolution approving the more than $1.5 million grant for the sheriff’s new technology center never mentioned cameras or surveillance, according to WIVK. Representatives from the sheriff’s office and from Flock Safety are expected to answer questions at that meeting, WATE reported.

Burchett’s bill is narrower than a nationwide ban. It targets the federal government’s own purchases of this technology and, notably, federal agencies’ access to camera networks that are owned and operated locally. That access question has drawn national attention after Flock itself acknowledged running limited pilot projects in 2025 with two federal agencies, Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations, an investigative arm of ICE, to assist with human trafficking and fentanyl cases. Flock says it ended those pilots in August 2025 and has since walled federal users out of its statewide and nationwide search networks, according to the company’s own account. Other Republicans have introduced similar measures this year. Texas Congressman Keith Self’s PRIVACY Act would likewise bar federal funds from being used to buy or install this kind of surveillance technology and would require federal agencies to get a warrant before accessing or querying data collected by state and local systems, according to Self’s own office.

Local pushback against these federal grants has already killed at least one such project outright. In Green River, Wyoming, the city council voted 6 to 1 this month to reject a $111,956 grant from the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, that would have paid for Motorola license plate readers at the town’s entrances, after residents packed a council meeting to oppose it, Cowboy State Daily reported. The town’s mayor had told the paper he wasn’t aware of any specific terrorism threat facing the community of about 12,000 people, even though the grant program is formally intended to help prevent and respond to terrorist attacks.

Reactions to the announcement were mixed, and Burchett also drew separate criticism this week over his vote on the unrelated defense authorization bill. That procedural fight centered on the SAVE America Act, President Trump’s voter identification and citizenship-verification priority. There is no indication the defense bill itself contains any language authorizing or funding surveillance systems like Flock’s.

Here is what happened. On July 21, Burchett voted for H. Res. 1438, the rule governing floor consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed 214 to 211. The rule also set up floor votes on other legislation, including a bill restricting stock trading by members of Congress, and it directed that the House-passed SAVE America Act be attached to the defense bill before it heads to the Senate. The next day, Burchett voted against final passage of the $1.15 trillion defense bill itself, which passed 216 to 212, joining six other House Republicans in opposition.

That is a genuine reversal. Three weeks earlier, on June 30, Burchett was one of 14 House Republicans who voted against an earlier rule governing the same basic maneuver, H. Res. 1398, which paired the defense bill with the same SAVE America Act mechanism. That rule failed 198 to 224, stalling the defense bill going into the July 4 recess. Three weeks later, he voted for essentially the same maneuver, then voted against the defense bill when it reached final passage. His office has not publicly explained what changed between the two votes.

The House also passed a bill restricting stock trading by members of Congress the same week, 232 to 198 on July 22, barring members, their spouses and their dependent children from buying new individual stocks while allowing them to keep and eventually sell what they already own. The package also carried unrelated voter ID language. Burchett had been publicly skeptical of the stock trading bill before coming around to support it. “I just don’t think we’re being genuine to the public about it, and we should ban stock trading by members of Congress,” he told reporters after the vote, according to the Daily Signal. “You should not own individual stocks. You ought to own a mutual fund like I do.”

Whatever readers make of Burchett’s NDAA maneuvering, H.R. 9800 is now a real bill sitting in committee. Whether it gets a hearing or a markup now rests first with the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Reaching the House floor would require another step, and ultimately the willingness of House leadership to bring it up.

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Vance Boelter, the man who posed as a police officer and gunned down former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their Brooklyn Park home last summer, was sentenced Thursday to two consecutive life terms followed by 40 years in federal prison, closing the federal criminal chapter on one of the most brazen acts of political violence against American elected officials in recent memory. The sentence puts Boelter behind bars without a possibility of parole and brings some resolution to a politically motivated crime that rocked Minnesota, according to Axios. I reported last month when Boelter, 59, agreed to plead guilty in exchange for prosecutors dropping the death penalty. Thursday’s hearing made the agreed-upon punishment official.

The attacks unfolded in the predawn hours of June 14, 2025, when Boelter, dressed in a tactical uniform and driving a vehicle rigged to resemble a squad car, went first to the Champlin home of state Sen. John Hoffman. According to court documents cited by Fox 9, Boelter shot Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter, Hope, before driving to the Hortmans’ Brooklyn Park home, where he shot and killed Mark Hortman and then Melissa Hortman as she tried to flee upstairs. He also went to the homes of two other Democratic lawmakers that night but failed to reach either target, one of whom was away while a responding police officer’s arrival sent him fleeing the other scene, according to CBS Minnesota. It was the largest manhunt in Minnesota history. I reported at the time that investigators recovered a target list naming dozens of Democratic officials and abortion providers, and I later detailed how a mobile device linked to Boelter’s home had traveled through several high-risk countries in the years before the attack.

Court filings made public ahead of sentencing detailed just how deliberately Boelter tracked the state’s political landscape before the attacks. Prosecutors wrote in a 31-page sentencing position that Boelter repeatedly searched for information online about the “No Kings” protest scheduled for later that day at the Minnesota State Capitol and about the closely divided Minnesota Legislature, according to the Star Tribune. Investigators said Boelter sent a text to his family hours before the shootings asking them to “pray that something takes the wind out of these protest sails,” and that “No Kings” rally materials were found in the vehicle he left behind at the Hortman home. Prosecutors argued that Boelter tracked the state’s one-seat Senate majority and evenly split House because he understood that killing enough Democratic lawmakers could shift the balance of power in both chambers, according to Axios. It’s a sharper picture than what was available in the early days of the case, when we examined how Boelter’s history as a Walz-appointed board member complicated easy assumptions about his politics and motive.

The hearing itself stretched across hours of victim testimony. Sen. Hoffman told the court that Boelter looked him in the eye before shooting him nine times, and that “the court will hand down the defendant’s sentence. Mine continues forever,” according to Fox 9’s live coverage as relayed by Axios. Hope Hoffman told Boelter “not only is he a criminal and a loser, he’s also the worst kind of father he could possibly be,” adding “I hope one day he miserably dies with that thought,” according to CBS Minnesota. Yvette Hoffman said she wished that when Boelter’s life ends, his body would be carried out of prison in a body bag, the same report noted. The Hortmans’ daughter, Sophie, described having to say goodbye to the family’s wounded golden retriever, Gilbert, who was also shot and later died, according to reporting carried by the San Mateo Daily Journal. Mark Hortman’s family voiced anger that Boelter would not face the death penalty, with his sister saying it would not offer her peace of mind that taxpayers would fund his room and board for the rest of his life, the same report noted.

Boelter, wearing prison garb and remaining largely still throughout the hearing, apologized before the sentence was read, telling the court “To every person I have caused loss, pain, heartache, confusion, sadness, shame, or loneliness, I am truly sorry,” according to Axios. His federal defender, Manny Atwal, told the court afterward that Boelter had shown remorse by pleading guilty and accepting the sentence, per the San Mateo Daily Journal.

The federal case is only part of Boelter’s legal exposure. Hennepin County has said it will move forward separately with eight state charges, including two counts of first-degree premeditated murder, four counts of attempted first-degree murder against John Hoffman, Yvette Hoffman, Hope Hoffman and Rep. Kristin Bahner, felony cruelty to an animal, and impersonating an officer, according to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. The Hoffman family has also filed a civil lawsuit against him. The evidence of Boelter’s motive is getting considerably clearer: he held conservative religious views, closely tracked Democratic lawmakers and partisan control of the Minnesota Legislature, and followed the “No Kings” protest scheduled for the day of the attacks. But prosecutors have not reduced that motive to a single, simple explanation, and for a country that has watched political violence against public officials become an increasingly common headline, that remains the harder question this case leaves open.

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A member of Vice President JD Vance’s Secret Service detail has been placed on administrative leave and is now the subject of a formal investigation that officials say could escalate into a federal criminal case. Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi confirmed the probe Thursday, telling The Epoch Times that “a member of the Vice Presidential Protective Division is the subject of an administrative investigation, and potential criminal inquiry, involving allegations of compromising operational and information security.” The agency did not name the employee or specify exactly what information was disclosed, but said any conduct that potentially threatens the safety of a protectee “will not be tolerated.”

The employee is suspected of serving as a source for a July 15 MS NOW report describing frustration among Vance’s protective detail over the strain his personal travel schedule has placed on the team. That story reportedly included specific operational details, including plans for Vance and his son to fly on a Marine Corps helicopter to a golf lesson, an outing that was ultimately scrapped due to severe thunderstorms. Subsequent reporting identified the disclosure of those operational travel details as what drew scrutiny from the Secret Service, the FBI, and White House officials. The agent is now under review by the Secret Service’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and it remains unclear whether the case will end in administrative discipline or criminal charges. The sourcing on the employee’s identity remains anonymous: officials say they believe they’ve identified the individual suspected of providing the information, but no public evidence has yet confirmed it.

This is not the first time an employee assigned to Vance’s own detail has faced this kind of scrutiny. In January, a different Secret Service employee assigned to protect Vance, identified publicly as Tomas Escotto, was placed on leave after undercover video released by independent journalist James O’Keefe allegedly showed the agent disclosing sensitive security information. In that case, the agency suspended the agent’s security clearance and revoked his access to facilities and systems, and ordered all Secret Service personnel nationwide to retake mandatory anti-espionage training. USSS Deputy Director Matthew Quinn said at the time that the Secret Service “has a 160-year-old tradition of discretion that sets this agency apart, and we have no tolerance for employees who fail to meet this standard.” Two separate disclosure cases involving employees assigned to the same vice presidential protective operation within roughly six months raise a legitimate question about whether the agency has a broader internal security or supervision problem, or whether the cases are simply two unrelated acts of individual misconduct. The agency’s recent watchdog findings, detailed below, don’t establish a connection to either disclosure case, but they do document broader weaknesses in staffing, training and operational management that make the institutional question harder to dismiss.

The current investigation also lands amid a broader Trump administration effort to identify and prosecute leakers across the federal government. Earlier this month, four New York Times reporters were subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury as part of a Justice Department investigation into their reporting on security features aboard the new presidential aircraft gifted to President Trump by Qatar, with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly helping personally direct that probe. Taken together, the two investigations suggest the administration is assigning unusually high priority to unauthorized disclosures involving presidential and vice presidential security, an approach likely to appeal to Trump supporters who have long complained about unauthorized disclosures from inside the federal government.

The disclosure allegations also arrive just weeks after the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General issued two long-awaited reports laying out how badly strained the Secret Service’s staffing and planning had become heading into 2024. One report, issued June 30, found the agency was understaffed by an average of 21.4 percent across fiscal years 2023 and 2024, a shortfall the watchdog said forced agents into marathon shifts with little rest between them and contributed to burnout across the agency’s ranks. The watchdog found the problem went beyond raw headcount: the agency lacked reliable systems for tracking personnel qualifications, clearances and assignments, and found unqualified personnel staffing some specialized protective functions.

A companion report released the same day, focused specifically on the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt against then-candidate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, found the Secret Service assigned an under-trained operator to counter-drone duty at the rally; that operator’s equipment malfunctioned, and the Secret Service missed an opportunity to detect a drone flight by shooter Thomas Crooks in the lead-up to the attack. Those staffing and planning findings provide important context for reported longstanding morale complaints on Vance’s own detail, where agents have reportedly voiced frustration over the burden his personal travel places on an already stretched team.

The agency’s institutional problems extend beyond leaks and staffing. Myosoty “Miyo” Perez, the site agent who developed the Butler rally security plan, has now been suspended for a third time in roughly a year and a half. This latest suspension centers on a separate internal investigation into whether she properly disclosed her marriage to a foreign national, according to reporting from RealClearPolitics. That case is not tied to the Butler planning failures themselves, but Perez’s role as the Butler site agent means her ongoing disciplinary history keeps drawing attention back to that day.

It’s worth separating the two 2024 attempts on President Trump’s life here. The Butler attack, where a gunman came within inches of killing Trump and fatally shot rallygoer Corey Comperatore, is where the documented operational failures occurred, now laid out in detail by the DHS Inspector General. Then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle herself told Congress it was the agency’s most significant operational failure in decades. The second attempt, in September 2024 at the president’s West Palm Beach golf course, played out differently: a Secret Service agent spotted suspect Ryan Routh before Trump came into his line of fire, and Routh fled after the agent opened fire. The two incidents shouldn’t be treated as equivalent examples of agency failure.

Taken as a whole, the picture is not of one isolated personnel case but of an agency facing several different strains at once. Two disclosure investigations tied to the vice president’s own protective detail, a Butler site agent facing a separate and unrelated discipline case, and a federal watchdog that has now formally documented the understaffing and planning gaps surrounding the worst Secret Service security failure in decades: those are four distinct problems, not one recurring defect, but they are converging on the same agency at the same time. Whether the current Vance-detail investigation ends in administrative discipline or becomes the criminal case officials say it could be, it adds another data point to a record that Congress and DHS oversight will have to reckon with.

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Alabama likes to talk about vice in moral absolutes. Its laws tell a different story. Alcohol is dangerous. Alabama sells it. Gambling is constitutionally restricted. Three tribal casinos operate legally while millions of dollars move through the politics surrounding expansion. Possess marijuana for personal use and you face a misdemeanor. Possess certain hemp products and Alabama can charge you with a felony. Wednesday’s hearing on marijuana rescheduling is where those inconsistencies collided in public.

The Alabama State Committee of Public Health held a hearing on whether to follow the federal government’s rescheduling of certain medical marijuana products. In April, the Justice Department and DEA placed both FDA-approved marijuana products and marijuana products regulated under a qualifying state medical license into Schedule III, which federal law reserves for drugs with an accepted medical use and lower abuse potential than Schedule I or II drugs, and whose abuse may lead to moderate or low physical dependence or high psychological dependence.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the move was meant to “expand Americans’ access to medical treatment options.” Under Alabama law, once the federal government reschedules a substance, the State Board of Health has 30 days to follow suit unless it objects and holds a hearing, which is what happened after the committee voted to object in May.

Alabama isn’t alone in working through this. States nationwide are deciding whether to follow the DEA’s lead, and Alabama’s fight is a useful window into how that argument plays out on the ground.

Wednesday’s hearing drew mostly opposition. Eagle Forum of Alabama’s Becky Gerritson argued rescheduling would worsen the state’s mental health crisis and said ADPH’s policy “should follow the evidence, not public opinion or commercial pressure.” The Alabama Citizens Action Program’s Greg Davis urged officials to oppose the change regardless of how the drug reaches someone. A member of the public warned the state was losing a generation to addiction and psychosis risk. Wagon Trail Med-Serv’s Joey Robertson was the lone voice supporting rescheduling. ADPH’s general counsel said a decision will come after the Aug. 5 public comment deadline. That testimony is worth weighing against what ADPH itself said back in May, when State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris told the committee the department “fully intends” to implement the change eventually.

The obvious response to all this is to point at alcohol, and it’s worth making, but it’s the response the other side sees coming. Alabama doesn’t need alcohol to make this case. It has a harder problem inside its own cannabis law. Last year, the Legislature passed HB445, banning smokable hemp products. Under that law, possession of certain prohibited hemp products can be prosecuted as a Class C felony, carrying up to 10 years in prison and a $15,000 fine. First-time, personal-use marijuana possession in Alabama remains a Class A misdemeanor, capped at one year and a $6,000 fine. Certain hemp products can bring a felony. First-time personal-use marijuana brings a misdemeanor. That’s not a comparison to a different substance in a different context. That’s the state contradicting itself within cannabis policy alone.

Then there’s alcohol anyway, because it’s still true and still relevant. Alabama runs its own liquor stores. The Alabama ABC Board operates 170 retail and wholesale locations and, per its own FY2024 annual report, generated nearly $360 million distributed to the General Fund, the Department of Human Resources, the Department of Mental Health, cities, counties and state law enforcement. Meanwhile the CDC and NIAAA report that excessive alcohol use kills roughly 178,000 Americans a year and contributes to more than 200 diseases and injuries, and the CDC says every type of alcoholic drink raises cancer risk. The DEA’s own marijuana fact sheet, by contrast, states plainly that “no deaths from overdose of marijuana have been reported.”

Gambling follows the same pattern from a different direction, but the campaign finance records complicate the most obvious theory about who benefits. Alabama’s constitution bans lotteries and most gambling, and Alabama remains the last state east of the Mississippi without a lottery, with voters not given a chance to weigh in since 1999. The Poarch Band of Creek Indians operates the state’s three federally protected tribal casinos, in Montgomery, Atmore and Wetumpka. In 2024, a lottery and casino package passed the House but died in the Senate by a single vote, 20 to 15, one shy of the 21 needed for a constitutional amendment. The instinctive assumption is that the tribe funded that outcome to protect its own casinos. The campaign finance records say otherwise. Among the 15 senators who voted no, the Alabama Farmers Federation had donated an average of about $16,800 per senator since 2022, over $262,000 total. The Poarch Band of Creek Indians had donated to just four of the fifteen, totaling $60,000. ALFA has an openly stated anti-gambling position, arguing expansion would increase government and cause addiction, debt and social harm. So among the senators who killed the 2024 package, the dominant campaign money from the two most prominent anti-expansion interests came not from the tribe, but from the farm lobby. Gambling remains illegal while one of its most powerful opponents is also a major campaign donor to lawmakers who decide whether voters ever get a say.

None of this proves marijuana is harmless. It isn’t. Nor does it settle whether Alabama should legalize recreational cannabis or expand gambling. It raises a narrower question: what principle actually explains the state’s choices? If danger, addiction and protecting children are the standard, Alabama applies it very differently depending on the product.

Three different vices, three different rulebooks. Danger alone doesn’t explain the distinctions. History, revenue, regulatory turf and political influence do part of the work too. Alcohol gets a state-run store. Gambling remains constitutionally restricted while powerful interests spend heavily on the lawmakers deciding its future. Certain prohibited hemp products can bring a felony. First-time personal-use marijuana brings a misdemeanor. And tightly regulated medical marijuana is now undergoing extraordinary scrutiny over a federal rescheduling Alabama’s own health officer says the state fully intends to implement.

That’s not a coherent policy built around relative harm. It’s a patchwork, and Alabama’s own laws and campaign finance records show exactly where the seams are.

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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan formally referred former special counsel Jack Smith to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution on Wednesday, accusing him of making false statements to Congress about how his investigators handled lawmakers’ private communications. Smith was appointed special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland during the Biden administration and spent more than two years leading two federal prosecutions of President Trump, one over his handling of classified documents and one tied to the 2020 election. A federal judge dismissed the documents case in July 2024, and Smith dropped his appeal after Trump’s 2024 win, moving to dismiss the election case as well under DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

In a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Jordan wrote that “all individuals have an obligation to comply with a duly authorized congressional inquiry,” adding that Smith’s testimony to the committee “included intentionally false statements designed to obstruct the Committee’s oversight.” Jordan said Smith’s conduct “can only be understood as an effort to thwart the Committee’s inquiry” and asked DOJ to examine whether it warrants criminal charges.

The referral traces back to a December 2025 closed-door deposition in which Smith was asked specifically whether toll records his office had obtained from telecommunications providers for members of Congress included the content of their text messages. He answered “No,” describing toll records as non-content data limited to incoming and outgoing numbers, timing and duration. Taken on its own, that answer was narrowly accurate. What Smith did not volunteer, and was never directly asked, is that his team had separately obtained something else entirely.

Records Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Ron Johnson released last week show that Smith’s office had subpoenaed the National Archives for text messages from phones associated with Trump White House personnel, and that production contained the actual contents of messages exchanged with 44 current and former members of Congress from both parties. Grassley, who says he was one of the 44, called it “a runaway train that had no brakes,” saying Biden DOJ and FBI investigators “ignored their own routine investigative protocols” to review communications that were outside the scope of the case.

Fox News reports the lawmakers swept up include Jordan and Grassley themselves, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Susan Collins, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat. Trump-era officials named in the same records include former Vice President Mike Pence, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, FBI Director Kash Patel and Ivanka Trump.

That distinction is likely to sit at the center of any DOJ review. Smith’s narrow answer about what the congressional toll-record subpoenas contained appears accurate on its face. Jordan’s allegation is broader: that Smith used a technically precise answer about one set of records to leave the committee with a false impression that his team had never accessed lawmakers’ message content through any source, when investigators had through the separate White House production.

The newly released records also show that Smith’s team bypassed a required DOJ “filter team” review, a safeguard meant to catch privileged or constitutionally protected material before investigators can read it. Jordan cites that sequence, in which investigators began reviewing the records within roughly an hour of receiving them, as evidence the access wasn’t an inadvertent collection error, and accuses Smith of later giving Congress a misleading account of what his team had reviewed.

Wednesday’s move is not the first time Republicans have pushed to hold Smith personally accountable. In October 2025, Sen. Marsha Blackburn and several GOP colleagues asked the DOJ to refer Smith to its Office of Professional Responsibility for a misconduct investigation, and urged that any resulting findings be sent to disciplinary authorities in Tennessee and New York for possible sanctions, including disbarment, over the earlier toll-records collection. The following month, Jordan referred one of Smith’s own deputies, Thomas Windom, to DOJ for obstruction after Windom refused to answer nearly every question in a committee deposition despite DOJ authorization to testify.

Smith has denied wrongdoing throughout the controversy.

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Three police officers in Fayetteville, Georgia lost their jobs this month after an internal audit caught them running license-plate searches that had nothing to do with police work, including plates belonging to themselves and to people they knew. A DeKalb County sheriff’s deputy was fired and criminally charged in a separate case involving the same technology. Neither is an isolated incident. Georgia has now become home to a growing list of officers fired or criminally charged in recent weeks for misusing the same surveillance system, and Georgia is not even close to the center of the story. The company that makes the cameras, Flock Safety, argues these firings are proof its safeguards work: every search is logged, agencies control who gets access, and misuse gets traced back to the individual who did it. Critics counter that an audit catching an officer after he searches someone’s movements is not the same protection as requiring justification before the search happens in the first place.

The system is called Flock Safety, and calling it a “license plate camera” undersells what it actually does. Unlike an older reader that checks one plate against a stolen-car list and forgets it, Flock’s cameras photograph every vehicle that passes and log the plate along with the make, model, color and other identifying features. That information lands in searchable databases that can be shared across participating agencies and, where an agency permits it, queried across state lines. By this spring, Flock was under contract with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies running more than 80,000 cameras across 49 states.

San Jose shows what that growth looks like up close. The city started with four cameras at a single intersection in 2021. By this year it had 475 of them, capturing roughly 360 million vehicle images in 2024 alone. San Jose officers themselves ran more than 260,000 searches of that data between June 2024 and June 2025. Once other agencies with access to the shared network are counted, the city’s Flock records were queried nearly 4 million times over that same year, and by the latter half of 2025 the pace had climbed to more than 15,000 searches a day. That gap shows the network effect clearly: a single town installs the hardware, and other departments with access to the shared network can end up benefiting from what those cameras saw. Three San Jose residents have since filed a federal class-action lawsuit arguing the network violates the Fourth Amendment. That case is still active.

That scale is the whole story in miniature. A single camera watching one intersection is not especially alarming. Thousands of interconnected cameras, sharing data across state lines and retrievable weeks later, are something categorically different. Flock’s greatest selling point and its deepest civil-liberties problem turn out to be the same fact: it does not start recording once police identify a suspect. It records everyone, all the time, so that officers can search for someone specific later. The technology genuinely does solve crimes. It solves them precisely because it never stopped watching the innocent people around the crime in the first place.

What happens when ordinary officers get access to that kind of power is no longer theoretical. In Milwaukee, an officer resigned earlier this year after prosecutors say he ran 179 Flock searches tracking a romantic partner and that person’s ex, an audit that then uncovered a second Milwaukee detective, charged this month, accused of using Flock and a physical GPS tracker to stalk two more victims.

A former detective in Bonner Springs, Kansas is facing eighteen counts in a similar case. Investigators with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reviewing more than twelve million searches logged by nearly 4,000 agencies over a ten-month stretch, found hundreds of searches tied to political protests, including demonstrations from across the political spectrum. In one of the more disturbing cases the same investigators uncovered, a Texas sheriff’s office ran a nationwide search of more than 83,000 cameras after learning a woman had taken abortion medication, logging the reason for the search plainly in its own records. Officials initially told the public the search was a welfare check for a missing person, a claim court records later contradicted.

None of these searches required a judge’s signature. Courts have long held that a driver has little expectation of privacy in a license plate visible on a public road, and for years that reasoning extended cleanly to individual scans. Whether it extends to networks like Flock’s is now genuinely being litigated. A federal judge upheld Norfolk, Virginia’s camera network against a Fourth Amendment challenge in January, reasoning that the city’s cameras did not capture enough of a person’s movements to count as comprehensive tracking, and that ruling is now on appeal to the Fourth Circuit. The Supreme Court added a wrinkle of its own on June 29 in Chatrie v. United States, ruling that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they used a geofence warrant to obtain a suspect’s cell-phone location history from Google. The case involved phone data, not license plates, so it doesn’t decide the Flock question directly, but its reasoning about when aggregated location data crosses into constitutionally protected territory is already shaping how lawyers argue the Norfolk and San Jose cases. Courts have not settled this. They are actively deciding it, right now, in real cases with real plaintiffs, and the outcome will determine whether aggregating millions of individually lawful observations into a searchable record of where someone has been counts as the kind of search the Fourth Amendment was written to restrict.

Even the system’s accuracy has come under scrutiny. When the Los Angeles Police Department, one of Flock’s largest customers, let its three-year contract lapse this month, it did so after its own inspector general found that 161 of the department’s stolen-vehicle alerts during a two-month stretch turned out to be false, a 32.3 percent error rate. The mistakes traced back to outdated entries in the underlying stolen-vehicle database rather than the cameras misreading plates, but the consequences landed on drivers either way: each false alert triggered what LAPD calls a high-risk stop, meaning officers can order a driver out of the car at gunpoint over a vehicle that was never stolen. LAPD has not walked away from Flock entirely. Department officials confirmed this month that they are negotiating a new agreement that would give the city legal ownership of its own camera data and bar Flock from sharing or commercializing it, with a public hearing scheduled before anything is signed.

What makes this fight harder to place on the usual political map is who is doing the objecting. In May, Pennsylvania Republican Scott Perry, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, teamed up with Illinois progressive Democrat Jesús “Chuy” García on an amendment that would have barred any state or city receiving federal highway money from using automated license-plate readers for anything but toll collection. The amendment failed in committee by a vote of 44 to 20, but the coalition behind it was the story. Law enforcement groups remain the technology’s most reliable defenders, arguing it recovers stolen cars and finds missing children. Opposition comes from an unusual alliance of civil-liberties progressives worried about protesters and reproductive privacy, and constitutional conservatives who see a warrantless, government-accessible movement-tracking network as precisely the kind of infrastructure the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. Neither side is arguing the technology has no value. The argument is about what it costs to keep it running exactly as it is.

That is the question hanging over every city still weighing whether to sign, renew, or walk away from a Flock contract. Nobody built this network by asking voters to approve a nationwide system for tracking where cars go. It grew one small purchase at a time, a dozen cameras to catch stolen vehicles, then a dozen more, then a regional data-sharing agreement, until five years later most Americans had no idea how much of their own driving had already been logged, searched and shared. The cameras still catch criminals. They also monitor everyone else. The remaining question is who gets to search those records, for what reason, and whether anyone outside the department has to approve it first.

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A divided federal appeals court on Monday night rejected former President Joe Biden’s bid to keep the Justice Department from turning over redacted audio recordings and transcripts of his conversations with biographer Mark Zwonitzer to the Heritage Foundation, but paused its own ruling until August 3 to give Biden time to seek further relief.

The 2-1 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that Biden “has not shown a likelihood that the requested materials must be withheld from disclosure.” Circuit Judge Florence Pan, whom Biden himself nominated to the bench, dissented. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Obama appointee, and Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, formed the majority.

As I reported when Biden first sued to block the release in May, the recordings at issue date to 2016 and 2017, when Biden sat with Zwonitzer for his memoir “Promise Me, Dad.” They resurfaced years later as evidence in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, including whether he disclosed classified information from his notebooks to Zwonitzer, an investigation that ended without charges.

Hur’s report described the conversations as “painfully slow,” with Biden struggling to recall events and read his own notebook entries. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has pursued the material under the Freedom of Information Act since 2024, and Judge Tanya Chutkan separately allowed the House Judiciary Committee to intervene in a related fight over the same records in June.

The Justice Department initially withheld the recordings under FOIA exemptions. After President Trump returned to office, the department reversed course, moving toward disclosure to the Heritage Foundation under FOIA and to the House Judiciary Committee through a separate congressional request. Biden sued to stop the releases, and a district court judge, Dabney Friedrich, rejected his bid last month before pausing her own order to give him time to appeal.

Biden’s lawyers argued that releasing decade-old private conversations would amount to publishing the equivalent of diary entries or personal text messages, and that the recordings exist in government hands only because they were collected during a criminal investigation that produced no charges. They also argued there is no urgent public interest in disclosure now, since Biden “neither holds nor is seeking public office.” The Justice Department countered that the public has a legitimate interest in evaluating the evidence behind Hur’s conclusions, telling the court that “releasing the materials will allow the public to assess the persuasiveness of Hur’s determinations.”

Notably, the current Justice Department is arguing the opposite of the position it held under Biden’s own Justice Department, which withheld the same material citing similar privacy concerns before the administration change.

Monday’s ruling does not mean the tapes are public yet. The panel’s decision is stayed until 11:59 p.m. on August 3, preserving the status quo while Biden decides whether to pursue additional appellate relief. Unless Biden obtains further relief before then, the ruling clears the way for the Justice Department to turn the requested material over to the Heritage Foundation after that date. The separate House Judiciary Committee track remains ongoing.

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Peter Daszak was three days from landing back in New York after joining the World Health Organization’s mission investigating the origins of COVID-19 in China when U.S. Customs and Border Protection quietly shelved an examination its own National Targeting Center had spent days building.

Newly released records show CBP’s National Targeting Center flagged Daszak, then president of EcoHealth Alliance, as an “extremely high person of interest” ahead of his February 5, 2021, arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport, according to documents Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul released Monday. Officers built a formal targeting event and scheduled an examination by CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team.

The reasons CBP cited were specific. Daszak had collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its lead researcher, Zhengli Shi, for more than fifteen years. He was listed as principal investigator on NIH grants funding bat coronavirus research in China. And, in the analyst’s own words drawn from the underlying case file, “much of the funding DASZAK receives is put towards gain of function research.”

The examination CBP planned went well beyond a routine customs stop. The targeting request instructed officers to determine whether Daszak had collected biological samples while in China, whether he was traveling with any, whether he had mailed samples back separately, whether he had carried materials into China with him, and whether he had stayed in contact with anyone at WIV.

Then, three days before Daszak’s flight landed, an internal CBP email dated February 2, 2021, told colleagues: “NTC has rescinded previous inspection request; however, subject may be of interest to the FBI.” The case’s formal disposition entry is more direct still: “Referred to [FBI]. FBI requested not to stop subject. No further NTC action.”

The Tactical Terrorism Response Team exam never happened.

What the records do not say is why. The email’s own language, that Daszak “may be of interest to the FBI,” cuts more than one way. It could mean the bureau wanted him left alone. It could just as easily mean the bureau had its own investigative interest in him and did not want a CBP stop interfering with whatever that interest was. The documents establish what happened. They do not establish why.

Paul introduced the release as part of a broader documentary record he has spent months assembling, writing on X that the public had been told a lab leak “wasn’t plausible” while “their own private messages say otherwise.” What this CBP file itself establishes is narrower: that the agency’s own analysts considered Daszak enough of a concern to build a specialized border examination around his return from the WHO’s COVID-origins mission in China, and that the FBI asked CBP to stand down three days before he landed.

The file also folds in a detail that predates the flight by six months. The targeting profile cites an August 2020 Science Magazine report that NIH had publicly asked Daszak to retrieve the original WIV type-specimen used in genetic analysis and return it to the United States, along with an explanation of his collaboration with the lab, including cell phone data. Daszak reportedly called the request “outrageous” and did not appear to intend to comply. That NIH request was already public record well before his return flight; CBP’s analysts simply folded it into the case for closer scrutiny.

The release lands roughly a week before Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify before Paul’s committee on whether his prior congressional testimony about NIH funding of gain-of-function research at WIV was accurate. It also joins a document trail this publication has followed for months, including Gabbard’s declassified CIA readout on Fauci’s role steering COVID origins experts, the two-decade timeline connecting Fauci to the intelligence community, and the long-form accounting of the funding pipeline between USAID, EcoHealth, and Wuhan.

Neither the FBI nor Daszak had issued a public response to the newly released records as of this writing.

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Since President Trump’s July 16, 2026 declassification of records on Chinese acquisition of voter data, Michigan registration fraud, noncitizen voting, and voting-system vulnerabilities, the debate has repeated the same shape it has taken every year since 2020: supporters treat new documents as confirmation the election was stolen, critics treat them as confirmation nothing happened, and neither side changes anyone’s mind. That fight is a distraction, but not for the reason both sides think. It’s a distraction because the proven record of American election fraud was never built to answer a presidential-scale question in the first place. It was built, case by case, court ruling by court ruling, to answer a much smaller and much more urgent one: can a few hundred bad ballots decide who runs your county, your school board, or your city council. The answer is yes, it already has, repeatedly, on the record, and that is the election-security fight that has been overshadowed by the continuing battle over what happened in 2020.

Start with proven fraud, meaning cases that ended in a criminal conviction, a civil penalty, or a court overturning a result, not allegations. The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, the most extensive public accounting of prosecuted election fraud in the country, documents roughly 1,561 proven instances and about 1,325 convictions nationwide. These aren’t theoretical: absentee ballot schemes, false voter registrations, felons voting while ineligible, vote buying, ballot harvesting, spanning decades and states of every political lean. The case that matters most for what’s on your ballot this year happened in Miller County, Texas, where a judge found 1,482 illegal votes had been cast in a local race decided by a 449-vote margin, and ordered a new election. That is not a rounding error against a national total. That is proof, adjudicated in court, that a fraud scheme most national reporters would never bother covering was more than enough to flip a real office held by a real person. Scale critics love to point out that a few hundred fraudulent ballots couldn’t have changed a presidential race decided by tens of thousands of votes in every contested state. It’s the wrong argument. Nobody’s city council race is decided by tens of thousands of votes. Most aren’t decided by a thousand. Miller County is the model, not the exception, for what these numbers mean in the elections most Americans actually vote in this November.

Separately from fraud, there is proven vulnerability, meaning demonstrated weakness in the machinery itself, independent of whether anyone exploited it in a given election. Since 2017, DEF CON’s Voting Village has given security researchers unrestricted access to voting machines and electronic poll books still in active use across the country. Every year the event has run, participants have compromised every piece of equipment made available to them, in some cases within minutes and without specialized tools. One machine, the AVS WinVote, was found to have been remotely hackable, without detection, for the entire eleven years it was fielded in real elections. Reporting on the most recent Voting Village found the pattern unchanged: vulnerabilities researchers have flagged for years remain unfixed. A single compromised machine would barely register in a presidential race spread across a state. In a local precinct deciding a county commission seat or a school board race, that same machine is the entire election. Voting Village organizers have recommended paper ballots and risk-limiting audits for years specifically because they let a jurisdiction catch a hacked or malfunctioning machine after the fact, and a growing number of states have adopted both since the vulnerabilities first became public: Georgia moved to hand-marked paper ballots with post-election audits after 2020, Colorado has run risk-limiting audits for years, and Michigan has expanded paper trails and voter-ID checks. The gap isn’t a lack of a known fix. It’s inconsistent adoption of one, in exactly the small jurisdictions least equipped to catch a problem without it.

Layered on top of the historical record is a live, ongoing enforcement effort that has moved well past allegation. The Justice Department has secured roughly two dozen arrests, prosecutions, or convictions for noncitizen voting in recent months alone, with about 90 additional cases under active investigation, spanning Kansas, Hawaii, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Florida. Some of these are admissions rather than disputes: in Florida, a Cuban national and a Haitian national both pleaded guilty to voting illegally as noncitizens in the 2020 federal election, and this outlet previously reported on a Massachusetts case in which a Canadian citizen was charged with voting illegally in U.S. elections dating back to 2008.

Michigan’s own Democratic Secretary of State, who had previously said noncitizen voting wasn’t occurring in her state, was forced to confirm 15 credible cases in the 2024 election alone, in a state where local races are routinely decided by far fewer than 15 votes. A watchdog group separately documented nearly 400 noncitizens voting in Washington, D.C. in the 2024 general election, and several states have identified between 20,000 and 30,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls during targeted DHS-style database reviews, part of a broader push in which the Justice Department has been requesting full voter-roll and election data directly from states, a method audits elsewhere have shown can carry a real false-positive rate, with officials saying the true nationwide number could run into the hundreds of thousands. That larger figure isn’t settled, and fairness requires saying so. But 15 confirmed votes is already a number that can end a local race, and it’s already happened.

This is the frame the newly declassified documents belong in, and it’s where the fight is worth extending, not narrowing. The White House’s Election Integrity release describes China acquiring voter data from at least 18 states, totaling roughly 220 million records by the administration’s count. It describes Michigan election canvassers, working for a Democrat-aligned registration firm called GBI Strategies, admitting to signing other people’s names and creating fictitious registrations in exchange for pay tied to volume, a scheme that dropped 8,000 to 10,000 registration forms into a single city clerk’s office in one county alone. That number would be a footnote against Michigan’s statewide presidential margin. It would be an earthquake in the county and city races on the same ballot.

Michigan’s own 2020 investigation found the suspect Muskegon registrations were flagged before they were processed onto the rolls, which is why state officials concluded at the time the qualified voter file wasn’t compromised, a conclusion the newly declassified FBI interviews complicate but don’t yet overturn. What the release does not do, based on everything reviewed so far, is establish that any of this changed the certified presidential tally. That could change if the administration produces more, and it’s worth saying plainly: absence of proof so far is not the same as proof it doesn’t exist.

President Trump has built the strongest documented case yet that America’s election machinery has real, exploitable gaps, and that case deserves a second act: taking the same receipts he used to make his point about 2020 and pointing them squarely at November, where county commissions, school boards, and city councils are decided by the exact margins GBI Strategies proved a single operation can move. That’s the fight we should be demanding next, not a smaller one than 2020, a more winnable one, with the proof already in hand.

That’s the ask this record actually supports, and it’s a bigger one than “prove 2020 was stolen,” not a smaller one: keep pursuing the chain-of-custody, tabulation-level evidence that would settle 2020 for good, and put the same investigative muscle, right now, into the races where the proof already sitting in these documents is more than enough to matter: nationwide adoption of paper ballots and risk-limiting audits, uniform citizenship verification at registration through systems like SAVE, and funded replacement of the specific voting equipment DEF CON researchers have already shown can be compromised, starting in the small counties and cities where a few hundred bad ballots is the whole election.

The races this November will be decided by exactly the margins this record proves are, in fact, vulnerable. That’s the fight worth winning while the bigger one keeps getting built.

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President Trump used a primetime address from the White House on Thursday night to announce the declassification of a broad set of intelligence documents that, according to the administration, reveal vulnerabilities in America’s election system, including an alleged Chinese operation to acquire the personal data of 220 million American voters. The documents were posted publicly on a new White House election integrity page, and President Trump presented them as the basis for a renewed push to pass national voter identification legislation.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately,” President Trump said during the address, arguing that the current system falls well short of that standard.

Ahead of the address, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the findings would “shock you if you have an honest eye,” and said the claims would be backed by documentation released the same evening, according to The Washington Times.

China’s alleged acquisition of voter data

The administration’s central claim, laid out on the White House’s election integrity page, is that China acquired 220 million U.S. voter files beginning in the 2020 election cycle, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and political party affiliations. President Trump said the released documents show China assigned a dedicated unit to the effort, and separately alleged that Beijing paid journalists to report negatively on his first-term administration. He further claimed that members of the U.S. intelligence community were aware of the data acquisition and did not share that information with him during his first term.

Election infrastructure vulnerabilities

A second batch of newly declassified intelligence community assessments, described on the White House’s release page as spanning January 2020 to June 2026, addresses the security of voting machines and ballot-counting systems nationwide. President Trump cited one assessment naming Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and unspecified non-state groups as adversaries with the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure. The released documents separately allege that the CIA obtained intelligence on a Venezuelan plot to digitally alter that country’s 2020 election results in a manner the administration says could evade detection even under an audit.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the agency produced the underlying intelligence reporting on Venezuela’s capabilities, adding that the newly declassified material “shed further light on China’s intentions” toward the 2020 election.

Michigan voter registration investigation

The release also includes what the administration describes as FBI files on a 2020 investigation into a Democratic-aligned get-out-the-vote organization raided by Michigan State Police in Muskegon, according to the White House release. The administration states the files include claims from canvassers, made to investigators, that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names and submitted registrations for people who did not exist.

Noncitizens on state voter rolls

President Trump cited a Department of Homeland Security review during his address estimating that approximately 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in federal elections nationally. Separately, DHS sent letters dated July 10 to election officials in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania stating that a preliminary review had identified more than 256,000 potential noncitizen registrations across those four states alone, according to Fox News Digital, which obtained copies of the letters.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the department compared publicly available voter registration records against federal immigration data. DHS said it identified 81,336 California registrants, 19,497 New Jersey registrants, 8,576 Nevada registrants and 8,594 Pennsylvania registrants whose names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers matched noncitizens in federal records. The department separately estimated that there could be as many as 190,832 potential noncitizen registrations in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.

DHS characterized the findings as preliminary and asked state officials to work with the department to verify individual identities before taking action, with a response deadline of July 24. The letters note that many noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents and certain visa holders, are legally issued Social Security numbers, and that the SSN match was only one of several identifiers used, not a standalone determination of citizenship status.

The ask: the SAVE America Act

President Trump closed his remarks by calling on the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, a national voter identification bill that has stalled in the upper chamber. The administration is presenting Thursday’s disclosures as the evidentiary basis for the legislation, arguing that a system without voter ID, proof of citizenship requirements, or limits on mail balloting cannot be adequately verified given the vulnerabilities described in the release.

A note on sourcing

The claims in this piece originate from documents the administration declassified and characterized, from President Trump’s remarks during Thursday’s address, from CIA Director Ratcliffe’s public statement, and from letters DHS sent to four states, obtained by Fox News Digital. Readers can review the underlying documents directly at the White House’s election integrity page.

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