By Michael Jones

With less than three weeks until the midterm elections, Senate Democrats are preparing to send more than 100 trained congressional staffers into competitive states to monitor voting and ballot counting amid concerns that President Donald Trump could interfere with the process.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, announced this week that staffers have been recruited and trained for deployment across nine states with closely contested Senate races. Ohio, Georgia and Michigan are among the initial destinations, although Democrats have not released the full list and assignments could change.

“Their role is very clear: to observe, to document, and report the facts,” Schumer told reporters on a press call. He said the goal is to give Congress “objective, firsthand information about what’s happening on the ground.”

The observers will be stationed at polling places and vote-counting facilities to document potential voter intimidation, threats against election workers and problems with ballot counting and certification. Depending on how the process unfolds, they could remain on the ground for days or weeks after Election Day.

“They’re not there to interfere. They’re not there to cause a scene,” Padilla said, emphasizing that congressional observers are expected to document what they witness rather than disrupt election administration.

The effort marks the first deployment under a Senate election-observer program that Schumer and Padilla launched in June. It follows a longstanding House initiative and operates under congressional authority reaffirmed by a bipartisan law enacted in 2024.

The observers will not run elections, decide which ballots count or intervene in disputes at polling places. Their job is to establish an independent record of what happens and give Congress firsthand information if problems emerge—a distinction that is central to understanding what the program can accomplish.

The Confirmation of Congressional Observer Access Act, known as the COCOA Act, requires states to provide designated congressional observers access to locations where ballots are cast, processed, counted, canvassed, recounted, audited and certified. It recognizes Congress’s constitutional authority to oversee federal elections, including its responsibility to judge elections involving its own members.

The law gives observers broad access but sharply limits what they can do. They cannot handle ballots or election equipment, interfere with election administration or influence outcomes. Their presence does not displace the state and local officials responsible for conducting elections.

Padilla said that the participating staffers are Senate employees, not campaign volunteers. Senate offices were invited to nominate interested staff members, who received legal training covering what observers are permitted to do and how they should conduct themselves.

Senate Rules Committee staff are conducting the training, according to Padilla’s office. Outside experts, including an election law firm experienced with the House observer program, helped develop the materials and train those conducting the sessions.

The operation also plans to issue state-specific guidance and communicate with election officials before and during deployment.

Senate Democrats believe congressional observers are not subject to state restrictions governing election observation in Senate races, according to a person familiar with the program’s planning. The operation nevertheless intends to cooperate with state officials as staffers carry out their assignments.

The 2024 law provides a federal framework for that access, but the practical arrangements will matter as congressional staffers enter election facilities governed by state and local procedures.

Democrats have also established a process for responding to observers’ findings.

Reports from the field will go to a central headquarters, Padilla’s office said. The senator and Senate Rules Committee staff can then contact state election officials to address problems. The information could also support congressional oversight, future legislation or the committee’s consideration of a contested Senate election.

That gives the program a role beyond Election Day without turning observers into election administrators or law enforcement officers. They can document an incident and bring it to the attention of officials with authority to respond, but they cannot independently resolve it.

Schumer and Padilla say the additional oversight is warranted by Trump’s statements and actions concerning election administration.

The president has publicly called for the federal government to take over voting, while his administration has pursued executive actions affecting election procedures, sought restrictions on mail voting and pressed Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would impose new documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration.

Democrats argue those efforts threaten access to the ballot and raise questions about how the administration might approach an election in which control of Congress is at stake. The administration has defended its election policies as measures to protect election integrity.

Padilla also cited a Justice Department threat of litigation against California over voter-eligibility information as an example of the federal pressure facing state election officials.

Schumer framed the observers as a way to ensure Congress receives information directly from election sites rather than relying solely on competing accounts after disputes arise.

Republicans are also establishing a Senate observer program under the same congressional authority, according to Wednesday’s announcement. Padilla said Democrats have been communicating with Republican offices and hope to deploy staffers in bipartisan pairs where possible.

But the extent of Republican participation remains unclear. Padilla said he did not know how many Republican staffers had been recruited or trained, and Democrats intend to proceed even if bipartisan pairings are unavailable. A Senate Republican aide contacted for this column had not responded by publication.

For voters, the presence of congressional observers should not change the basic process of casting a ballot. Election workers remain responsible for checking in voters, administering voting procedures and addressing questions at polling places.

Anyone who encounters intimidation, difficulty voting or any other election-related problem can contact the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) for assistance. Voters can also contact their state or local election office for information about registration, polling places and voting procedures.

The observers are not a substitute for those resources. Their assignment is to watch what happens, document problems and provide Congress with information that could become important after the polls close.

Whether the program makes a meaningful difference will depend not just on where Democrats send their staffers, but on what they encounter, how quickly concerns reach election officials and what Congress does with the information afterward.

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

By Michael Jones

Congress is heading toward a year-end legislative pileup that could become considerably more complicated after voters have their say in November.

Government funding expires December 11. A bipartisan permitting deal is awaiting action. The Senate has passed legislation to reshape college sports, but the House has yet to follow suit. Lawmakers still face unfinished business on national defense, surveillance authorities and agricultural policy, with another Republican reconciliation package and a debt-limit increase potentially joining the mix.

The problem extends beyond how much Congress has left to do. Midterm results could also change the political calculations behind nearly every item on the agenda.

But lawmakers aren’t particularly interested in discussing what comes next right now.

Multiple members approached for this column declined to discuss the lame duck, even when granted anonymity, saying their focus remains on Election Day. A senior House Democratic leadership aide said discussions about the post-election agenda haven’t begun.

The reluctance is understandable. Republicans are defending their congressional majorities while Democrats are trying to win them back. Neither party has much incentive to publicly contemplate the legislative consequences of an election that hasn’t happened yet.

But the uncertainty creates an unusual predicament for congressional leaders. They’ll return to Washington with a narrow window to resolve competing priorities, some of which have been stalled for months, while the results of the election could make compromise either more attractive or more difficult.

The mid-December funding deadline is the most immediate concern. Congress must approve another spending agreement or temporary extension to avoid a partial government shutdown before Christmas, which could disrupt federal services and delay paychecks for government workers.

The annual National Defense Authorization Act is another year-end priority. The farm bill also remains unfinished, despite its importance to agricultural producers, rural economies and federal nutrition assistance.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act presents a different challenge. The surveillance authority has already expired, leaving lawmakers to grapple with whether and how to restore powers that national security officials consider essential but privacy advocates argue need stronger safeguards.

And those are only the more familiar items on the agenda.

The Senate’s 77–22 passage of the Protect College Sports Act last month demonstrated that bipartisan legislation can still command substantial support in a deeply divided Congress. But the House has yet to act, leaving unresolved whether lawmakers can agree on a national framework for college athletics before the current Congress expires.

A more revealing test may be the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, a sweeping permitting-reform agreement announced September 30 by the Republican chairs and Democratic ranking members of the Senate’s energy and environment committees.

The proposal would accelerate federal reviews for energy and infrastructure projects, expand electricity transmission and require data centers to cover associated transmission costs rather than pass them on to other electricity customers. Supporters see an opportunity to address rising energy demand and costs, while critics worry about weakened environmental protections and reduced community oversight.

Lawmakers who disagree on much of the nation’s energy policy spent months negotiating the agreement. Its sponsors have identified the lame duck as their opportunity to move it, but the legislation still needs broader support in both chambers and the president’s signature.

That makes the election particularly consequential. Democrats who gain additional leverage in November could question whether to accept the current compromise or pursue different terms in January. Meanwhile, Republicans could see the lame duck as their opportunity to secure an agreement before the balance of power changes.

The same calculation could extend to other unfinished business, although not every priority offers the same opportunity for compromise.

Republicans have discussed another budget reconciliation package, which could let them advance certain tax and spending policies without the 60 votes generally needed to overcome a Senate filibuster. But reconciliation comes with strict procedural limits, and Republicans would still need to maintain sufficient support within their own ranks.

A potential debt-limit increase and outstanding efforts to overturn federal regulations could further complicate the calendar. The former could require difficult negotiations over federal borrowing authority, while the latter could give Republicans a chance to lock in deregulatory priorities before the current Congress ends.

What makes this lame duck especially unpredictable is that the election could fundamentally alter the incentives of the lawmakers involved.

If Democrats win control of the House, Republicans would retain their majority until January, giving Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his conference a final opportunity to advance legislation under the current balance of power. Democrats would have to decide which agreements are worth making before they gain control of the chamber.

A change in Senate control would introduce another layer of uncertainty. Even with a Republican majority, most legislation still requires bipartisan cooperation to overcome the filibuster. A party preparing to take control of the chamber might be reluctant to help the outgoing majority complete its agenda when it could pursue its own priorities weeks later.

If Republicans maintain control of both chambers, leaders could postpone some priorities until the new Congress rather than force difficult negotiations in the final weeks of the year. But that approach carries risks, too. Unfinished legislation expires at the end of a Congress, forcing lawmakers to restart the legislative process.

The election also introduces an accountability question that tends to receive less attention than the struggle for control of Congress.

Lawmakers defeated on November 3 will still have the authority to vote on major legislation through the end of their terms, as will retiring members. Their decisions could shape federal spending, health care, energy development and other policies long after they leave office.

And with limited time to negotiate, congressional leaders could face pressure to attach unrelated priorities to government funding legislation or other must-pass measures. Such agreements can move stalled proposals forward, but they can also leave little time for public scrutiny before consequential votes.

None of these dynamics guarantees that the lame duck will collapse into partisan gridlock. The Senate’s college sports vote and the bipartisan permitting agreement demonstrate that lawmakers can still find common ground. But agreements reached before an election aren’t necessarily immune to the political consequences of its results.

For now, the campaign has pushed those questions to the back burner. Members are focused on winning elections, but the legislative deadlines are already set. What remains uncertain is how the election results will reshape the final weeks of this Congress—and whether lawmakers can translate an ambitious year-end agenda into legislation before their time runs out.

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

PHOTO BY ALEX WROBLEWSKI / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Jackie Appel, Investigative Reporter

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Jeffrey Epstein liked dynamics he could control and understand, most heinously illustrated by his systematic trafficking and abuse of more than 1,000 women and girls over the course of his adult life. But his urge to shape the world around him as he saw fit extended to many other  areas of his life, such as his dealings with world-renowned scientific experts and institutions. 

Epstein was famously interested in scientists, particularly those who operated on the fringes and at the cutting edge of their fields. Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in his connection to the Santa Fe Institute, a prominent independent research center in Sante Fe, New Mexico,, less than an hour’s drive from his Zorro Ranch property.

The fascination has not gone unnoticed by state lawmakers, who highlighted the institute as a point of interest for Epstein in the interim report released by the New Mexico Survivors’ Truth Commission. None of the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute have been accused of any wrongdoing, but the connections documented in the Epstein files warrant  a closer look. 

Interconnectivity of Science

The Santa Fe Institute, or SFI, was founded in 1984 as an alternative to traditional labs or universities. It was built  on the idea that the ever-increasing specialization and niching-down of science were a detriment to true understanding and discovery. 

“The intellectual world [had] divided into specialized camps that more or less ignored one another,” SFI co-founder George Cowan wrote, according to SFI’s website.“If the gap […] were to be closed,” he reportedly wrote in his memoir, “it seemed that the initiative had to be taken by natural scientists. It was physics that had made a mistaken virtue of avoiding ‘soft’ science.”

Over the years, SFI has remained committed to the goal of interdisciplinary research and cooperation. It doesn’t  even have departments, according to its website. This commitment has led to the institute becoming perhaps best known for its focus on complexity theory, a branch of science that seeks to develop universal theories that describe systems across scientific disciplines.

“Many scientific disciplines are already associated with powerful models and theories,” David Krakhauer, SFI’s current president, wrote in a 2015 article. “Complexity science seeks to connect these theories, to find explanatory and predictive frameworks that allow us to, for example, describe biological mechanisms in computational terms or social structures in energetic terms.”

It was this interest in being able to describe the workings not only of the natural world and the broader universe, but of human interactions, systems (financial and otherwise), and behaviors, that drew Epstein to the group. 

‘Move fast and break things’

In a way, Epstein’s fascination with SFI mirrors the fascination numerous other financial elites seem to have with academic and technological “rule-breaking.” Mark Zuckerberg’s motto at Facebook in the early days was “Move fast and break things.”  Elon Musk relied on 20-somethings to overhaul massive, carefully constructed government systems through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.  Sam Altman has been pushing the development of AI forward at breakneck speed with little government oversight. . On a more human level, venture capitalist Bryan Johnson went as far as to infuse himself with his teenage son’s plasma in an effort to stay young. 

The belief that they could obtain a result or achieve a level of understanding no one else has, if only everyone else would get out of their way and let them circumvent “the way things are”

seems to be a common attitude.  Epstein fits into a pattern of people who seem to have allowed their financial success to convince them that they can see what others don’t, and that if they could just act on that insight unchecked, they could solve — well, everything. 

And to them, being the one to solve the mysteries of the universe — or at least being behind the solution — seems to be more important than the solution itself. As Sam Altman told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow about Elon Musk, “[He] desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

In an unfinished documentary Epstein was making to rehabilitate his image, he explained his fascination with SFI to his friend Steve Bannon, who was filming the interviews.

“Complex systems are complex by definition. But there’s not necessarily — it’s not one level of complexity” Epstein said.. “We might say, ‘well, our fingers are complex — the movements, the muscles of our hands — but it’s not as complex as the blood system.” 

“Now, I have a circulatory system. I have systems on top of ‘There’s no one group or person that really understands the way the [whole] body works,” he continued. “There’s no one group that understands the way the financial systems work. […] So the goal of the Santa Fe Institute was to see: Is there a way to get in and somehow understand how complex systems interact?”

Bringing a Silicon Valley Mindset to Santa Fe

Epstein became acquainted with SFI through his convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell introduced  Epstein with Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the founders of SFI. According to Maxwell, Gell-Man and Epstein “got along very, very well.”

Epstein and Gell-Mann’s relationship spanned years: Gell-Mann thanked Epstein for his financial support in his 1994 book , The Quark and the Jaguar, and wrote to Epstein after he completed his sentence: “I hope your life has returned to normal and is going well.” In an email to a recipient whose name is redacted, Epstein advised the person to tell Gell-Mann “we ae close „ youve been to the ranch etc; tell him you know he likes beautiful women , he wil like that [sic].” 

“I for one would like to understand how such a brilliant mind could have such terrible judgement in his supporters,” Krakauer told the Santa Fe New Mexican in an email earlier  this year. “We shall never know.”

Beyond Gell-Mann, Epstein’s closest direct SFI contact seems to have been Geoffery West, a theoretical physicist who served as the institute’s president from 2005 to 2009 and, according to emails released in the files, arranged to visit Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in August 2012. 

The Santa Fe Institute reports having received $275,000 in donations from Epstein over the years, with just one $25,000 donation having been accepted after his 2008 conviction. In 2019, SFI donated $25,000  to Solace Sexual Assault Services.

Justice Department records, however, put Epstein’s total contribution to SFI at $680,000 or more, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. Whether some of that differential went directly to a scientist instead of through the institute (Gell-Mann seemed open to the idea), or the gap reflects a bookkeeping error remains unknown.

The convicted sex offender’s loose connections to SFI are vast and span decades. As part of The Cover-Up, COURIER’s ongoing investigation into Epstein, several other individuals have been identified for their role connecting Epstein to the world of science and academia. Future reporting will detail these relationships and what role they may have played in Epstein’s criminal network, or how Epstein may have used them without their knowledge.

The Truth Commission’s interim report noted that SFI fully complied with the commission’s subpoena, and that officials are still investigating the financials of the matter. More is expected when the commission releases its final report in December, and New Mexico Attorney General  Raúl Torrez has already opened a criminal investigation into Epstein’s associates in the state.

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

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By Michael Jones

For a brief moment this week, the Senate looked almost functional.

On Monday, 77 senators—including more than half of the Democratic caucus—voted to pass the Protect College Sports Act, a sweeping bill intended to establish national rules for college athletics, including how schools compensate athletes for their name, image and likeness, share revenue and regulate transfers.

Two days later, the bipartisan vibes were gone.

Senate Democrats blocked two Republican-backed bills Wednesday dealing with issues voters broadly care about: rising electricity costs from power-hungry data centers and members of Congress trading stocks.

The whiplash offers a useful window into what happens to bipartisan legislating when Election Day is less than five weeks away. Democrats say Republicans waited until the final days before senators left Washington to put politically popular issues on the floor, either attaching provisions they knew Democrats would reject or advancing legislation that fell short of the problems it purported to solve. Republicans say Democrats would rather deny them a legislative victory than accept imperfect progress.

Both debates, however, start with problems on which there is considerably more agreement than Wednesday’s votes suggest.

Data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, and their rapid expansion has intensified concerns that households and small businesses could end up paying for the new power plants, transmission lines and other infrastructure needed to serve them.

Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, one of the Republicans facing a competitive election this fall, has pushed the Ratepayer Protection Act as an answer. The legislation would require states to consider standards ensuring that data centers and other large electricity users cover the costs they impose on the grid rather than shifting them onto other customers.

The House passed it 417–3 last month. That wasn’t just bipartisan. Nearly everybody agreed. Most Senate Democrats didn’t.

The procedural vote Wednesday failed 57–43, three votes short of the 60 needed to advance. Four Democrats—Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—joined Republicans in voting yes.

The objection from Democrats I spoke with wasn’t to making data centers pay their own way. It was that Husted’s bill doesn’t actually require them to.

“It literally says that utilities must consider,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told reporters before the vote. “We’re lawmakers, not law suggesters. So if we want to reduce costs, we should mandate it.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was even more dismissive, describing the legislation as essentially a restatement of existing law that risks giving voters the impression Congress solved a problem it didn’t.

“It’s clearly designed to help them in campaigns,” Murphy told me. “It’s not designed to actually solve any problems.”

Unsurprisingly, Husted sees it very differently.

Before Wednesday’s vote, he argued that Congress had an opportunity to send President Donald Trump legislation that could begin protecting consumers immediately, pointing repeatedly to its overwhelming support in the House.

“Let’s rise above the politics that often drag this place down and deliver for the American people and do our jobs,” Husted said.

Then he made the political stakes explicit. Husted argued that if Democrats blocked the bill, they would demonstrate that they “do not care about affordability.”

That exchange gets at the strange incentives governing Congress this close to an election. Democrats can argue a bill doesn’t go far enough while Republicans can argue Democrats are allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. And either party can turn the other’s vote into campaign material.

Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) told me last week that Republicans’ sudden focus on affordability amounted to an effort to “make up for lost time.”

“We have been talking about affordability issues the entire cycle,” she said. “I think what the concern is for them is that the voters are going to see that while they focused on nominating Trump’s appointees, they did not focus on the American people.”

The fight over congressional stock trading was even messier.

The Stop Insider Trading Act, sponsored by Nebraska Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, would prohibit lawmakers, their spouses and dependent children from purchasing new individual stocks. They could keep stocks they already own and sell them after providing advance public notice. Republicans also added a separate provision requiring photo identification to vote. The House passed the package 232–198 in July, with 13 Democrats voting for it.

Every Senate Democrat voted Wednesday against advancing it. The cloture motion failed 53–47.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Republicans of deliberately constructing the legislation to fail, arguing that its stock-trading restrictions were too weak and that Republicans added voting restrictions they knew Democrats wouldn’t accept.

“They designed this bill to fail,” Schumer said before the vote. “They loaded their legislation up with poison pills that they knew would make this bill dead on arrival.”

But Ricketts accused Democrats of being obstructionists.

“Public service is not a profit-making business,” he said in a statement after the vote. “Senate Republicans voted to deliver for Americans and help restore their faith in government officials.”

There is a substantive disagreement buried beneath all this election-year finger-pointing. 

Democrats point to stronger proposals that would prohibit lawmakers from owning individual stocks altogether. Last year, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced bipartisan legislation covering members of Congress as well as the president and vice president. Republicans counter that the legislation actually available for passage Wednesday would still have imposed new restrictions on lawmakers’ financial activity.

The contrast with Monday matters.

Democrats haven’t stopped voting for Republican-backed legislation simply because an election is approaching. Enough of them joined Republicans to give the Protect College Sports Act a 77-vote majority after months of negotiations between Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). The legislation won at least 70 votes at every major procedural stage before final passage.

What has changed is the price of compromise.

With senators now leaving Washington to campaign, Democrats have less incentive to swallow substantive objections to legislation merely because they support its stated goal. Republicans, meanwhile, have every incentive to force votes that allow them to tell voters they tried to address affordability and congressional ethics, only to be stopped by Democrats.

Wednesday’s votes didn’t reveal a Senate suddenly incapable of bipartisanship. Monday had already disproved that.

They showed something more familiar about Congress in the final weeks of an election: Bipartisanship is still possible. But everyone gets choosier about the compromises they’re willing to make—and much more conscious of who gets to claim the win.

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

By Michael Jones

A police officer with access to an automated license-plate reader can use it to help find a missing child, recover a stolen car or identify a vehicle connected to a violent crime.

That same technology can also tell an officer where an ex-girlfriend’s car has been.

The difference between those searches is supposed to be rules, oversight and accountability. But as automated license-plate readers have spread across the country, those safeguards have not always kept pace.

At least 50 law enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of using automated license-plate reader systems for unauthorized purposes, according to a bipartisan letter Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.) sent Attorney General Todd Blanche this week. At least 30 of those cases involved officers allegedly stalking current, former or prospective romantic partners.

In one case cited by the senators, a police chief allegedly searched for vehicles belonging to a former partner and her daughter about 600 times over 13 months.

Now Washington is confronting a question communities have already been forced to reckon with: What rules should govern technology capable of tracking where Americans go—and who is making sure the people with access to it follow them?

“This is a national issue,” Warnock told me Wednesday at the Capitol. “There’s some 140,000 officers all across the country who have access to this technology.”

Warnock and Britt are behind the Senate’s first bipartisan action focused specifically on automated license-plate readers, or ALPRs. They are asking the Justice Department to recommend safeguards for state and local police departments, including access controls, audits and supervisory review. They also want the DOJ to explain by Oct. 21 how much federal funding has supported the systems and what oversight accompanies that money.

Their push comes as Congress is taking a broader look at Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that operates the country’s largest ALPR network. Flock has more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and 140,000 monthly active users, according to the senators. The cameras record information including a vehicle’s license plate, make, model, color, location and time and turn it into searchable data.

On Wednesday, senators from both parties raised privacy and civil-liberties concerns at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” Flock CEO Garrett Langley declined to testify.

The emerging debate is not simply about whether the cameras are good or bad. Both senators who spoke with me stressed that the technology can serve legitimate—and sometimes urgent—public-safety purposes.

Britt pointed to cases in Alabama in which the technology has helped police investigate murders and burglaries and recently locate a person with dementia.

“I support law enforcement, and I want to make sure that they have every tool in their toolbox to make sure that they can keep Alabamians and Americans safe,” Britt told me. But, she added, there have also been cases in which “rogue law enforcement officers have used them in a way that is counter to their intent.”

“We want to make sure that citizens are also protected from those misuses,” she said.

That distinction matters. The policy response does not have to be a choice between abandoning the technology and accepting unrestricted surveillance.

Warnock made the same point to reporters on Wednesday morning.

“The technology can’t be trusted to manage itself,” he said during a press call.

Flock itself has responded to the scrutiny by strengthening its safeguards. The company announced last month that it was reducing its recommended default retention period for license-plate data from 30 days to seven, requiring case codes for law-enforcement searches and making a system that flags abnormal search activity mandatory for law-enforcement customers. It is also introducing automatic lockouts when user activity meets criteria for abnormal behavior, pending an administrator’s review.

Those changes also illustrate a larger problem: some of the protections now being strengthened are arriving after the technology has already become deeply embedded in American policing.

That is where Warnock and Britt see a role for Washington.

Follow the federal money

The federal government helps state and local police buy technology. The Justice Department’s Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, for example, provides hundreds of millions of dollars for state and local criminal-justice priorities—including equipment, technology and information systems. And a separate $300 million DOJ initiative announced this summer specifically lists license-plate readers and artificial-intelligence systems among the technologies eligible for federal support.

What remains unclear is how much federal money has paid specifically for ALPR systems and what conditions came with those dollars.

Warnock and Britt are asking the DOJ to answer exactly that.

They want to know how much department funding has supported ALPR purchases, whether grant recipients receive training on data retention and access, whether DOJ knows of misconduct involving federally funded systems and whether agencies can face financial penalties or be required to take corrective action when abuse occurs.

Warnock told reporters that federal funding gives Washington an accountability tool.

“The entities that want federal funding need to be held accountable,” he said.

He also rejected the idea that states and cities alone can solve the problem through a patchwork of different policies.

Warnock wants audits of searches, stronger supervision and systems that can track how the technology is being used before abuse becomes persistent.

“For all we know, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said of the documented cases.

Britt framed their partnership as an attempt to keep the issue from becoming another partisan fight.

“I think it’s important for us to speak in a bipartisan manner, so that Americans know we are not trying to politicize the issue,” she told me. “I also understand making sure that we not only curtail [misuse of the technology], but we have to hold people accountable for it too.”

Want to know whether Flock is watching your streets?

You don’t have to wait for Washington to learn how license-plate readers are being used where you live.

Start with your city or county government and police department websites. Search for “Flock Safety,” “automated license plate reader,” “ALPR” and “license plate reader.” City council and county commission agendas, procurement databases and contract records can show whether a local government has purchased the cameras, how much it is spending and when a contract was approved.

Police departments may also publish policies governing who can search ALPR databases, how long they retain information, whether they audit searches and when they can share data with other agencies. State law can impose additional requirements.

And those details matter. Flock says its current standard retention period is seven days, but existing customers can maintain previously approved retention periods and different state and local requirements can apply. The company also says customers own and control the data their cameras collect.

The question facing policymakers has evolved from whether the technology will remain part of policing to whether the rules governing it can catch up with its capabilities.

Warnock put it more starkly.

“Big Brother is already here,” he said.

The challenge for Congress, the Justice Department and thousands of police departments around the country is deciding who gets to look up where Americans have been—and making sure somebody is watching the people doing the searching.

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

By Jackie Appel, Investigative Reporter

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A legislative committee tasked with investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes in the state are working to close a loophole in New Mexico’s sex registry laws that allowed the sex trafficker to operate in the state virtually undetected.

The New Mexico Survivors’ Truth Commission — a bipartisan delegation of state representatives dedicated to investigating Epstein’s operations in New Mexico — recently published specific details regarding how Epstein was able to use a loophole to avoid registering as a sex offender in the state of New Mexico. This let him to fly largely under the radar for decades as he assaulted as many as 30 victims on his Zorro Ranch property.

The commission obtained documents from a number of state and federal agencies, which included internal correspondence between law enforcement officials who deliberated over how to handle Epstein’s registration status:

What the Epstein Files reveal

Further inspection of documents released as part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act reveal exactly how Epstein navigated the legal requirements to skirt registration. One of Epstein’s lawyers, Peter Schoenburg, wrote: “I do not read [the offense to which Epstein plead guilty] as falling within one of the enumerated SORNA qualifying offenses under NMSA 1978, § 29-11A-3(E) (defining ‘sex offense’ for purposes of the New Mexico SORNA provisions).”

Essentially, Schoenburg argued that Epstein’s Florida conviction did not qualify as a “sex offense” according to New Mexico’s legal definition. The claim hinges on the fact that Epstein pleaded guilty to “procuring [a] person under [the] age of 18 for prostitution” in Florida—a crime which involved a 17-year-old victim (though her actual age is disputed). This conviction meant he had to register as a sex offender in Florida and in New York, where he also maintained residences.

However, the text of New Mexico’s closest similar statute, “sexual exploitation of children by prostitution,” stipulated that to be convicted of a crime, the victim must be “a child under the age of sixteen.” According to the state’s definition, a “sex offense” encompasses any number of crimes — including “sexual exploitation of children by prostitution” — and “their equivalents in any other jurisdiction.” Schoenburg argued that Florida’s “procuring [a] person under [the] age of 18 for prostitution” statute and New Mexico’s “sexual exploitation of children by prostitution” statute are not equivalent, and therefore, Epstein had not committed a sex offense according to New Mexico law.

The argument appeared to be legally sound, and was accepted by the New Mexico Department Of Public Safety.

“It’s shocking and upsetting that 16 and 17-year-olds do not currently have the same protections as younger children under state law,” State Rep. Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe), chair of the New Mexico Survivors’ Truth Commission, told COURIER in an email. “We are prepared to right that wrong in the coming legislative session.”

Closing the loophole

Renewed interest in Epstein’s loophole has prompted lawmakers to finally close it in the upcoming legislative session. The Survivors’ Truth Commission is expected to propose a solution as part of its final report, and State Rep. Meredith Dixon (D-Albuquerque) recently announced she would file a package of legislation to close the loophole, “spearheaded” by Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who is running a separate criminal investigation into Epstein.

In the past, according to Dixon, several efforts have been put forth to bring New Mexico’s relevant statutes up to date, but they’ve never made it to the House floor. Now, however, with the spotlight on the Epstein case, she is hopeful that the time has finally come for legislators to accept that change is necessary.

“What has happened, I think, is that now—with […] the Epstein Commission looking at Zorro Ranch and this loophole—I think there’s a better understanding by legislators and members of the public of exactly why we need to make some of the changes that we’ve been asking for,” Dixon said. “I think previously, it may not have been clear. There may not have been an example that made everyone realize, aha! This is why we need to change [the statutes].”

If passed, the change in state laws would serve as a stepping stone towards tightening the messy legal web of laws that aim to protect victims of sexual crimes, but often allow affected individuals to fall through the cracks and perpetrators to avoid accountability.

“I think it’s more accurate to think, in the context of US trafficking, that the whole system is a loophole,” Andy Forest, a research fellow at the nonprofit Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST LA), told COURIER. “We made the country on the basis of trafficking people [slavery]. So, it’s not so much that we made this tight system and we have to close loopholes now. We have to make the system no longer a whole mess of loopholes.”

More gaps as new technology emerges

Forest highlighted an August decision—arrived at by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit—that AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as another area where legislation makes it harder for victims of sexual crimes to get the justice they deserve. While not a loophole like the New Mexico statute, Forest says that the decision closes the door to legal recourse for many survivors of abuse perpetrated largely online.

“Let’s say I am a survivor of child sex trafficking,” Forest said. “Images have to feed [the AI image generator]. I never get to know if mine were the ones that would feed it. So the problem that this is creating for survivors is that it allows more sexual abuse material to be created of individuals, and there’s absolutely no recourse.”

For example: under this court decision, the generation and retention of CSAM for personal use is legally protected, as long as the images generated are of “fake” children — even though the AI image generator was trained to make those images using actual children. As long as the person generating the images didn’t use actual children to create the model, they would not be considered a sex offender. Similarly, under the Epstein loophole someone who solicits a 16- or 17-year-old child for prostitution is not considered a sex offender.

Emerging gaps in the US legal system like this one, and longstanding issues like the Epstein loophole, provide legal avenues for perpetrators to take advantage of victims without breaking any laws.

Laws are specific by necessity, but that specificity can leave victims out in the cold. While future changes won’t help past victims, small adjustments to a phrase or definition can make a world of difference for any potential future victims. Advocates like Forest are hopeful that the adjustments necessary to close the New Mexico loophole will come as a result of Dixon and Torrez’s proposed legislative package, or from suggestions put forth by the Survivors’ Truth Commission.

In the meantime, the Survivors’ Truth Commission will continue their investigation into the goings on of Zorro Ranch and the bureaucratic failures that allowed them to take place for so long. The commission is expected to release their final report this December.

---

COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

By Michael Jones

Rep. LaMonica McIver has had plenty to celebrate at this year’s Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference.

The New Jersey Democrat is expecting her second child any day now. And this week, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), a mentor to McIver who will retire at the end of her term, helped pass another responsibility to the next generation: McIver will become a co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls next Congress.

But when McIver gathered Black women executives and business leaders this week to discuss their influence on American business and culture, she wasn’t interested only in celebrating how far Black women have come.

She wanted to talk about what it has taken to get there.

“When you don’t give us a seat at the table, we will build a new table with chairs and a boardroom,” McIver told the crowd.

It was a celebration of resilience that also raised an uncomfortable question: Why should Black women always have to build another table?

The answer matters beyond the conference rooms of the Congressional Black Caucus’s marquee annual gathering. Black entrepreneurs still face significant disparities when they seek the money they need to build and expand their businesses.

Just 35% of Black-owned small businesses that applied for loans, lines of credit or cash advances were fully approved for the financing they sought, compared with 56% of white-owned firms, according to the Federal Reserve Banks’ 2024 Small Business Credit Survey. The figures aren’t adjusted for differences such as profitability or credit risk. Still, the disparity is consistent with years of findings showing that Black business owners face greater difficulty obtaining financing.

That gap exists against an enormous racial wealth divide. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances found the typical Black family held $44,900 in wealth in 2022, compared with $285,000 for the typical white family. While Black families experienced substantial wealth growth between 2019 and 2022, the typical white family still held more than six times as much.

McIver, who serves on the House Small Business Committee, said she sees the consequences firsthand.

“When you talk about a Black business specifically, I think the access to capital is a big problem,” she told reporters after the panel.

Black businesses, she said, often cannot obtain the same access to capital as white-owned businesses, making it harder both to get started and to survive once their doors open.

“The playing ground is not fair from the start,” she said.

The women McIver invited to join her put flesh on those statistics.

Talisha Bekavac, executive vice president of the U.S. Black Chambers, described persistent difficulties securing capital and contracts even as Black women have become a rapidly growing group of entrepreneurs. She also described a less visible form of exclusion: women being brought onto contracting teams when their participation helps secure a contract, only to be sidelined once the deal is won.

“A lot of times, it’s just men subcontracting the men,” Bekavac said. Women, she added, can be brought onto teams and then “starve[d]” of work or paid late.

Rhonda Adams-Medina, Audible’s global head of business affairs, described another burden successful Black professionals can inherit once they make it through the door.

As a Black person in a position of influence, she said, “you’ve got a second job”: making sure you aren’t the only one who gets through it.

Adams-Medina said she has deliberately expanded hiring searches when human-resources departments failed to present diverse candidates and has resisted relying on elite-school credentials as a shortcut for talent. Despite attending Princeton and Harvard Law School herself, she said she has never hired anyone from either institution.

“I look for the person who can do the job,” she said. “I don’t look for labels.”

There is something admirable about that sense of responsibility, but also something revealing about its necessity.

Again and again, Black women who reach positions of power are celebrated not merely for doing the jobs they were hired to perform, but for taking on the additional work of opening doors, mentoring the people behind them and repairing institutional shortcomings they did not create.

McIver doesn’t think that responsibility belongs to them alone.

I asked her what her colleagues who aren’t Black women—particularly those with committee gavels, leadership positions and other forms of institutional power—should take away from the discussion.

“Sometimes our counterparts, especially when they don’t look like us, they think that it’s not their problem what’s happening to Black people,” McIver said without hesitation. “It’s your job to speak up.”

She compared remaining silent about racial discrimination to watching something racist happen to a Black friend and doing nothing. McIver extended the argument to people experiencing inequities in corporate America and to political fights over immigration and diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

“If not, you’re just complicit to the problem,” she said.

That challenge comes as the federal government’s approach to race-conscious economic programs is changing.

The Small Business Administration proposed a rule in June that would eliminate the use of presumed social disadvantage based on membership in certain racial groups in its 8(a) Business Development Program, which helps eligible small businesses compete for federal contracts. The Trump administration describes the change as eliminating racial discrimination. (Applicants would instead have to demonstrate social disadvantage through individual evidence.)

The policy fight can become abstract quickly. The experiences McIver elevated this week make its stakes considerably more concrete.

Kathryn Busby, president of original programming at Starz, described representation as both an opportunity and good business. She said the company remains committed to stories by and about women and underrepresented communities regardless of whether doing so is “in vogue or out of vogue.”

Authentically telling stories about communities that have historically been overlooked isn’t merely “the right thing to do,” Busby said. “It’s actually the profitable thing to do.”

The success of Black women can demonstrate what happens when barriers are overcome, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence that those barriers have disappeared.

Resilience is an admirable quality in an entrepreneur, an executive or a member of Congress. But it’s not a replacement for meaningful economic policy. And celebrating people for repeatedly overcoming an uneven playing field is no substitute for leveling it.

Black women have shown they can build their own tables.

McIver’s challenge to everyone else is to ask why they so often still have to.

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

By Michael Jones

When Laura Loomer went after Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon last month, she wasn’t exactly subtle.

The right-wing activist and close ally of President Donald Trump unleashed a series of racist attacks against Nixon and several other prominent Black women in public life, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and former Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.).

The attacks on Nixon, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, drew a particularly forceful response. Politicians and public figures rallied to her defense. Members of Congress denounced Loomer. The Congressional Black Caucus weighed in.

The backlash was striking in its breadth.

But Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) told me there’s another question worth asking: Why should it take an especially grotesque episode of racism for Black women to receive that kind of solidarity in the first place?

Lee, the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania, has dealt with racist abuse since long before she acquired the national profile that comes with serving in Congress. She said prominence can actually give people, in their minds, permission to say things about Black women they might otherwise suppress.

“People use that higher profile as an excuse,” Lee told me. “All their racist fantasies—they’re like, well, I can use them on these public figures and get away with it.”

The problem is bigger than Loomer.

“Anti-Blackness has been pervasive throughout this entire administration, and obviously not just this administration, but definitely this one,” Lee said.  “And it just doesn’t get the attention that other forms of hate or bigotry get, because people expect that anti-Blackness is just the norm.”

Then she put her finger on an assumption that has followed Black women through American public life for generations: They can take it.

“Black women know how to handle it, right?” Lee said. “Like, I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to check in on that Black woman because they’re strong. And that’s how they treat all of us.”

That expectation—the strong Black woman who can endure whatever gets thrown at her—is often framed as admiration. In practice, it can become an excuse for indifference.

And American politics has spent generations demanding that Black women endure.

Long before social media made it possible to hurl a racist insult at an elected official from a smartphone, racial stereotypes were used to define which Black women were considered respectable, intelligent, feminine or worthy of exercising authority. Black women who challenged existing power structures could be cast as angry, aggressive, ignorant or otherwise outside the boundaries of acceptable public life.

The particulars have changed across generations, but the underlying function is familiar: reduce a Black woman to a racial caricature and you make it easier to dismiss her ideas, question her competence and portray her presence in positions of power as illegitimate.

That history matters because Loomer isn’t shouting into some political vacuum.

She has maintained proximity to a president who has himself repeatedly attacked prominent Black women. And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told me he sees Loomer’s rhetoric as part of something broader.

“We’ve seen an unprecedented attack on Black women by the Trump administration and MAGA extremists,” Jeffries said, pointing to attacks against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

“Laura Loomer’s extreme racist comments are just an extension of the assault that we’ve seen on Black women all across America by the Trump administration,” he added. “It’s unacceptable, unpatriotic and un-American. We’ve got to forcefully push back against it.”

Jeffries was even more direct during a recent press conference, calling Loomer a “stone-cold racist” and saying Republicans in Congress and the White House should be ashamed to continue associating with her.

Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas), who publicly defended Nixon despite telling me the two have never met, made a related point.

“We’ve seen the president declare war on Black women,” Menefee said, citing Trump’s rhetoric toward Jackson and former Vice President Kamala Harris, along with attacks on Omar and Pressley.

But Menefee’s criticism wasn’t reserved for Republicans.

“What I’ve seen from folks in media and folks on the Democratic side is a silence and a failure to stand up and stand in the gap for Black women,” he said.

Menefee noted that Black women are among the Democratic Party’s most important constituencies, but he rejected the idea that their political importance should be the reason others defend them.

“Even if they weren’t, they are human beings who deserve dignity and respect and protection,” he said.

Political solidarity can easily become transactional: Defend the people whose votes you need. Praise the constituency that anchors your coalition. Condemn racism when the offense becomes so egregious that silence carries its own political cost.

But Lee is asking for something harder.

She told me she notices how quickly people mobilize when other groups or public figures are attacked. She sees the Facebook posts, tweets and Instagram messages. But when racist abuse fills her comment section or those of other Black women, the response can feel different.

“It’s almost like they just move on, they go about their life, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, that was gross,’ but they don’t actually give it the same energy that they give other people,” Lee said. “That is a normalization.”

And normalization is precisely why this episode matters beyond whatever Loomer posts next.

The backlash to her attacks on Nixon demonstrated that elected officials and institutions can respond forcefully when a Black woman becomes the target of overt racism. But solidarity is most meaningful when it isn’t reserved for the moments that are easiest to condemn.

It requires challenging the subtler assumptions that make the spectacular episodes possible: that Black women are uniquely equipped to withstand abuse, that racist attacks are simply part of the price of seeking power, that someone else will speak up or that saying something could make a family gathering, friendship, workplace or political coalition uncomfortable.

Lee told me that discomfort is exactly where the work begins.

“A lot of the reason why people don’t speak up is because it’s familiar to them,” she said. “It might not be their own thought process, but they see it in their relatives, they see it in their social circles, and they don’t want to be a social outcast.”

Then she offered a question that extends far beyond Laura Loomer, Angie Nixon or one ugly stretch of posts on social media.

“Think about whether your social comfort is more important than us having a society where Black women are actually respected.”

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

Protestor cites Epstein files at a No Kings anti-Trump demonstration at the Vermont State House in Montpelier, Vermont. (Photo by: John Lazenby/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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By Camaron Stevenson, National Correspondent

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With just two months until the midterm elections, voters across party lines are looking for candidates who are willing to take on corruption, hold powerful abusers accountable, and demand the full release of the Epstein Files.

A new nationwide poll conducted by public opinion research firm GBAO and released Wednesday by COURIER and Reckoning Action found that 88% of Americans who plan to vote in the midterms, including 83% of Republican voters, will prioritize candidates who promise to hold powerful people accountable, including through the release of the full Epstein files. Justice for Epstein’s victims ranked higher for voters than almost every other issue, including healthcare, affordability, immigration, public safety, and the Iran War.

The issue could complicate President Donald Trump’s efforts to boost his endorsed midterm candidates. Three out of four respondents who voted for Trump in 2024 said justice for Epstein’s victims and accountability for his co-conspirators would be a top factor when filling out their ballots.

“For months, Americans across the political spectrum have seen the release of the Epstein files completely mishandled, the privacy and the safety of survivors disregarded, and justice routinely denied. Now, voters across party lines are drawing a line and making it clear: this issue will be a critical determining factor in their midterm vote,” said Cheyenne Hunt, executive director for Reckoning Action. “To every candidate hoping to earn the trust of voters ahead of November, know this: if you have been in any way complicit with this cover-up, or if you are unwilling to take a stand for justice, voters will not forget.”

When asked about a candidate’s message to voters, addressing justice for Epstein’s victims had a 17-point advantage over the Iran War and ranked 15 points higher than messaging around transgender issues, two of President Trump’s primary talking points. The only issue ranked higher was corruption, a term voters are beginning to see as synonymous with Trump and his enablers in Congress.

Releasing the Epstein Files became a national priority in 2025, as the Trump administration became engrossed in an apparent cover-up of the records, what they contained, and who they might implicate. The most grievous transgressions include secret meetings in the Situation Room; moving Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to a low-security prison; holding a fake Epstein Files release party with far-right media personalities; and closing its investigation into Epstein without additional prosecutions after a hasty review of less than 7% of the DOJ’s investigative files.

In lieu of executive accountability, the public turned to Congress. Pressure from voters grew so intense that the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) passed with virtually unanimous support. But the new polling suggests that voters may now turn to the ballot box to punish those they believe have failed to ensure the law is upheld. To date, only half of the 6 million records from the government’s case files on Epstein have been released, and the US Department of Justice has failed to provide Congress with explanations for redactions and omissions as required by law.

The full release of the Epstein Files will take a Congress willing to use its power to force the DOJ to comply with the law, as Attorney General Todd Blanche has stonewalled any attempts to do so. Senate Republicans approved Blanche’s nomination to his role in August, despite pleas from survivors of Epstein’s abuse to reject him. Blanche took lead on the Epstein investigation in 2025, members of Congress currently investigating his handling of the case say his priority has been to protect the president every step of the way.

“He is the chief architect of the cover-up that the White House is engaging in to prevent the disclosure of files,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL). “To prevent the disclosure of any information that might implicate Donald Trump.”

Some candidates have taken note of the salience of this issue and are already running campaign ads attacking opponents who have failed to deliver accountability on Epstein. Democratic candidates Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia have criticized their opponents for initially voting against releasing the Epstein Files, while Sherrod Brown in Ohio went a step further, highlighting donations Sen. Jon Husted received from billionaire Les Wexner, whose wealth financed Epstein’s criminal network for over a decade.

Others, like James Talarico in Texas, have used past records of leniency for perpetrators of sexual assault as an example of enabling abusers like Epstein. In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs released a scathing television ad putting Republican candidate Rep. Andy Biggs’ record on Epstein front and center. While Biggs voted to pass the EFTA, he voted against the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena to obtain the full, unredacted files, and has been absent from the committee’s investigation into Epstein’s criminal network.

Hobbs also tied Biggs’ inaction on Epstein to his record on other related issues as a state legislator, including voting against funding to investigate sexual abuse crimes and supporting protections for a fundamentalist cult known to be a hotbed of domestic violence and child abuse.

Republicans, in contrast, have largely kept Epstein out of their campaigns. The few attempts to counter accusations of taking cash from the “Epstein Class” have either been disproved or backfired, and Democrats’ votes to release the Epstein Files were consistent throughout the process.

The strategy reflects another finding from the COURIER/Reckoning Action poll: the more closely an issue aligned with Epstein’s crimes and the questions surrounding the case, the more likely voters were to rank it as a concern.

Of the 15 issues tested, five were considered top concerns by over 80% of respondents: child abuse, government corruption, abuse of power, those in power avoiding accountability, and human trafficking as the top five concerns. Among the issues of least concern were several Trump sees as his strengths: immigration, transgender athletes, and public safety.

With control of Congress in the balance this fall, the president, administration, and candidates across the political spectrum will all have to contend with the simple fact that the Epstein cover-up isn’t going away.

---

COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

By Michael Jones

The national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time last month, setting off another round of warnings in Washington about how much the federal government owes and what it will take to bring its borrowing under control.

But millions of Americans are confronting a debt problem of their own.

More than 42 million people hold $1.7 trillion in federal student loans. Roughly nine million borrowers are in default on $220 billion of that debt, according to the latest Education Department data.

The two kinds of debt are fundamentally different, economically and otherwise. But the $40 trillion milestone comes as affordability dominates the midterm elections and Democrats make cost of living the centerpiece of their argument for winning back Congress. 

That raises another question: If they do, what would they actually do for Americans struggling with student debt?

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), a member of the House Education and Workforce subcommittee that oversees higher education, told me Democrats face two challenges: helping existing borrowers and making college less expensive for future students.

“There is no reason why higher education has to be as expensive as it is in this country,” she said.

Bonamici stopped short of prescribing a specific legislative agenda before discussing it with other members of the committee and Democratic caucus. But she pointed to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program as one place to start.

The program, created by Congress in 2007, allows qualifying government and nonprofit workers to have their remaining federal student debt canceled after making 120 qualifying monthly payments.

The Biden administration made fixing PSLF a major component of its student-debt agenda after years of complaints about administrative problems that kept borrowers from receiving the forgiveness they had earned. By the end of Biden’s presidency, more than one million public-service workers had received relief through the program.

Bonamici said she heard from constituents who spent years navigating those roadblocks before finally having their debt forgiven.

“They put in their time, they put in their 10 years, they made payments based on income over that period of time they were working in public service,” she said. When borrowers finally received the relief they had been promised, she added, “people have tears in their eyes.”

“So I think you start with programs like that, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program,” Bonamici said.

The federal student-loan system Democrats would inherit, however, now looks considerably different from the system they controlled during the Biden years.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans used last year’s massive tax-and-spending law to overhaul how Americans borrow for college and repay federal student loans. Major provisions took effect in July.

New borrowers now choose between a tiered standard repayment option and the new income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan. Republicans also eliminated Grad PLUS loans for new borrowers, capped Parent PLUS borrowing at $20,000 annually and $65,000 overall per dependent student and imposed new borrowing limits on graduate and professional students.

The Trump administration argues that these changes address one underlying cause of the student-debt crisis: Colleges have been able to raise prices in part because students and families could borrow increasingly large amounts from the federal government to pay them.

The Education Department says limiting federal lending will put pressure on institutions to control costs, while the new repayment system will be simpler for borrowers to navigate. The Repayment Assistance Plan also includes protections intended to prevent balances from growing for borrowers who make their required payments.

That leaves Democrats with a more complicated task than simply reviving former President Joe Biden’s student-loan policies.

Biden attempted broad debt cancellation of as much as $20,000 per borrower before the Supreme Court struck down the program in 2023. His administration subsequently pursued relief through programs already authorized by Congress, ultimately approving debt cancellation for more than five million borrowers, including people with disabilities, borrowers whose schools defrauded them and public-service workers.

His SAVE income-driven repayment program also became entangled in litigation and was ultimately dismantled after Trump returned to office.

A Democratic House or Senate next year couldn’t simply recreate that agenda on its own. Trump would remain president, limiting the prospects for legislation he opposes. But congressional control would give Democrats the power to write and pass their own higher-education bills, conduct oversight of the Education Department and use committee hearings to challenge the administration’s implementation of the Republican law.

It would also force Democrats to decide what comes next.

Do they try to reverse Republican limits on federal borrowing? Make income-driven repayment more generous? Strengthen protections for borrowers pursuing public-service forgiveness? Pursue another form of targeted debt relief? Or focus more heavily on reducing what students have to borrow in the first place?

That last question may be the most consequential.

Federal data illustrate the scale of the immediate repayment problem. Beyond the nine million borrowers already in default, 8.4 million had at least one loan in forbearance as of March. About 13 million borrowers were enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan.

But helping those borrowers addresses debt that has already accumulated. It doesn’t resolve why students need to borrow so much to obtain a degree.

“In the short term we need a solution,” Bonamici said. “But in the long term, we just have to make higher education” more affordable.

That debate is unfolding as Republicans increasingly emphasize alternatives to four-year college, including apprenticeships, workforce training and shorter credential programs. The Trump administration has framed its higher-education overhaul partly around expanding those options and making students and institutions more accountable for whether expensive degrees produce sufficient economic returns.

Bonamici agrees that college shouldn’t be treated as the only route to a successful career. She told me students who prefer an apprenticeship, the trades or another workforce pathway should have access to one.

But she rejects the idea that those alternatives diminish the value of college—or that its current price should be accepted as inevitable.

The economic data support her on the first point. Workers with bachelor’s degrees had median weekly earnings of $1,578 in 2025, compared with $966 for workers whose highest level of education was a high-school diploma, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bachelor’s-degree holders also experienced lower unemployment.

The challenge for Democrats is figuring out how to preserve that opportunity without requiring so many Americans to spend years—or decades—paying for it.

“Anybody who wants to go to college should be able to do that without worrying about how they’re going to pay for it,” Bonamici said.

She invoked former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s call to “open the doors of opportunity” when he signed the Higher Education Act more than six decades ago.

“Higher education is still a good investment,” Bonamici said. “We have to have a path for everybody.”

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.

Written by Keya Vakil, VP of State Political Content, with additional data analysis by Michael Foley, Director of Product Growth & Partnerships.

Everywhere you look, people are talking about data centers.

“How Data Centers Broke American Politics,” read a WIRED headline from early August.

“The Great Bipartisan Data Center Smackdown Has Begun,” read another from the Wall Street Journal.

There is now virtually unanimous consensus among political insiders that championing data centers is a toxic stance that can cost a candidate a race. 

Republicans are so alarmed that the issue could cause Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio to lose his seat that they’re practically begging top AI companies to spend money to come to his rescue. Meanwhile in Michigan, Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers endorsed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in the state just months after previously supporting them and downplaying their impacts. 

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro, who previously championed data centers, has also reversed course, issuing strict new regulations on them. And then there’s Texas, where three-term Gov. Greg Abbott’s previous support for data centers has now become one of his biggest vulnerabilities, giving his Democratic opponent a potent line of attack against him.

Everywhere you look, data centers are now reshaping campaigns and threatening to turn elections upside down—so much so that pro-AI super PACs are now dumping money into the midterms to try and change the narrative around data centers. 

But before data centers became a national political story, they were a local one.

A year ago, few would have predicted just how quickly the backlash would become an issue that could impact elections all across the country. But at Courier Local, we were already aggressively covering the data center fights unfolding in communities. We certainly were not alone in recognizing that something was brewing, and our friends at More Perfect Union in particular deserve recognition for their coverage. 

But our local newsrooms were among the earliest to consistently cover how communities were responding to proposed data centers. Since October 2025, we have published over 1,700 stories, videos, and graphics on this debate network-wide, with coverage continuing in real time. 

What we saw then is what everyone sees now: people of all political stripes oppose data centers. Typically, online comments on our stories, videos, and graphic posts feature a spectrum of responses: enthusiastic agreement, nasty disagreement, outrage, trolling, racist or sexist remarks, and so forth. 

But on our earliest data center reporting, we noticed a trend: virtually unanimous agreement in opposing them.

This wasn’t just rural communities opposing development that changes the landscape, as we see quite often. It wasn’t just suburban and urban NIMBYs speaking out about threats to the character of their neighborhoods. It wasn’t just environmentalists worried about pollution. It was everyone, everywhere, all at once united in opposition to data centers.

There has not been a single other issue we’ve seen this kind of response with; in our ultra-polarized political climate, very little unites left and right. When we saw our data center coverage really broke through across the ideological spectrum, it told us we’d hit on something. It told us that our audience cares about this topic and wants more coverage of it. 

The data backed up our anecdotal observations that people were deeply engaged on the topic.

In the 4th quarter of 2025, we published 151 pieces of content about data centers across Courier’s 10 local newsrooms on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Those posts garnered 7.1 million impressions, 571,740 engagements, and 68,622 shares. They received more than three times the average number of impressions as a typical piece of our content, and saw an engagement rate 56% higher than the typical piece of content we published in that timeframe.

My theory at the time, as written in an internal memo dated January 14, 2026, was as follows:

Data centers have become an invasive physical manifestation of deeply existential worries that Americans across party lines hold: they represent the dominance of Big Tech over all sectors of our society, they’re in-your-face imposing visual symbols of the growing role of AI (and the threat it poses to jobs and communal life), they represent out-of-touch government jamming local communities and overriding popular opinion, they represent threats to local environments and water supplies, and they’ve become an emblem of the rampant rising costs that have made life impossible for so many in the past five years. 

Our coverage on data centers resonates so deeply because they represent real threats to multiple strands of people’s lives and identities — their individual livelihoods and finances, their physical communities, their local and regional economies, their environments, their sense of agency and freedom in their own life, and perhaps most importantly, their sense of having any control over their future. And it represents the ultimate story of our politics of the past 15 years — powerful elites and companies benefiting from a rigged, corrupt system that doesn’t listen to or serve American communities. 

Data centers and AI are a massive political issue that has the ability to reshape our economy, our political coalitions, and remake the electorate. Right now, a handful of members of both parties recognize the potential here. Party leadership, however, continues to take a cozy, hands-off approach to it. 

Nearly eight months later, I’d argue that theory holds up—and the issue isn’t going away. Interest in data centers has exploded this year.

Google search trends for data centers:

Google news trends for data centers:

Since it matters to our audience, we’ve continued our reporting on data centers in 2026. We’ve amplified everyday people’s perspectives in originally reported stories, produced compelling explainer videos, clipped local government meetings where residents and lawmakers discuss data centers, created skimmable graphics, written data center-focused newsletters, and provided audiences the information and resources they need to get involved in data center fights in their communities, should they want to. And as the midterm elections draw near, we’ve covered the massive amounts of spending coming from pro-AI forces scrambling to stem the backlash to data centers.

What does this look like in terms of raw numbers? 

As of Aug. 31, we’ve published at least 1,313 pieces of content about data centers across the social media channels for Courier Local’s 10 original newsrooms and our 9 new expansion ones, which launched between May and August of this year. 

Those posts have surpassed 45.4 million impressions and been engaged with more than 4 million times. They’ve also boasted by far our highest engagement rate on any topic we’ve covered this year on social media.

In total, data center content represents 4.4% of our total content output across social media, but accounts for 7.9% of our impressions and 7.1% of our engagements, once again showing that data center reporting broadly resonates and overperforms.

While we’ve covered data centers all year long, looking at the data, you see a very clear uptick starting in May.

This is due to three factors: 

1. Our aforementioned expansion. From May to August, Courier roughly doubled its local footprint, and we’re now covering data center fights in 19 states instead of 10. 
2. As we saw data centers continue to become an even bigger deal, we increased our coverage. Again, this is simply listening to your audience. 
3. An overhaul of our social media strategy led to a higher volume of social content across the board, including but not exclusive to data center content.

While Courier is a social-first news network, we also continue to report and write articles. Across our 19 local newsroom websites, we’ve published 469 stories about data centers in 2026, most of which have also come since May. This includes original reporting and republished content from newsrooms that allow for it.

Interestingly, you’ll notice that our uptick in coverage began before the topic really exploded to the fore among the wider media ecosystem in July.

Impact

Beyond the topline metrics on Web and Social (and the tens of thousands of new followers we’ve gained through our coverage), our reporting has made us a go-to source for data center news in our states, with more than 50,000 Google searches that included the term “data center,” leading to our newsrooms, including: 

• 21,000 to The Copper Courier in Arizona
• 8,970 to Gander Newsroom in Michigan
• 7,030 to The Keystone in Pennsylvania

 

In Michigan, our data center directory, which we update weekly, has become a resource for state residents interested in knowing the latest on data center fights in their communities, and has been cited by other local and national media as well.

Our reporting on ways residents can get involved in these fights has also resonated and made an impact. For instance, these two posts drove 634 audience members to click through to local petitions.

Along the way, we’ve continued to engage with our audiences to ensure this is a two-way conversation. 

When our newsletter editor at The Keystone, our Pennsylvania newsroom, asked his audience how they felt about AI in June, one subscriber replied: “I’m very concerned about the rapid growth of AI. Setting aside the tremendous problems with water, noise, and light pollution for people living near these massive data centers being built to support AI development, I would say that my biggest concern with AI is how people are being tricked into relying on it.”

That was one response of over 300 that came to our newsroom inbox.

Our coverage has also been noticed—and misinterpreted—by the right-wing Capital Research Center, which claimed we were “waging a coordinated offensive against the construction of AI data centers,” going on “all-out blitz against data centers,” and tying “the data center issue to elections and partisan politics.” 

The author claims our coverage of data centers was inorganic and implies it was part of an astroturfed campaign to make data centers unpopular.

“Courier’s data center coverage appears to be as artificial as the artificial intelligence coming out of the data centers,” he writes.

It’s a credit to our incredible team of on-the-ground reporters, social media producers, newsletter editors, and state organizing coordinators that our coverage has been so widely consumed and impactful that some people think it’s part of some vast anti-data center plot. 

It’s easier to turn to conspiratorial thinking and blast data center opposition as “Data Center Derangement Syndrome” than to evince an ounce of curiosity about why data centers have become so hated.

It’s easier to convince yourself that the tens of thousands of people who’ve protested and spoken up at local municipal meetings are either brainwashed or all part of some grand conspiracy than to ask: Might there be something deeper at play about why people hate data centers? Might it benefit me to listen and ask questions? Could I be the one who’s wrong? 

Or you could simply say it’s the masses who are wrong. That’s proven to be a great strategy so far.

The truth is, our coverage was driven by Courier’s primary ethos: audience-focused journalism that aims to boost civic engagement and get people more involved in their communities. We take great pains to not just report on the issues, but to analyze what our audience is responding to—not just numerically, but philosophically—and ask why, and use those answers to inform future reporting. 

We did what good political journalists do: We talked to people and more importantly, we listened to them. 

That we’ve made an impact on the issue is a credit to our team—but it’s also just the result of good local political journalism, which should always be in conversation with local communities and responsive to them.

P.S. If you’re wondering what the next issue like data centers is, well, it’s already happening…

By Michael Jones

For a few days last week, the Senate looked ready to do something increasingly unusual in Washington: pass a major bipartisan bill.

The Protect College Sports Act had Republican and Democratic sponsors, overwhelming support from the Senate Commerce Committee and backing from some of the biggest institutions in American sports. 

Its premise was straightforward. College athletics have been transformed by court rulings, a patchwork of state laws and the rise of name, image and likeness compensation, leaving schools and athletes without a uniform set of rules.

Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Maria Cantwell of Washington, the Republican chair and Democratic ranking member of the Commerce Committee, spent months trying to build one.

Then Congress happened.

By the time senators left Washington for their August recess last weekend, the bill had become entangled in concerns from Black lawmakers about athlete representation and economic power, a conservative campaign over transgender athletes, continued lobbying by colleges and athletic conferences and the basic problem of finding enough Senate floor time to resolve it all.

The legislation isn’t dead. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.)  has committed to bringing it up when senators return in September, and Cruz said last week that it would be among the chamber’s “first orders of business.”

But its path to this point offers a useful window into why passing a major law is often so much harder than identifying a problem that Congress broadly agrees needs to be fixed.

A bipartisan bill with real momentum

Cruz and Cantwell introduced the legislation in May after months of negotiations. The bill would establish national rules governing NIL compensation, transfers, eligibility and other aspects of college athletics while providing new protections for athletes.

Those protections are substantial. The latest version includes scholarship guarantees, medical coverage for sports-related injuries and representation for current and recent former athletes on the governing boards that make college sports rules. At least one-third of the membership and voting power on those boards would have to come from current athletes or athletes who graduated within the previous decade.

The bill would also require certain institutions and athletic organizations to cover out-of-pocket costs for sports-related injuries, independent second opinions and catastrophic-injury insurance.

In June, the Commerce Committee advanced the legislation 19-9. Supporters eventually assembled a coalition that included major professional sports leagues and players associations, Olympic organizations, hundreds of colleges and universities and nearly two dozen athletic conferences.

Even two of the most powerful holdouts, the Big Ten and SEC, eventually negotiated changes with Senate staff.

That is usually what legislative momentum looks like.

Then the politics caught up

But lawmakers don’t write consequential laws in a vacuum, and the groups most enthusiastic about a bill aren’t necessarily the ones who get the last word.

The Congressional Black Caucus had warned Cruz and Cantwell for months that it believed Black athletes, coaches, agents and Historically Black Colleges and Universities were not being given enough influence over legislation that could reshape the economics of an industry their talent helped build.

Last week, as Senate leaders prepared to move the bill, the caucus formally opposed advancing it in its current form.

“The legislation before the Senate has evolved,” CBC Chair Yvette Clarke of New York said. “However, the fundamental concerns of Black collegiate athletes, coaches, agents, HBCUs, and the communities we represent have not.”

The caucus argued that the bill would give powerful athletic institutions new legal protections without sufficiently guaranteeing athletes a voice in a system that would replace today’s uncertainty.

The final legislation does include provisions aimed at some of those concerns, including athlete representation in governance and an entire title establishing grants to improve sports broadcasting and technology infrastructure at HBCUs. But the CBC’s position is that meetings and revisions aren’t enough if the final policy doesn’t adequately reflect the priorities of the people who will live under it.

“Meaningful engagement is measured by results, not meetings,” the caucus said.

At almost the same time, pressure was coming from the other direction.

Conservative lawmakers and activists raised alarms that the bill’s federal preemption language could override laws in 27 states restricting transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.

Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jim Banks of Indiana and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama responded by filing an amendment intended to preserve those state laws explicitly.

The dispute became significant enough that the White House counsel’s office circulated a two-page legal analysis arguing the conservative interpretation was wrong.

The administration said the legislation would not preempt those laws because its eligibility provision doesn’t establish rules based on sex. Instead, it sets requirements such as being a student-athlete, meeting academic standards, not being a professional athlete, and complying with eligibility rules tied to state and federal law.

The actual text illustrates why the disagreement arose. Section 121 would prevent states from enforcing certain laws governing athlete eligibility when they conflict with the national framework, including provisions described in the bill’s eligibility section. But the legislation separately says nothing in it should override or modify Title IX.

In other words, a bill written primarily to bring order to NIL, transfers and college sports governance had suddenly become part of one of the country’s most contentious culture-war debates.

How the calendar became its own obstacle

None of this means Congress shouldn’t pass the bill. It doesn’t mean its critics are right about every provision, either.

It means legislating is rarely as simple as finding a good idea and collecting 60 votes.

Every major bill creates rules, distributes power and decides whose interests receive federal protection. That gives universities, conferences, athletes, civil-rights organizations, ideological activists and lawmakers themselves reasons to try to shape the outcome. Sometimes those pressures improve legislation. Sometimes they weaken it. Sometimes they simply make passage harder.

And all of that happens while the congressional clock keeps ticking.

By last week, the college sports bill was competing for precious floor time with government funding, Russia sanctions, cryptocurrency legislation, President Donald Trump’s nominees and Republicans’ plans for another reconciliation package.

Thune teed up an initial procedural motion to force the issue, but senators ultimately left town without taking the vote.

Now supporters have another month to work through the opposition.

“Time may have run out to protect college sports in August but there is plenty of time in September,” Cantwell said after the Senate adjourned. She said the challenges facing athletes and universities “aren’t going away” and predicted the bill would pass next month.

Cruz was similarly confident, declaring that the Senate would take up the legislation when it returns and send it to Trump.

They may be right.

But the bill senators consider in September will have arrived there after months of hearings, negotiations, amendments, lobbying, coalition-building, opposition campaigns and one missed deadline.

Some lawmakers would argue that this isn’t necessarily evidence that Congress failed to do its job. It’s what doing the job looks like.

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Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.