u/WhoIsJolyonWest

Aurora police are working with the FBI to investigate Michael Herbert, 55, since incidents allegedly spanned jurisdictions.

Aurora police have identified additional men who were allegedly abused in their youth by the former Aurora Christian Schools board member, officials said in an update.

Aurora police began investigating Michael Robert Herbert, 55, in December, when a man in his 20s reported he had been a victim of child sexual abuse beginning when he was an early teenager, Patch reported. Herbert used a trusted relationship with the victim and provided gifts, money and other incentives to manipulate and abuse him, officials said.
Officials did not say how many new victims they have identified since Herbert's arrest on May 15.

"At this time, investigators are not releasing a specific number of identified victims due to the sensitive nature of the investigation and out of concern for victim privacy," spokesperson Jim Levicki told Patch. "However, detectives have identified multiple individuals and continue to receive additional information as the investigation progresses."
Herbert, of 200 block of South Westlawn Avenue in Aurora, faces 10 felony charges, including criminal sexual assault, child sexual abuse material and involuntary sexual servitude of a minor.

Aurora police are working with the FBI to investigate Herbert since incidents allegedly spanned jurisdictions, including multiple locations within Aurora and places outside of Illinois, officials said.

Herbert remains in custody at the Kane County jail. His next court date is scheduled for May 27.
Police are asking anyone with information about the case or who believes they were a victim of Herbert to contact the department's investigations division at 630-256-5500 or tips@aurora.il.us.

Whites-Only Community in Arkansas Sued for Discrimination
Return to the Land, a 160-acre development requiring members be white and heterosexual, is breaking fair housing and civil rights laws, according to a lawsuit.

Last summer, Michelle Walker was watching the local 5 o’clock news in her St. Louis living room when a segment about a real estate opportunity caught her attention.

The anchor described a new housing community in the Ozark Mountains, an area Ms. Walker, 49, her husband and three children knew well from frequent vacations. Land could be purchased there, the anchor said, for about $1,000 an acre. Ms. Walker, a real estate broker, immediately recognized the price as significantly below market value.

The catch was that membership in this development was limited only to applicants who were white and heterosexual, because the land was part of a compound run by white nationalists looking to build a community for white Americans only.

Ms. Walker applied to join the community and was rejected. On Wednesday morning, she sued them for discrimination, citing civil rights laws dating back to 1866.

The community, Return to the Land, received an explosion of news coverage last summer after two of its founders went public about their plans for building a network of whites-only compounds across the United States. Their efforts are currently focused on a pilot community in Ravenden, Ark., where they’re building houses, a community center and farm pens on 160 sun-burnished acres. Jews, Black people, homosexuals and anyone with heritage that isn’t white and European are banned.

Galvanized by a federal government that has aggressively backed “reverse discrimination” legal cases, including against The New York Times, white nationalists are increasingly pushing the boundaries of the nation’s civil rights laws. Those boundaries include several landmark fair housing laws, which explicitly ban discrimination in real estate on the basis of race and religion.

But since its founding in September 2023, no legal challenge has been mounted against Return to the Land, allowing its founders to continue building and recruiting unhindered. Tim Griffin, the Arkansas attorney general, announced he had opened an investigation into potential legal violations by Return to the Land after reports on the community were published last summer, but has not made any announcements since. Nearly a year later, his communications director, Jeff LeMaster, said the investigation was ongoing but there are “no updates to share at this time.”

Ms. Walker’s lawsuit, filed Wednesday morning in Arkansas federal court, is the first civil case to allege discrimination by the group. She is being represented by Relman Colfax, a leading fair housing law group based in Washington, D.C., as well as Legal Aid of Arkansas and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Her lawyers say that in addition to damages, they are seeking a court order from a judge that demands the group stop discriminating, and they believe the law supports their demand. The founders of Return to the Land have said they believe their community to be in compliance with the law because of a line in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that allows private associations and religious groups to give preference to their own members when offering housing. It’s a rule, legal experts say, designed to allow groups like churches to offer a house for clergy on their property.

The founders of Return to the Land run a limited liability company that owns the land the compound stands on, as well as a membership association. Members who buy a share, currently priced around $6,600, are given three acres of land on which they can build a home. Since members are buying a stake in the L.L.C. and not directly buying the acreage, the organization says they aren’t breaking any laws. According to the complaint, however, that arrangement provides no shield from the law, because the value of the share “is tied to the value of the associated land, not the percentage of the L.L.C.” and the associated land is a member’s property.

Legal scholars have dismissed Return to the Land’s justifications, and Ms. Walker’s lawsuit cites violations of not just the Fair Housing Act, but the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1871, which contain no such carve out for membership groups.

Reached by phone, Eric Orwoll, the community’s co-founder and its de facto spokesman, said he wasn’t surprised to hear the organization was being sued.

“It’s not something we hadn’t anticipated,” he said. “This is going to be a competition between our right to freely associate and then civil rights laws, which seem contradictory to our claims.”

He said he believed that the First Amendment and the right to freely associate would help Return to the Land prevail, and then declined to comment further, saying he wanted to first read the suit himself.

Ms. Walker considers herself white, but said she does not share the mind-set of the white nationalists living on Return to the Land. She is a practicing Christian with Jewish ancestry on her mother’s side, and her husband is Black. They have three biracial children. In 2021, she chaired the diversity committee of the National Association of Realtors, the powerful national trade group representing more than one million real estate agents.

According to her lawsuit, she applied for membership to clinch what she saw as a killer real estate deal and was rejected based on her ancestry and the race of her husband and children.

She wasn’t concerned that her politics might clash with the residents, or that her interracial marriage could cause a disturbance, she said, because she wasn’t planning to ever live on the land herself. She was hoping, she told The Times, to learn about how renting it out might work — but first she wanted to be approved.

“A good investment is a good investment,” Ms. Walker said, adding that she did not set out with the goal of mounting a legal challenge when she applied. “There was never a plan for my husband and children to go there. I’m bold but I’m not stupid.”

Last summer, there were about 40 members living in the Return to the Land community, many in makeshift cabins accessible by rough gravel roads. They haven’t publicized their numbers since.

Mr. Orwoll gave The Times a limited tour, showing off goat pens, a small children’s playground and an air-conditioned shed with fiber internet that serves as his office. During the tour, he pulled a copy of “Mein Kampf” from a bookshelf and turned it around to hide its spine so it wouldn’t be photographed.

In November 2025, Ms. Walker completed an application form on Return to the Land’s website, which included a questionnaire with several questions about her ethnicity, religion and political beliefs.

Other questions asked her views on gay marriage, the Covid vaccine and abortion. The questionnaire also asked her to indicate how often she thinks about the Roman Empire.
The Times reviewed screenshots of her application.

“I was stunned when I saw the questions on the application,” Ms. Walker said. “That’s when the radar really started going off. I didn’t expect them to be asking such openly fair-housing-related questions.”

She answered honestly, she said, explaining that she was a white Christian woman with Jewish relatives and a husband who had African and Irish ancestry.

“I was hoping I would be accepted. I see myself as a white woman,” she said. “I wanted that land.”

After completing her questionnaire, Ms. Walker said she was invited to do a video interview with a member of Return to the Land. She was instructed to download the app Telegram, and on the day of her interview, in December 2025, the video did not work. She nevertheless answered the interviewer’s questions, she said, which were similar to those in the initial application. According to the complaint, the interviewer also asked Ms. Walker “if she belonged to any other white nationalist organizations.”

When the interview was completed, since the video had not worked, she was asked to upload a video of herself and send it over Telegram, she told The Times. She complied. Mr. Orwoll told The Times last year that it’s important for the group to see what the applicant looks like.

“Seeing someone who doesn’t present as white might lead us to, among other things, not admit that person,” he said.
Ms. Walker filmed a five-second video while seated on her sofa, where she waved to the camera.

“This is Michelle Walker, we just had our interview,” she said in the video, which she shared with The Times. “Just wanted to say hello. Merry Christmas.”

Just over her shoulder, a photograph of her family, including her husband and her three children, was visible on the living room wall.

A month passed and Ms. Walker did not hear anything from Return to the Land. In January, she said, she reached out via Telegram to her interviewer to ask about the status of her application.
The interviewer, the complaint reads, “told Ms. Walker that she should not expect an approval.”

Could be said about the group in the White House, instead it was said in 1936 about the American Liberty League. Democrats called it the “Millionaires Union”.
It was a group of rich people who rallied around private property and “individual liberties”, funded by the du Ponts, GM, the Pew family and others to disseminate information about the New Deal’s “dangers to investors”. They couldn’t just say it was about property so they couched it as defense of the Constitution. They wanted to be perceived as bipartisan and in favor of the common man, but they wanted to align with the KKK and the American Legion.

This was the group behind the businessmen plot that tried to recruit Smedley Butler to overthrow the FDR administration.

See also:
Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips Fein

How Movement Conservatism Reshaped American Democracy: If racism were truly over, why do the new maps look so much like modernized versions of Jim Crow laws of the past?

In her book How the South Won the Civil War, historian Heather Cox Richardson traces how the authoritarian ideology that fueled the Confederacy did not disappear after the Civil War. Instead, she argues, it migrated westward and reemerged through a mythology of rugged individualism, hierarchy, and cowboy culture that masked older systems of oligarchic power.

She writes, “Over the course of a generation, both elite slave owners and Movement Conservative leaders came to believe that they alone knew how to run the country.”

That observation helps explain much of modern American politics, especially the evolution of the conservative legal movement and its decades-long effort to weaken federal protections for minority voting rights.

Through years of observation, I have come to believe that Chief Justice John Roberts is deeply aligned, both philosophically and institutionally, with Movement Conservatism. Nothing in isolation immediately jumps out as radical. Roberts is cautious, disciplined, polished, and measured.

But when you fast-forward through his career and judicial opinions, a pattern emerges: consistent skepticism toward federal voting-rights enforcement and race-conscious remedies designed to protect minority participation in democracy.

Roberts fits the movement-conservative pipeline almost perfectly. He clerked for William Rehnquist, joined the Reagan Justice Department, worked on conservative legal positions opposing expansions of civil-rights remedies, later served in the George H. W. Bush Solicitor General’s office, and was ultimately elevated by George W. Bush as the kind of refined conservative jurist the legal movement had spent decades cultivating.

The clearest organizational tie is the Federalist Society. In 2005, The Washington Post reported that Roberts appeared in the 1997–98 directory as one of nineteen steering committee members of the organization’s Washington chapter.

Leonard Leo said Roberts had been recruited as a law-firm contact for the group, though Roberts and White House aides later said he had no recollection of being a formal member. But whether he carried a membership card is beside the point. Roberts moved through the same elite legal ecosystem that transformed movement conservatism from a political philosophy into constitutional doctrine.

I did not fully grasp the magnitude of the backlash that followed Brown v. Board of Education at the time, but in hindsight I should have. Every major step toward racial equality in American history has been met with organized resistance, often fierce resistance. Over a decade after the decision nearly 100,000 Black educators were fired.

That backlash eventually evolved into something more sophisticated than the crude segregation of the past. It adopted the language of economics, states’ rights, constitutional originalism, and “government overreach.” But beneath much of it remained the same old fear: the fear of losing social dominance.

Economist James M. Buchanan seized upon this climate of resentment and transformed it into an ideological framework that posed a profound challenge to democratic government itself. Buchanan’s philosophy emerged from the South during the resistance to desegregation and carried with it echoes of the Lost Cause mentality.

Over time, however, the movement evolved into something broader and less overtly racial. Class supremacy and extreme market fundamentalism increasingly became its public face, while the racial origins became easier to obscure.

The acolytes of this worldview tend to dismiss the sacrifices and struggles that shaped modern democracy. Prosperity, however obtained, is treated as proof of virtue. The working class is often viewed as parasitic.

Taxation becomes synonymous with theft. Government itself is portrayed not as a democratic instrument, but as an enemy to be restrained, crippled, or drowned.

In Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean documents how Buchanan’s anti-government ideology gradually spread through universities, judicial networks, think tanks, and state legislatures, fueled by enormous concentrations of private wealth.

The result has been decades of voter suppression efforts, attacks on labor protections, hostility toward public education, and a growing effort to insulate concentrated wealth from democratic accountability.

The pressing question now is whether this wave can still be contained or whether we are watching the slow-motion erosion of democratic self-government itself.

I do not plan to write additional books devoted specifically to racial bias, but I have never stopped researching the subject. Once you begin to understand how deeply distorted the conventional telling of American history has often been, and how many realities were softened, omitted, or sanitized to preserve national myths, it becomes difficult to stop trying to explain the deeper forces underneath our political conflicts.

One revealing example came during Roberts’s years in the Reagan administration. In a December 1981 memo, Roberts wrote that “something must be done to educate the Senators” about the “seriousness” of changing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to an effects test.

In January 1982 talking points, he recommended that the administration take a “positive and aggressive” position against the proposal, arguing that it would produce nationwide litigation and encourage quota-like outcomes in electoral politics.

The larger significance is not that Roberts opposed the Voting Rights Act entirely. He did not. The significance is that he opposed strengthening the law by allowing discriminatory effects, rather than explicit racist intent, to establish violations.

That distinction sounds technical, but its consequences are enormous. If plaintiffs must prove racist intent, voting-rights cases become vastly harder to win because modern discrimination rarely announces itself openly. The crude language of segregation has largely disappeared from official discourse. What remains are systems, maps, procedures, and bureaucratic mechanisms that produce unequal outcomes while maintaining plausible deniability.

That judicial philosophy later found its fullest expression in Shelby County v. Holder, where Roberts wrote the majority opinion striking down the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance coverage formula. The Court argued that the country had changed and that the extraordinary federal oversight imposed on states with histories of racial discrimination was no longer justified.

But the aftermath tells a different story. Across much of the South, new gerrymandered maps quickly emerged that diluted minority voting power through cracking, packing, and district manipulation.

In states where Black voters possessed sufficient numbers to influence elections, mapmakers often found sophisticated ways to reduce that influence without using openly racist language.

That does not resemble a post-racial democracy. It resembles the old Southern playbook updated with software, consultants, and legal insulation.

The lesson is difficult to avoid: racism did not disappear because the Court declared the nation improved. In many places, it simply waited for the guardrails to come down.

When protections are removed and suppression rapidly follows, the obvious conclusion is that protection is still necessary.

If racism were truly over, why do the new maps look so much like modernized versions of Jim Crow laws politics? The question answers itself.

The bedrock ideology of the current Republican Party is steeped in Movement Conservatism. DEI has given way to open racial vitriol and contempt. That debate is no longer theoretical. It now sits at the center of America’s political instability.

Yes, racism remains a major problem in America, especially after a decade in which Donald Trump has openly inflamed racial resentment for political gain. The language may wear a cleaner suit now, but the purpose remains hauntingly familiar: ensuring that some citizens count less than others. Increasingly, in my view, this raises the question of whether democracy itself will become the new “Lost Cause.”

In these far-right extremist movements, children as young as 14 talk about a ‘pure people,’ downplay the Holocaust, and express hatred of immigrants

They are teenagers, or young adults barely over the age of 20, but above all, far-right radicals who dream of “Day X,” the day it all begins, the day they will massacre immigrants. Germans who go to school, attend training programs, or work — far removed from the neo-Nazi stereotype of skinheads in bomber jackets — and who then immerse themselves in far-right extremist movements that speak of a “pure people,” downplay the Holocaust, and hate migrants, but now also direct their anger at feminists and the LGBTQ+ community. German investigative journalist Angelique Geray, 33, decided to infiltrate these groups between 2024 and 2025 to understand how they become radicalized. “I wanted to find out why right-wing extremism is once again presenting itself as a kind of cult or youth trend,” she explained earlier this month in a cafe in southern Berlin after publishing her experience in a book titled Undercover unter Nazis(Undercover Among Nazis).

Authorities have been warning about this phenomenon for some time. Right-wing extremists use forums and platforms like Telegram, Instagram, and TikTok to recruit new, increasingly younger followers, whom they invite to private chat groups. Intelligence services warn of a new generation of neo-Nazis, and in 2025 they registered more than 5,300 young people — mostly between the ages of 14 and 17 — who allegedly committed far-right-motivated crimes.

This isn’t the first time Geray has infiltrated these circles. She did so in 2018 with the so-called Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement, which rejects the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and whose leaders were arrested in 2022 for plotting a coup. It was then that she developed her cover identity, that of Isabell, “a young woman with an inner resentment, who is dissatisfied with Germany.” Under that name, she later infiltrated the Identitäre Bewegung (Identity Movement) and, in 2024, the Junge Nationalisten (Young Nationalists, JN) and Letzte Verteidigungswelle (Last Wave of Defense, LVW), a group that surprised her because of the youth of its members and the violent acts they intended to carry out, which the journalist ultimately exposed.

“What I’ve observed during this time is that many, especially the very young ones, are precisely seeking recognition. It’s about — first and foremost — belonging to these groups and also being valued. These groups always have a very hierarchical structure,” Geray explains. This is the case, for example, with LVW, where there are positions such as Gauleiter— as the Nazis called the heads of each zone — head of the Gestapo, or Minister of Propaganda. Meanwhile, many of the approximately 60 members, aged between 14 and 21, address the founder as their Führer.

Once inside the group, they are incited to action; words alone are not enough. “Everyone wants to move up the ladder. And in these groups, advancement is achieved by planning or even carrying out particularly spectacular acts. From setting fire to mailboxes and painting swastikas on houses, to setting fire to the homes of political opponents; they even went so far as to hatch a plan to burn down a refugee center,” Geray recounts about experiences she later shared in a podcast, a documentary for the RTL network, and now also in a book.

As she explains, one can only be a member of the Young Nationalists (JN) if they are 100% European and at least 50% German. They recruit people between the ages of 15 and 35, reaching them through social media, but also through leisure activities such as boxing, concerts, and excursions.

“With the JN, I had to fill out an old-fashioned form with a photo, my address, and my bank account number to pay a membership fee. In the case of LVW, the contact was made through TikTok. Then we moved to WhatsApp, and there they sent me a series of questions like: “Why have you become right-wing? What do you want to do for Germany?”

They immediately sent her videos of young people wearing balaclavas in a room full of weapons. “And they explained to me that it was about preparing for Day X, for situations similar to a civil war, in which they go out into the streets with the intention of killing immigrants.” In fact, one of their rules stipulated that they had to equip themselves with “knives, brass knuckles, starter pistols, firecrackers, and so on, in order to be more radical.”

“Sieg Heil Kameradin!” they greeted Isabell in the chat groups where they also reported on events and actions of all kinds, and shared addresses of those they consider enemies. “We should pay this one a visit. Who has time next week?”

She thus immersed herself in a world where people drove cars with license plates like AH 204: AH for Adolf Hitlerand 204 for his birthday, April 20. In March 2025, she even attended a secret neo-Nazi training camp organized by JN. No one suspected a thing. She also ventured onto dating platforms like White Date. “I wanted to know how it works when neo-Nazis go out looking for love,” she recounts. For a year and a half, she met with different men. “Many would start the conversation by saying, ‘You want to have four children, don’t you?’” They made it clear that her time would be for the family and that she would have to obey the man.

She went everywhere accompanied by a security team that kept a distance, and equipped with a hidden camera whenever possible. Little by little, she gained the trust of those she spoke with and was able to see how young people become radicalized at “a dizzying speed.” “Many join because they feel terribly alone; they have hardly any leisure activities in their rural surroundings, and when they do, these come precisely from far-right groups.”

Members come from diverse backgrounds. “What surprised me most, actually, is that these young people are serious. The argument often comes up that, well, they’re young and they’re not serious. But I’m convinced that if even young people fantasize about something like a race war and are willing to commit such brutal acts, then it has to be taken seriously,” Geray maintains.

Furthermore, these groups do not hold a favorable opinion of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which came in second place in the last election, behind the conservatives. “When I’ve asked about the AfD, they’ve described it as a kind of ‘useful idiot.’ The party and its leaders are despised, but they are strategically used to gradually shift the boundaries of what can be said further to the right, so that, at some point, even more extremist parties can emerge,” the journalist explains.

After months undercover, in May 2025, the situation turned dangerous when she crossed the Czech border with LVW members to buy so-called “spherical bombs” — extremely dangerous, large fireworks banned in Germany — which, as she was later told, they planned to use to attack a refugee center. It was then that she decided to go to the police, who carried out raids and arrested eight young people aged between 15 and 22 on charges of, among other things, belonging to a terrorist organization, attempted murder, and arson. Their trial began in March, and last week, Geray testified. “I was so nervous I felt terrible,” she recalls.

At first, they didn’t know who had betrayed them, but now they do. After the investigation, she decided to come forward. “I didn’t want to give them the opportunity to expose me,” something she believes would have been only a matter of time. “Most people were taken by surprise,” but there were also those who didn’t take it well, like one member of LVW. “He swore revenge. He contacted me with a letter and said he regretted bringing me into the group. He’s taking the blame and vowing to kill me. He says he’ll find someone outside to do it.” She now moves “a little more carefully” and has bought a baseball bat. “I keep it by my bed. I hope I never have to use it. But, in general, I’m trying not to let this affect my day-to-day life.”

Among the problems with the taxpayer-financed “Rededicate 250” gathering: The American mainstream isn’t buying what its organizers are selling.

The stated purpose of Sunday’s “Rededicate 250” event at the National Mall was to “rededicate our country as One Nation Under God.” That phrasing, however, was just vague enough to tell the public effectively nothing about the significance of the gathering.

The truth was more straightforward — and more alarming. As Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons explained in a compelling piece for MS NOW, the event was actually “the largest and most prominent display of Christian nationalism” in recent memory, “with the full backing of the federal government in the White House and leadership in Congress.” Graves-Fitzsimmons added, “This is what theocracy looks like.”

Over the course of roughly nine hours, attendees and viewers watched a prayer event, paid for with millions of American taxpayer dollars, in which many of the nation’s most powerful federal officials made the case that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation” (it was not) and that Americans should do more to blur the church-state line (it should not).

The gathering was not altogether surprising. The Trump administration has spent the past year and a half abandoning all subtlety when it comes to embracing and endorsing Christian nationalism — though there was a related problem with the speakers’ pitch that went largely overlooked: The American mainstream isn’t buying what they’re selling.

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos pollreleased two weeks ago, for example, found that most Americans were deeply uncomfortable with recent religion-related statements from Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

A Pew Research Center report released late last week pointed in similar directions:
Support for ideas that are sometimes associated with Christian nationalism is mostly unchanged in recent years. For example, there has been no growth in the shares of Americans who want the government to stop enforcing separation of church and state or who believe that God favors the United States over all countries.
The same data found that a two-thirds majority of Americans want churches and other houses of worship to “stay out of day-to-day politics and not endorse candidates.”

A Vox report said, “These results align with survey findings from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found little public support among most Americans for Christian nationalist beliefs or change over the last four years.”

The president occasionally claims that he’s somehow responsible for some kind of Christian revivalism that’s sweeping the nation. There’s independent evidence suggesting that those boasts have no connection to reality.

As part of the Justice Department’s compensation fund deal, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving President Trump’s tax returns, that are pending.

The Justice Department on Tuesday expanded the agreement it reached this week with President Trump to resolve his extraordinary lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service to include a provision that would bar the agency from pursuing tax claims against the president, his family or his businesses.

In a one-page document signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and quietly posted on the department’s website, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving Mr. Trump’s tax returns, that are currently pending.

The new provision was released just one day after Mr. Trump agreed to drop his suit in exchange for the creation of a $1.8 billion compensation fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions. The fund drew repeated criticism from Democrats when Mr. Blanche appeared before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee for a hearing on Tuesday morning.

The New York Times reportedlast week that Mr. Trump’s talks with the Justice Department and the I.R.S. had included a measure calling on the I.R.S. to drop any audits of the president, his relatives or businesses. But that provision did not appear in the nine-page agreement laying out the terms to dismiss the lawsuit, which the department released Monday.

In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Neither the Justice Department nor the I.R.S. immediately responded to requests seeking comment. The top lawyer at the Treasury, Brian Morrissey, resigned on Monday after the Justice Department announced the settlement with Mr. Trump.

Justice Department officials have in part defended the creation of the “anti-weaponization” fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members will not be paid by it.
But protection from audit could be quite remunerative for Mr. Trump. In 2024, The Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually.

Federal law prohibits the president, vice president and other executive officers from instructing the I.R.S. to start or stop specific audits. But that broad prohibition does appear to include a carve out for the attorney general.

Around 10 "new" suspected victims have come forward in a French probe into the network of late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a prosecutor said Sunday.

France opened a human trafficking investigation after the US Justice Department in January released the latest cache of files from the investigation into the disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019 while facing charges of trafficking underage girls for sex.

French magistrates are seeking to investigate possible offences committed in France or involving French perpetrators who facilitated his crimes.

Top Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said around 20 suspected victims had made themselves known after she in February urged potential victims to speak up.

Some were already known to investigators, she told the RTL broadcaster.

"But we also had new victims come forward, ones we didn't know at all. There are around 10 of them," she added.

"The choice we've made for the time being is to listen to these victims," she said.

"A certain number of them are abroad so the investigators have tried to set up meetings to suit when they are able to come to Paris."

Investigators were also scouring through the so-called Epstein files, and would be searching them for any names mentioned by alleged victims, she said.

"We have also once again pulled out Mr Epstein's computers, his telephone records, his address books," she said, adding her team would be "making requests for international assistance".

French investigators searched Epstein's luxury Paris apartment in September 2019, after he was found hanged in his New York jail cell the previous month.

Suspected victims already known to investigators included women who had spoken during investigations into former European model agency boss Gerald Marie and late model agent Jean-Luc Brunel.

Fifteen women in March urged France to investigate Marie for possible links to Epstein.

Investigators in 2023 closed another probe into accusations Marie committed sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s because it was too long ago to be prosecuted.

French authorities arrested Brunel in 2020 after allegations he sexually abused minors and procured victims for the US billionaire. He was found dead in prison in 2022.

Two former models have told AFP that a modelling scout named Daniel Siad groomed them with the aim of delivering them to Epstein in one case in the 2000s, and Marie in the other case in the 1990s.

In the latest human trafficking probe, "none of the people who could potentially be implicated have been questioned" so far, Beccuau said.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to procuring for prostitution a girl under the age of 18, and served 13 months in prison before being released on probation.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost recently filed a motion on behalf of Ohio State University asking to drop 77 cases involving the late Dr. Richard Strauss sexually abusing Ohio State student-athletes.

Yost is arguing that any claims of abuse that happened before Oct. 21, 1986 should be thrown out, he said in a May 10 filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
Congress passed a law on Oct. 21, 1986 allowing states and universities to be sued in federal court for failing to prevent the sexual abuse of students.

Yost’s motion applies to plaintiffs in three cases against Ohio State.
He is arguing 43 plaintiffs should have their claims dismissed entirely because the abuse happened before Oct. 21, 1986, and he is asking that 34 plaintiffs should have their claims dismissed in part for the abuse that occurred before Oct. 21, 1986, according to the motion.

Strauss sexually abused at least 177 male victimsbetween 1979 and 1996 during his time as a physician for Ohio State’s Athletics Department and at the university’s Student Health Center, according to an independent investigation commissioned by Ohio State University.

Strauss retired from Ohio State University in 1998 and died by suicide in 2005 when he was 67.

Earlier this month, 30 former Ohio State football players joined a federal lawsuit against Ohio State for Strauss’ abuse.

At least three of the football players were part of the 1980 Rose Bowl team and played for coach Woody Hayes.
Ohio State has reached settlement agreements with 317 survivors for more than $61 million, according to the university. The most recent settlement was with 13 survivors for $1.8 million in April.

*This motion comes days after Yost announced he would resign, effective June 7, to take a job with Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing Christian nonprofit law firm. The Southern Poverty Law Center labels the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group.*

Ohio state Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, criticized Yost’s motion to dismiss the claims.

“He is completely betraying the needs of survivors of sexual abuse as he heads out the door,” DeMora said in a statement. “This decision has nothing to do with the case against Ohio State and Dr. Strauss; it is purely Yost using every opportunity he has left to screw Ohioans and benefit the ultra-rich elite class that he has always worked for.”
Survivors of Strauss have said that Ohio Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan knew about the sexual abuse when he was an Ohio State assistant wrestling coach from 1987 to 1995.

Jordan, who recently ran unopposed in the May primary for his Fourth Congressional District seat, has repeatedly denied knowing about any abuse.

Overtime Policy Overhaul| Pulling Demographic Reports
Parker Purifoy: The 2024 overtime rule officially died last week. But the question remains if the Department of Labor will do anything further with the standard.

The DOL’s technical amendment to its regulation on who qualifies for time-and-a-half wages withdrew the Biden-era policy which, if it had gone into effect, would have made four million more workers eligible for overtime.
It raised the exemption threshold to $58,656 for white-collar workers but was struck down by two Texas federal judges who found the move to be beyond the department’s authority.
Jim Paretti, an employer-side attorney with Littler Mendelson PC, said the decision to formalize the rule’s nullification didn’t change things for employers. But, he said, it did raise questions about whether the DOL, under acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, would work to put their own stamp on the regulation.
Last week’s rescission put back in place the final rule from 2019 setting the salary threshold at $35,568.
The move comes after the Trump administration pushed heavily for no taxes on overtime wages or tips in 2025.

The department may feel more constrained in blazing new territory because of those 2024 court orders and similar legal challenges to the Obama-era attempt to raise the salary threshold.

But the DOL could examine the work-duties portion of the test exempting an employee if they’re a “bona fide executive, administrative, or professional.” That portion of the test hasn’t been substantially updated in many years, Paretti said.

“But changing the duties test would be fundamentally changing the nature of the exemption,” he said. “So whether they have the taste for that, we’ll see.”
Worker advocates decried the rescission. Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, said in a statement that the move was “unsustainable for the country.”

“The Trump administration just told 4 million workers they don’t deserve to be fully paid for the hours they work,” she said. “Costs are rising, everything is too expensive, and this administration wants to keep wages as low as possible.

Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project, also pointed to rising costs of living.

“This short-sighted action is only going to worsen the affordability crisis. And gimmicks like Trump’s ‘no-tax-on-overtime’ are of little benefit to workers who are stripped of their overtime pay rights,” he said in a statement.

Rebecca Klar: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission submitted a regulatory plan for White House review that would withdraw workforce demographic disclosure requirements for many private companies, as well as for unions, schools, and local governments.

The sweeping rescission proposal hasn’t been published yet in full. So far it doesn’t appear targeted toward a segment of the workforce that’s gotten a lot of attention from the Trump administration: federal employees.
At least one prominent administration official has spoken on this issue.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting Director Russell Vought told the EEOC that its annual call for agencies to submit data on their workforce’s demographics conflicts with President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.

Vought, also director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, urged the agency to review and revise its report in a message shared publicly along with the CFPB’s submission of its annual MD-715 report.

MD-715 is the management directive requiring federal agencies to submit dataon their workforces by race, ethnicity, and sex, as well as EEO programs that, in part, show a proactive prevention of discrimination.
Republican EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has broadly acted in coordination with the Trump administration’s broader efforts to scrutinize diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government and private sector.
Given Vought’s proximity to the White House as OMB director and the EEOC’s actions in lockstep with the administration, shifts in the EEOC’s demographic data collection for the federal workforce could be down the line when the agency renews its forms for the process, said Fred Satterwhite, a principal consultant with DCI.

“It’s not like the EEOC has been a rogue part of the executive branch and CFPB had to point out to them they were disobeying,” Satterwhite said.
Vought’s message said that certain aspects of MD-715 appear to conflict with Trump’s orders, such as asking agencies to report whether their EEO policy statement addresses “gender identity” as a protected basis, and whether their strategic plans reference “diversity and inclusion principles.”
MD-715 has been in place for more than two decades, with earlier forms of similar collections dating back to the 1980s before it, Satterwhite said.
The commission must renew its data collection process every few years by submitting it to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, part of Vought’s OMB.

The current approved version of management directive is set to expire at the end of September, Satterwhite said.
“This may flow into future activity by the EEOC as part of ongoing synchronization between the commission and the White House,” he said.

The EEOC’s notice Thursday also includes proposed rescissions to reporting requirements under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but it’s not clear if that will directly impact MD-715.

An EEOC spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice thinks it has found a way to deal with the many judges who refuse to tolerate its unethical behavior: forum shopping key cases to MAGA judges across the country who are much more likely to reward underhanded tactics. The administration road tested this method in immigration cases by shuttling noncitizens to Southern detention centers within the jurisdiction of far-right courts. DOJ lawyers then pulled a similar trick to enforce a subpoena against a Rhode Island hospital that provided gender-affirming care to minors—only to see it blow up in their face. On Wednesday, Judge Mary S. McElroy shot down a federal subpoena seeking medical records and personal data of these children. She castigated department attorneys over their “appalling” and “reckless disregard for the duty of candor” and described them as “unworthy of this trust at every point.” Remarkably, McElroy also called out the ultrapartisan federal judge, Reed O’Connor, who tried to enforce the illegal subpoena from his Texas courtroom.

With the midterms nearing, President Trump’s approval rating has hit a second-term low as voters question his handling of the economy, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll.

Most voters think President Trump made the wrong decision to go to war with Iran, a New York Times/Siena poll found, leaving the Republican Party on rocky political footing heading into the midterm elections as his approval rating sinks and economic concerns rise.

Majorities of voters said that the war was not worth the costs and held deeply pessimistic views about the economy.

Mr. Trump’s approval rating — a key historical predictor of how a president’s party will fare in an election — has sunk to a second-term low in Times/Siena polls of 37 percent amid the deeply unpopular Middle East conflict.

Nearly two-thirds of voters said that going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of politically crucial independents. Less than a quarter of all voters thought the conflict had been worth the costs.

Republicans broadly approved of Mr. Trump’s job performance and the war. But most other voters showed serious skepticism of his leadership on other top issues, including the economy and the cost of living. Sixty-four percent of all voters disapproved of his handling of the economy, long a strength for him, and majorities expressed negative views of how he was managing the cost of living, immigration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Independent voters in particular have become unhappier with Mr. Trump. Sixty-nine percent disapproved of his job performance, up from 62 percent in a January Times/Siena poll. Forty-seven percent of independents said his policies had hurt them, up from 41 percent in fall 2025.

Overall, 44 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had hurt them personally, up from 36 percent last fall.

“He’s not doing what he said he was going to do,” said Brent Klein Jr., a Republican who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and 2024. “That’s my biggest frustration with him.”

After years on the political fringes, support for making the war-torn Palestinian enclave into a Jewish community is gaining support across Israel.

A river of Israeli flags winds through a desert path as hundreds of people, young and old, march toward the border in a display of their determination to build new Jewish settlements atop the rubble of northern Gaza.

So few buildings are left standing after Israeli bombardment that the Mediterranean is visible in the distance.

Daniella Weiss, founder of the radical right-wing settler group Nachala, sums up the crowd’s intentions.

“We are here on the way to new Jewish communities in Gaza,” she told NBC News in an interview at the border in late April.

“What we did in Judea and Samaria, we are going to do the same thing here,” Weiss added, a reference to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where illegal Jewish outposts and settler violence against Palestinians have grown dramatically in recent years.

While the march toward Gaza was a symbolic one, the statement it made still resonates across the Middle East.

Nachala and other groups like it are advocating the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, prominent Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti said.

“They don’t accept a two-state solution, and they don’t accept one democratic state solution,” he told NBC News. That leaves only one option for the far right, he said: “Complete control and elimination of the Palestinian presence.”

Weiss and her hard-line movement have made a journey from the fringes of Israeli society toward the political mainstream, propelled by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.

Weiss, who has referred to the events of Oct. 7 as a “miracle,” told NBC News that it had changed history by showing “the world, very expressively, what Hamas wants to do with us.”

As early as Oct. 9, 2023, 20 members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, signed a letter demanding absolute control over the strip as one of the four goals of the war. This gave the movement its first tailwind, and recent polls suggest growing public support for the idea.

The Israeli military campaign that followed Oct. 7 displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population,according to the United Nations. The offensive killed more than 72,500 people, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. And in the nearly seven months since a ceasefire, continued Israeli attacks have killed over 845 people, the ministry says.

Today, the Nachala movement’s vision of turning Gaza into a thriving Jewish community is very much alive. And Palestinians do not exist anywhere in this version of a Jewish Gaza.

“The 2 million or whatever number of Arabs, Gazans, who live here will not live in Gaza,” Weiss said. “It can take a week, it can take maybe a few months. They will not live here.”

Weiss and others with similar beliefs are getting a boost from the highest echelons of the Israeli government. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not support Jewish resettlement of Gaza, he helms the most right-wing government in the country’s history, which includes several hard-right settler leaders like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Speaking to a crowd in a synagogue earlier last month, Smotrich said that Gaza needs to be “all ours, entirely Jewish, through Israeli settlement. The enemy should leave it and find their luck elsewhere.”

But while they are growing in power domestically, Nachala, Weiss and the settlement movement in general have been condemned internationally.

The British government hit them with sanctions in May 2025. According to a statement released by the U.K. Foreign Office, Weiss was “involved in threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting acts of aggression and violence” against Palestinians. Nachala was involved with “facilitating, inciting, promoting and providing logistical and financial support” for illegal outposts and the forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel, it said.

The Canadian government has also imposed sanctions on Weiss.
The United States has not sanctioned Weiss or Nachala, although in 2024 under President Joe Biden it did sanction four extremist settlers in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, settlements in the West Bank — where an estimated 700,000 Jews live among about 3 million Palestinians — are considered illegal under international law. Israel views West Bank settlements as legal if they are authorized by the government.

In Gaza in 2005, between 8,000 and 9,000 Israeli settlers were removed under the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who argued that the 21 settlements were expensive and hard to defend. The scenes of security personnel forcibly removing weeping and resistant settlers deeply divided Israeli society. But until recently, the idea of returning Israeli settlements to Gaza remained a nostalgic dream reserved for those on the extreme right fringes, viewed by the majority as a messy and expensive experiment best left in the past

Today, the idea of resettling Gaza also appears to be gaining popularity among more mainstream Israelis.

A poll from August 2025 conducted by the Smith Institute and published by Israeli news site Walla showed that 49% of Israeli Jews supported the occupation of Gaza and the displacement of Palestinians. Another survey from mid-2025 commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, conducted by Geocartography, an Israeli polling firm, and published by liberal newspaper Haaretz, showed that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

Weiss, meanwhile, says she’s undeterred and that her ambitions for Jewish settlers like herself extend beyond the West Bank and Gaza.
“It’s a turning point in history which made us, the Jewish nation,” she said, referring to Oct. 7. “Now I’m going to settle Gaza and Lebanon and Syria.”

On the same day Nachala marched to the border with Gaza, a small group of right-wing activists entered Lebanon illegally. They published videos of themselves walking inside the country on Israel’s northern border, some waving the Israeli flag and declaring their intention to settle.
“Jewish settlement in Lebanon is ahead of us,” one of the men said as he gestured north.

The activists were later detained by the Israel Defense Forces and “transferred to the Israel Police for further handling,” the IDF said in a statement.

One week away from Memorial Day weekend and the unofficial start of the summer travel season, with gas prices remaining high, negotiations were set to resume Monday at the largest oil refinery in the Midwest.

Victor on cam intro: Union workers here have been locked out of their jobs at the BP Whiting Refinery in Whiting, Indiana, for nearly two months.
On Monday, negotiations between BP and the union representing these workers are set to restart in an effort to bring the lockout and strike to an end.

Outside the refinery, union workers have gone on demonstrating in hopes of a new contract. About 800 workers with e United Steelworkers union have been locked out of the refinery since March 19.

Monthslong negotiations over a new labor agreement have stalled, but are set to pick up this week.

This is just one of the issues impacting the BP Whiting Refinery. A recent power outage was quickly resolved, but its impact lingered — prompting a recent uptick in oil prices in the Great Lakes region on top of the already high prices with the war with Iran, according to analysts.

"We're paying well over what we were this time last year," said AAA spokesperson Aixa Diaz.

AAA said the average cost of a gallon of regular gas in the city of Chicago is $5.43, up from $4.74 a month ago and $3.75 from a year ago.

Analysts say relief at the pump likely will not come until a resolution becomes clear over the conflict in Iran, which has left trade traffic in the Strait of Hormuz at a standstill.

"Once we see a little more clarity in the timing and scope of any agreement, oil prices will start going down noticeably," said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

Drivers and passengers face these prices as summer travel season is set to take off. AAA estimates a record 45 million people will travel 50 miles or more from this upcoming Thursday through Memorial Day on Monday, May 25.

Critics denounced the highly unusual plan, which has yet to be finalized or approved, as a vast political slush fund financed by taxpayers.

The Trump administration is considering the establishment of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate the president’s allies and others investigated by the Justice Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., creating an ethical and political minefield for Republicans and the department’s leadership.

The unusual plan, which Democrats and former government officials criticized as a vast political slush fund financed by taxpayers, is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be finalized or approved, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The Justice Department is modeling the program, in part, on a landmark $760 million settlement fund the Obama administration created to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who were deprived access to federal subsidies for decades, one of those people said.

Payments in that settlement came from the Judgment Fund, an uncapped pot of money that does not require congressional approval to make payments and is maintained by the Treasury Department.

The proposal comes in response to various claims President Trump has made against a federal government he himself controls. He has sought compensation for the leak of his tax returns during his first term, as well as the investigations into his handling of classified documents after he left office and into his 2016 campaign’s potential ties to Russia.

The idea of establishing a government fund to pay Mr. Trump’s political allies has gained traction internally as the Justice Department and White House try to resolve a $10 billion lawsuit Mr. Trump filed in January against the Internal Revenue Service. The judge overseeing that case is considering throwing out Mr. Trump’s suit because it is ridden with perceived conflicts of interest and the potential for self-dealing.

It was not immediately clear where the fund would draw money from. But officials with the Treasury Department have been part of internal discussions, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

A compensation fund for Trump allies but not for the president himself would offer a short-term fix, allowing the president to receive a deliverable benefit from the lawsuit before the judge could dismiss it, according to officials briefed on its details.

The fund would also address Mr. Trump’s separate pair of administrative claims against the Justice Department for its previous investigations into him. Mr. Trump has asked for $230 million for those claims.

ABC News reported the fund proposal on Thursday. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

People in Mr. Trump’s orbit have for months discussed a compensation fund for his allies who incurred significant legal fees during the various investigations that ensnared Mr. Trump and his aides. It could extend to the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 but will not be limited to his allies.

The move, which is likely to include compensating those Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol, would represent the culmination of the government’s comprehensive effort to rewrite history. The proposal would, in many respects, act as a bookend to Mr. Trump’s issuance of clemency to those convicted of crimes during the Capitol riot — felons now valorized by his appointees as heroic and as “survivors” who have been victimized.

The Justice Department under Mr. Trump’s control has prosecuted his enemies on flimsy evidence, dropped cases against defendants he favors and demolished anti-corruption and national security units. Yet those moves have not prompted public outrage comparable to the backlash over its handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The compensation plan could be political poison for Republicans already weakened by Mr. Trump’s plummeting popularity ahead of the midterm elections.

“An insane level of corruption — even for Trump,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote on X on Thursday night. “A $1.7 BILLION slush fund for Trump’s hand-picked stooges to hand money to January 6 insurrectionists and his political allies.”

Brandon DeBot, a senior attorney adviser at New York University’s Tax Law Center, called the proposed fund an “absurd and extraordinary” exchange for dropping a lawsuit that the government would have fiercely fought against anyone other than Mr. Trump.

The situation also places the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, the former lead lawyer on Mr. Trump’s defense team, in a difficult position. Moderate Republicans in the Senate, including Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have said they would support Mr. Blanche’s potential permanent nomination for the job if he were to recognize that the Jan. 6 attacks were a disgrace.

Mr. Blanche had resisted a push by Ed Martin, who ran the Justice Department’s weaponization working group and represented Jan. 6 defendants, to pay restitution to any of the rioters, according to a person familiar with the discussions. It is not clear what has changed. In recent days, Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, has made it clear that he believes that some of the convicted rioters were treated too harshly.

Mr. Trump’s suit against the I.R.S. turns on the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2019. Mr. Trump, two of his sons and his family business demanded at least $10 billion in the suit, arguing that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from leaking tax information to The Times and ProPublica.

The case sits on shaky legal ground. Kathleen M. Williams, the judge on the case, in the Southern District of Florida, has questioned whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is valid given that as president, he controls both the lawyers bringing the suit and the government attorneys who have to respond to it. It is a basic legal principle that the two sides in a lawsuit must be actually opposed to each other.

Otherwise, there is not a conflict for a judge to even consider when assessing the underlying merits of the case.

Judge Williams ordered Mr. Trump and the Justice Department to write briefs by May 20 outlining whether they were in opposition.

She also asked six prominent outside lawyers to evaluate whether the lawsuit could proceed at all given the self-dealing involved in the president seeking damages from an agency that he directly controls.

On Thursday night, the lawyers outlined a series of questions that the judge should consider asking the Justice Department — and which officials there might find awkward to answer. Those lawyers suggested the court grill the department about measures lawyers involved in the case have taken to ensure that they can act in the “independent” interests of the I.R.S., not those of the president.
They also said the judge could delve into whether the I.R.S. has made certain that any settlement discussions with the president “are conducted at arm’s length and without risk of collusion.”

But Mr. Trump’s insistence on taking vengeance has created chaos and confusion at the highest levels of his own administration. To avoid having to explain themselves, the Justice Department and White House are now racing to iron out a settlement and withdraw the suit before the judge can evaluate its legitimacy, The Times reported this week.

Another potential settlement option discussed within the Justice Department is for the I.R.S. to agree to drop any audits of Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses in exchange for Mr. Trump dropping the lawsuit.
Attorneys both inside and outside the government have identified clear defenses to Mr. Trump’s suit, and former Justice Department officials have said it would be egregious for the department not to even contest Mr. Trump’s claims.

But a ruling from the judge stating that Mr. Trump’s suit is so collusive that it is legally invalid would further highlight the unusual decision to settle the case.
“I don’t understand how the judgment fund could pay someone independent of an actual lawsuit,” said Gilbert Rothenberg, a former Justice Department tax lawyer who signed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case outlining how the government could defend against Mr. Trump’s claims. “That strikes me as rather bizarre.”

When voters go to the polls Tuesday throughout South Alabama, they will encounter a congressional contest unlike anything on a ballot since Saturday’s primaries in Louisiana.

Before that, you likely have to go back to the 19th century to find a similar situation.
The Republican primary in the 1st Congressional District will feature seven candidates. Voters can choose their favorite. But here’s the twist: the outcome doesn’t matter. The election likely won’t count, and the results will be voided immediately.

Every other race on Tuesday’s ballot (Governor, U.S. Senator, Lt. Gov, etc.) will count, and state officials are encouraging people to show up and participate in the primaries. Runoffs for multi-candidate contests in which no one receives more than 50% of the vote will take place June 17. But the congressional primaries for four districts — the 1st and 2nd in South Alabama, and the 6th and 7th in west Alabama and the Birmingham region will instead be decided during a special election set for Aug. 11 - if a federal court challenge doesn’t stop it.

Still, the results from Tuesday’s voided congressional primaries will be posted on the Alabama Secretary of State’s website before the end of the night. Some political observers believe the winner could gain momentum. And if a candidate
underperforms, it could signal trouble as the field regroups ahead of the Aug. 11 special elections, which will be held under newly redrawn districts that give Republicans an advantage in both the 1st and 2nd districts.

“I do think the unofficial vote count will potentially have some consequences,” said Jess Brown, a retired political science professor at Athens State University and longtime observer of state politics.

Focus on frontrunners

The two GOP frontrunners in the former, now ghosted 1st District — former U.S. Rep. Jerry Carl of Mobile and state Rep. Rhett Marques of Enterprise — will appear on the same ballot Tuesday but will soon part ways.Carl plans to run in the newly drawn 1st District, which includes Mobile, Baldwin, Enterprise and Covington counties. Marques will shift to the 2nd District, which includes the rural counties of the southeastern Wiregrass.

“If Carl leads, especially by a hefty amount, he gains a status as a frontrunner for the August special election,” Brown said, noting that candidates only need a plurality to win on Aug. 11. There is no runoff after the special congressional primaries, another rarity in Alabama politics.

“In my view, Carl has the most to lose in terms of status if he trails in this primary,” Brown said. “That will be seen by voters and political operatives as two consecutive losses.”

Carl lost the 2024 Republican primary to current U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Enterprise, in the now-voided but heavily conservative 1st District that combined Baldwin County and parts of Mobile County with the Wiregrass. That district emerged after legal challenges to Alabama’s 2023 congressional map, which resulted in a new map that recreated the 2nd District as a Black opportunity district.

Now, the 2nd District — currently represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures of Mobile — is reverting to a majority-white and likely Republican district.

“AL-2 could be more ‘likely Republican’ in a big (Democratic) wave, but the bottom line is that the Republicans should win both (the 1st and 2nd congressional district) seats even in 2026,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Brown said that for Marques — who has the endorsement of U.S. Sen. Katie Britt of Enterprise — the goal is simply to “be seen as highly competitive” in the unofficial contest.

“If Marques leads, he acquires frontrunner status,” Brown said.

Carl’s campaign declined to comment.
Marques, in an email to AL.com, said he is focused on running in the new 2nd district, and said he plans to campaign on the same pro-Trump message.

“I still encourage Alabamians to get out and vote on May 19 for our constitutional officers up and down the ballot, and I’d be honored to earn their support at the ballot box on August 11,” he said.

His campaign team, also in a statement, said “we’ll see on Tuesday night what impact the confusion and changes have had on voters.”

“Rhett is going to keep fighting to earn every vote between now and August 11, when he’ll help President Trump grow the Republican majority in Congress,” the campaign’s statement says.

Results matter

At least one candidate on the 1st District ballot believes Tuesday’s results can offer a preview of the August special elections.

“In many ways, (the voters) operate like an early, district-wide temperature check, an unbiased indicator of where candidates appear stronger, where they may need to improve, and how voters are responding to the field as it currently stands,” said James Richardson of Headland, whose name is also on Tuesday’s ballot in the GOP’s defunct 1st District race but who will shift to the 2nd District contest this summer.

“These unofficial results can highlight who performed above or below expectations, and that information inevitably shapes how campaigns, voters, and political observers interpret the landscape heading into August,” Richardson said. “It also provides honest feedback about each candidates’ standing among Republican primary voters, especially for those shifting districts.”

Not every candidate is concerned about how they will do against the others. Austin Sidwell, a Fairhope business owner who is running in the 1st District, said his campaign isn’t focusing on competing against “any specific individual” but is about “standing up to special interest groups which have corrupted our election process.”

“I’m running to give families another chance at the American dream which career politicians are stealing from us,” he said.

James “Jimmy” Dees, a Mobile police detective from Fairhope who is running in the 1st District, said he will be interested in seeing if the results open a door for other candidates.

“It will be interesting to see if results show the messages of candidates, other than Carl and Marques, are making an impact with voters,” Dees said. “To date, most media have been focused on them (Carl and Marques) as the front runners, going forward I’m hopeful the ideas of others get more attention.”

John Mills of Newtown, who is still evaluating how to proceed in the race, said he believes Tuesday’s results will only have consequences if the results are analyzed within the new districts.

“A raw top-line result from the old district is not enough,” Mills said. “It may tell us something about name identification, but it does not tell us who is best positioned under the new district lines. Some votes may have come from areas that are no longer in the same district. Some counties now carry more weight than they did before. Some endorsements and local relationships may matter more in the new district than they did under the prior map. The map reset changes the political math.”

More candidates could join the congressional races soon. The qualifying period for the Aug. 11 special election opens Wednesday and closes Friday, meaning any new entrants will likely emerge quickly after Tuesday’s results.

Already, the possibility of jumping into the special election has become an issue in other races. Alabama State Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, has been accused by his primary challenger, Mike Vandenheuvel of Foley, of planning to qualify for the 1st District race the day after their Senate primary. Elliott said Thursday he is “100 percent focused” on running for re-election, though he did not confirm or deny interest in running for Congress.

Candidate performance Tuesday could influence whether additional challengers join the field next week.

“I think it’s fair to say that any candidate who underperforms relative to expectations will have to answer questions about momentum and positioning,” Richardson said. “At the same time, the special election is a separate race with a different electorate, and campaigns will adjust accordingly.”

Brown expects the special election electorate to be more conservative and more aligned with President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base. Overall turnout will likely drop from Tuesday’s primary, he added.

The Alabama Secretary of State’s Office has not provided a turnout estimate for Tuesday. The 2022 primary elections — the last time statewide offices such as governor and U.S. Senate were on the ballot — drew fewer than a quarter of registered voters.

Aside from the 1st District, the only other contested congressional primary whose results will be invalidated is in the 6th District, where incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer of Hoover faces Case Dixon. There were no primary challenges to Figures in the 2nd District or Democratic U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell in the 7th.

From courthouses to chaos

The upheaval in congressional races stems from last month’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that a Louisiana congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The ruling triggered a wave of redistricting activity across the South, where lawmakers issued new or revised congressional maps to eliminate majority-Black districts in favor of majority-white, Republican-leaning districts.

Alabama’s new congressional districts and the Aug. 11 special election were established during a special legislative session last week, when the Republican-controlled Legislature reauthorized a congressional map first approved in 2023. That map had previously been invalidated by federal courts for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana, Alabama officials asked the Court to lift the injunction blocking the 2023 map. On Monday, the Court agreed in a 6–3 decision.

Gov. Kay Ivey set the special elections for the congressional races on Monday and announced that Tuesday’s results would be voided. It is the first time since at least the 1800s that an election appearing on a primary ballot was canceled before results were known. Historically, voided elections occurred well after voting, often due to fraud, campaign finance violations, or other irregularities.

In Louisiana, voters went to the polls Saturday with U.S. House seats also on the primary ballot. Those races, like Alabama’s, will be invalidated. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry set Nov. 3 as the election date for the U.S. House races.

But unlike Alabama, Landry is prohibiting election officials from releasing the results of Saturday’s contests, as well as the canceled congressional contests on the June 27 ballots.

Richardson said he believes voters will still pay attention.

“The results will certainly be watched closely as an early indicator of how voters are engaging with the field,” he said.

More than half of Americans support the separation of church and state. Yet Trump is spending your tax dollars on 'Rededicate 250' to push one version of religion as the only government-favored faith.

Officials from President Donald Trump's administration and evangelical Christian leaders plan to gather "with Scripture, testimony, prayer, and rededication of our country as One Nation to God" in Washington, DC, on May 17.

That description is a lie. The real plan here is to push one distinct version of religion – right-wing, MAGA-heavy, politically motivated Protestantism – as the only government-favored faith for our entire country.

"Rededicate 250," as the all-day event on the National Mall is called, will platform almost exclusively those kinds of preachers in a way that brazenly and intentionally violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

This is part of a larger attempt to undo the decrees the men we call our nation's "Founding Fathers" wrote into our first laws, mandating a separation between church and state.

Rededicate 250, pegged to this year's 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is designed to demolish those decrees.

But that's not what most Americans want.
Americans clearly support the separation of church and state

A Pew Research Center survey, released May 14 to provide context ahead of Rededicate 250, found that just 17% of Americans want Christianity declared as the official religion in this country. Fifty-four percent of Americans support a separation of church and state, while just 13% oppose that. And 52% said “conservative Christians have gone too far" pushing religion in government and public schools. 

The Rev. Paul Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister and CEO of the Interfaith Alliance, told me Rededicate 250 violates the U.S. Constitution's Establishment Clause, which guarantees both the freedom to practice religion and the freedom to prevent the government from forcing a religion on you.

"Unfortunately, this event is very clearly privileging one tradition with the full-throated support of the government," Rauschenbusch said. "And it's a very kind of thin slice of American Christianity that largely is unified by political goals."

Rededicate 250 is an offshoot of Freedom 250, an effort funded by your tax dollars and corporate sponsors, organized by the U.S. Park Service and promoted by Trump's White House, to celebrate America's 250 years of existence.

How much of your tax dollars are being spent on Rededicate 250? I can't tell you. The White House team assigned to answer that question did not respond to my request for information last week, a continuation in a pattern of obstructing transparency while mislabeling it as "freedom."

The Founding Fathers were clear about church and state

Then there's an unintentional irony of Rededicate 250's website using the 1975 Arnold Friberg painting "The prayer at Valley Forge," which depicts George Washington kneeling in the snow next to his horse. On display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, it has been labeled there as portraying "an imagined moment of prayer.”

Rededicate 250 leans hard on the "imagined" part because Washington, our first president, was a religious man but never wanted to force his faith on other Americans. He didn't just call for government toleration for different religions. He wanted full freedom for all creeds.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence before becoming our third president, was also a religious man. And he, too, emphasized a "wall of separation" between the church and government while promoting freedom for all religions.

So now, we're all paying for a religious celebration

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me Rededicate 250 represents a larger effort in Trump's second term to force a particular version of religion into our government.

"It's extremely concerning that at a time when America is celebrating our decision not to have a king who rules over both church and state, that we are leaning into a Christian nationalist activity that promotes the lie that America was founded as a Christian nation," Laser said. "It's deeply un-American, and an assault on one of our best foundational values as a country."

Annie Laurie Gaylor, cofounder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, told me her group and Faithful America, religious progressives who oppose Christian nationalism, will protest at Rededicate 250 with an inflatable "false prophet" that looks like a golden calf with the visage of a certain 47th president.

"An all-day Christian prayer-fest on the National Mall proclaimed by our president and participated in and evidently funded by our federal government is exactly what our Constitution intended to prohibit," Gaylor told me.

Just consider how Trump pitched Rededicate 250 while announcing it in February at the National Prayer Breakfast.

"I've always said you can't have a great country if you don't have religion," Trump said before adding, "I behave because I'm afraid not to, OK, because I don't want to get in trouble."

This, from a president who last month posted a social media meme that made him look like Jesus Christ and then criticized Pope Leo XIV for preaching peace after Trump threatened to destroy “a whole civilization” in Iran.

The First Amendment guarantees Trump's right to act that way, even if it outrages people of faith. But that amendment also guarantees that Americans should not have to pay for any religion to be celebrated, and certainly not one distinct version of faith.

That's Trump's next outrage, happening on the National Mall, in contradiction of our Constitution.