Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS OCT 30, 2026

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your roundup includes: the New York Times’ Alaska scoop hands DOJ a treasure map and 40-plus grand jury subpoenas go out before the ink dries; the Times suddenly finds “some evidence” that Ilhan Omar married her brother, nine months after calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory”; the SPLC’s own lawyers trash their 20-year neo-Nazi informant now that he’s informing on them; James Comey gets charged a third time; a three-star general is fired for leaking to reporters at a suburban diner; and is it time to call it “The Storm” yet? jchilders

Yes, it’s time to call it a Storm. mrossol

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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There’s been a major update to yesterday’s Alaska story. The New York Times has now reported, “Republicans Ramp Up Investigation Into Democratic Plan to Pack Alaska’s Ballot.” By “ramp up,” it meant that in 24 hours, over 40 DOJ subpoenas went out, a House committee investigation began, and Alaska launched a state criminal matter. All in one day. All thanks to the Times’s own terrific article.

“Most if not all of the subpoenas were issued to Democrats,” the Times marveled. (Where else would they go? Haiti? One wonders which Republicans the Times thinks might have documentary evidence about the Democrat conspiracy.) As we thought likely, “lawyers for the federal government accused Democrats of having lied to the court.”

This is not to say the Times is helping any. The Times’s article heaped up a giant analysis of the legality of what it called “ballot stacking,” “an age-old practice used by both parties for decades” a term nobody ever heard of before yesterday, and which I think the Times just made up. (Internally, Mary Peltola’s campaign team called it “the ballot composition project.”) It cited “Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg,” who opined that he couldn’t see any crimes here. (We still don’t know if he took the bucket off his head to look.)

The article did not remind readers that “Republican lawyer” Ginsberg is a Never-Trumper who is often quoted in articles as the Republican lawyer who doesn’t agree that the 2020 election was stolen. Thanks a lot, Times.

Finally, the Times itself cleared the Democrats of guilt. “The Times did not uncover evidence of illegal activity,” it sniffed. Thank goodness it isn’t in charge of prosecutions. I wonder what the Times thinks the 40+ subpoenas are for. Practice?

🔥 Anyway, back in 2021, the Times had no problem finding a crime when a Republican state senator in Miami was accused of running a sham candidate against a Democrat back in 2021. Here’s the headline then:

As you can see from the subheadline, in 2021 the state senator who recruited him and the sham candidate “were both arrested.” (Both were later convicted.) The Times failed to mention this very similar 2021 case in its several thoughtful paragraphs analyzing how its experts cannot seem to find any crimes in 2026. Nor, back in 2021, did the Grey Lady deploy its gentle term “ballot stacking” or call it an “age-old practice.” Times, apparently, change.

And, as you can see with your own eyes, the very descriptive phrase “sham candidate” appeared right in the Times’ 2021 headline— but nowhere in its article published yesterday. Whoops! The reporters forgot their own vocabulary. By Monday they’ll probably be calling ‘ballot stacking’ a protected constitutional technique essential to democracy.

Anyway— the point is, in 2021, Florida was able to find crimes when somebody ran a sham candidate. Now the State of Alaska is looking. Plus, usually federal laws are much more flexible for charging these kinds of crimes. But the Times’ hypocrisy between its own stories wasn’t even the most entertaining part.

The most fun was what the DOJ’s 40 subpoenas imply. Let me explain.

🔥 Before this year, it would have been impossible for federal prosecutors to turn around 40 subpoenas within two days of a breaking Times story. But now they have help from superintelligence, which drafts subpoenas in seconds. And both CNN and Reuters called them “grand jury subpoenas,” which means the DOJ already has a criminal grand jury spun up and hearing evidence. (Before yesterday, we only knew about the DOJ’s civil lawsuit.)

So that’s fun. But wait. It gets richer.

Recall the Times original exposé story, which we covered yesterday. That article said it was “based on interviews over the past two months with 12 people who participated in or were told of the plan, would-be candidates that the team tried to recruit, dozens of text messages that provided updates on the progress of the effort, and extensive interviews” with Peltola’s former campaign manager. Those texts, the Times said, “show officials with the D.S.C.C. and the Peltola campaign communicating for months about the project.” It also cited Federal Election Commission records showing $87,000 from a Peltola super PAC to the special ballot maneuver operative’s firm, Wingspan Strategies, and messages involving the national party and the Elias Law Group about creating a fake “MAGA Party.”

That long list wasn’t just a scoop. It was a road map to a treasure trove of witnesses and documents. That’s how the DOJ got more than 40 subpoenas out the door before the paper’s ink was dry. Thanks to the Times’ story, the DOJ knows exactly what to ask for, who to request it from, and will point directly at the article when the judge asks whether “all this is just a fishing expedition.”

The Times made it so easy for them. This almost never happens.

As a lawyer, I’ve occasionally experienced this kind of rare pleasure. You can’t beat this kind of help from the other side. I had a case where a local official demanded my client pay his agency’s legal bills, which was ridiculous, but never mind. To prove the outstanding balance, he attached dozens of pages of unredacted attorney invoices. The line items drew a treasure map: references to emails, drafts, Zooms, meetings, letters— all with specific dates and names of the people who were involved.

Our public-records request went out practically before we finished reading it. The Times just did the same favor for DOJ, except it delivered the treasure map on page one. Ahoy, mateys! Practically overnight, the Alaskan Senate race has become a massive migraine for Democrats, and it is only going to get worse.

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The Times has really been outdoing itself this week. How about another one? Yesterday it reported, “Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage.” Welcome to Minneapolis, the City of Brotherly Love. Get this: the sub-headline admitted, “an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother.” Ouch.

Some evidence. This is the fallback position when, at long last, they can no longer say “no evidence.” They can’t bring themselves to concede there is “evidence,” so they deploy a rhetorical sleight of hand. The truth is, evidence is binary. There’s either “evidence” or there is “no evidence.” The phrase “some evidence” is meaninglessly redundant. It’s like saying someone is “partly pregnant.” Some evidence means the same thing as “evidence.” They’re hoping our brains will subconsciously interpret the qualifying word “some” to mean that the evidence is thin or inconclusive or scribbled on a crumpled cocktail napkin.

But it really just means one thing: there’s evidence. For whatever reason —a reason it never explains in the story— the Times is finally being forced to admit something it has steadfastly denied since the Obama era: the claim that Representative Ilhan Omar married her own brother is not just a conspiracy theory after all. There’s evidence.

🔥 Now let’s see what the Times called “some evidence” of a sham marriage. Read further and the “some” evaporated faster than a Somalian daycare center that just got a subpoena. The Times itself said it was “based on interviews with three current and former officials familiar with the present-day investigation and six current and former officials with knowledge of the 2016 investigation.” Sounds like more than “some” evidence.

Not only that. “Although Ms. Omar is an observant Muslim,” the Times explained, “the couple’s marriage certificate was signed by a Christian pastor rather than an imam.” And when immigration officials asked the husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, to prove his marriage was real, he fled. He left the country and has never returned. I’m leaving, on a jet plane; don’t know when I’ll be back again. Ironically, he provided no evidence their marriage was legit.

Still, the Times hedged. Nine officials, a bizarre marriage certificate, and a fleeing husband are, apparently, only “some evidence.” What do they want?One supposes a written confession would only provoke the Times to engage more experts opining about statements made under duress.

Agents, the article explained, “found evidence suggesting” they were siblings, dropping the “some.” The Obama-era case died on the vine, “chiefly” because prosecutors concluded the statute of limitations clock had run out, not because the “some evidence” did.

The “official exoneration” letter Omar waved around for ten years? Its author, a former US Attorney under Obama, now tells the Times the letter “was never meant to say anything about the substance.” He wants us to know he didn’t mean it to be taken that way. He just never said anything to anyone or corrected the record with a clarifying letter. The article also allowed, briefly, in classic drive-by fashion, that the brother-marrying claims first arose in 2016 not from Republicans but from Somali message boards.

But as recently as January, the Times was still calling it a “baselessconspiracy theory.” Its fact-checkers rated the claim “flatly false.” I suppose apologies would be expecting too much, but the Times didn’t even issue a correction for its years of misreporting Omar’s fratrimony as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

“Rep. Omar has repeatedly and unequivocally denied this baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory,” Jackie Rogers, Omar’s spokeswoman, said in a statement, echoing the Times’ own words. Rogers will never face consequences when this turns out to be a lie, but she should.

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Finally, and maybe best of all, the good ship Southern Poverty Law Center is listing to starboard and starting to sink. On Wednesday, DNYUZ reported, “Justice Dept. Turns Civil Rights Group’s Informant Against It” Ruh roh! In other words: DOJ prosecutors are doing their jobs.

Alert readers will recall that in April, the DOJ charged the progressive law firm and fundraising behemoth SPLC with fraud. Federal prosecutors alleged the group was actually funding the very hate groups it claimed to be investigating so that it could keep the donor gravy train moving. This surprised no one except corporate media reporters and national Democrats.

According to the indictment, one SPLC informant had no extremist background at all until he applied to SPLC for a job. Then, on SPLC’s instructions, he joined the planning chat for Charlottesville, posted racist content under SPLC supervision, and arranged rides to the rally. SPLC paid him over $300,000 in donor money.

The nation’s leading ‘hate-watchers’ weren’t just watching.

🔥 This week, the SPLC’s lawyers filed an overwrought motion claiming that the DOJ has turned one of its own informants against it. Irony alert. Flipping witnesses is totally normal in criminal cases. But SPLC’s lawyers don’t like it when the DOJ does exactly what they insist they were doing: paying neo-nazi informants to provide evidence against other bad actors.

The trained informant, known only as “F-9,” was not only a paid neo-Nazi infiltrator for years, but his benefits extended well beyond the $1.2 million the SPLC paid him over 16 years. He also lived with the SPLC’s undercover program director, Heidi “Ho” Beirich, in a close romantic relationship. It’s hard to imagine how the SPLC could be more intertwined with the fascist movement it was forever claiming to be deconstructing. They were literally sleeping together. (It’s also another form of fratrimony, if you think about it.)

Now, informant F-9 is doing what he was trained to do, by informing to the feds. In exchange for immunity, he has delivered a treasure trove of “some evidence.” It included over 1,800 text messages, 1.2 terabytes of documents on seven hard drives, 35-40 pounds of paper, and at least four Powerpointed “intelligence briefings.” He kept everything. Including, according to SPLC’s own motion, confidential SPLC records and “privileged information.”

The government is learning a whole lot about how the SPLC actually works. Sorry; how it worked.

Most of all, it was terrible news for the SPLC, which doesn’t like turncoat informers a bit, and wants the judge to shut the whole thing down.

🔥 Now, ironically, the SPLC must discredit its own informant. The 20-year relationship is over. Hurt feelings have ensued. The SPLC’s 29-page motion described its informant of two decades as a broke, tax-dodging, payment-hungry opportunist.

Oddly, that’s exactly what the government said the SPLC’s informant program was. Weird!

In other words, for nearly 20 years, the SPLC assured the FBI that their guy was reliable enough to go after anybody the SPLC called a hate group. Well, not perhaps anybody. Now that he’s going after the SPLC, nobody should listen to him. Suddenly, according to the same lawyers, he’s just a tax cheat with ‘extreme biases’ and ‘self-serving motives’ who only wants to get paid. You cannot make this stuff up.

Technically, from a legal perspective, all their motion asked for was an order requiring F-9 to preserve his documents. That unremarkable request should have taken about one page. Instead, they filed twenty-nine pages arguing why nobody should believe a word their own informant says. So it wasn’t really a discovery motion. It’s a brief for the media and the future jury pool.

As a PR strategy, it makes sense. The SPLC’s lawyers are earning their hourly rates. They are spinning as well as they can. But it revealed terrible news for the progressive juggernaut. They can make F-9 look like a self-serving mercenary, but they can’t make his drives and filing cabinets disappear. Cue the “everything is fine” meme.

This motion really says they’re in deep legal trouble and they know it. First, the DOJ is obviously mounting a massive case. Prosecutors don’t meet with a single witness 30+ times unless they are investing heavily in the prosecution. Second, lawyers don’t spend 29 public pages trying to wreck a witness who doesn’t matter. They do it when the case depends on him. Read that way, F-9 isn’t just some side witness. He’s the star: a twenty-year insider, he kept the documents, and he’s exposing the very payment structure the government calls fraudulent.

Mark this down: The SPLC is finished. Even if they somehow avoid criminal prosecution, their “hate group” business model is no longer viable. They can no longer sneak money to the groups that they use to support their fundraising. That is over. No more $300,000 in sketchy Cash App texts to coordinate turning out Nazis for a Charlottesville rally. And without the ever-present threat of looming fascism that they lovingly sustained like a mother robin feeding her chicks, why should donors give them any more money?

🔥 This, my friends, is not an October surprise. It’s an October tsunami. The hits just keep coming. For instance, four days ago, two new charges against former FBI Director James Comey were unsealed. Yesterday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Army Lt. General Brett Sylvia, the head of strategy, plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for leaking classified information to reporters. One suspects that serious charges will follow.

This is all in a single news cycle. Now add Senatorial candidate Mary Peltola — Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — the Southern Poverty Law Center. In each case, the lies the left told for years fell apart, on the record, in one week. None of it came from Fox News or X. The Alaska decoy burst out in the Times’ own reporting. Omar’s fratrimonious “conspiracy theory” suddenly became “some brotherly evidence” in the Times’ own pages. And the SPLC’s informant program was undermined by its own lawyers, who were trying to bury a mountain of inconvenient evidence.

Some evidence? How about a lot of evidence? Are you ready to call it “The Storm” yet? Just asking.

Have a fantastic Friday! The Weekend Edition will be in your inbox tomorrow morning, before you know it, with even more essential news and caffeinated commentary.