“Former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith faces investigation by Office of Special Counsel”

authoritarian threats in US, chicanery, Department of Justice

WaPo:

The U.S. Office of special counsel said Saturday it is investigating Jack Smith, the former Justice Department official who oversaw two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump, for potentially violating the law barring federal officials from political activity.

The independent agencytasked with overseeing investigations into partisan influence and coercion confirmed its investigation of Smith over potential Hatch Act violations.

The Hatch Act prohibits most federal employees from using their official authority to influence elections or engage in overt political activity on the job. If the office concludes a federal employee has violated the law, it refers the case to the president. Discipline can range from a reprimand to a removal from federal service. Criminal penalties are rare.

Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department in the days before Trump’s inauguration this year, became the public face of the department’s efforts to hold Trump accountable for two sets of alleged crimes. Trump was accused of trying to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and, after leaving the White House upon completion of his first term, mishandling highly classified documents and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. Neither case went to trial.

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“Democratic governors advise strong counteroffensive on redistricting”

chicanery, redistricting

Politico:

A  group of Democratic governors is urging its colleagues to get tough in countering Republican-backed efforts to gerrymander Texas’ congressional districts.

“It’s incumbent upon Democrat governors, if they have the opportunity, to respond in kind,” outgoing Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly told reporters at a Democratic Governors Association meeting Friday. “I’m not a big believer in unilateral disarmament.”

The advice from Kelly, who chairs the DGA, came two days after Texas Republicans proposed congressional lines that would create five GOP-friendly House districts ahead of next year’s midterms. Democrats need only to net three seats to regain control of the lower chamber.

Kelly didn’t cite California Gov. Gavin Newsom by name, but he is the most high profile, and likeliest, example of a Democrat considering a counteroffensive remapping effort to squeeze more seats from a blue state. On Thursday, Newsom said he’d seek a November special election to have voters approve a new House map that would boost Democrats’ numbers. It’s an expensive and potentially perilous gamble that his Democratic colleagues throughout the country appear to be backing — a notably more aggressive posture for the party….

NYT on “maximum warfare”:

The aggressive push by President Trump and Republicans in Texas to squeeze as many as five House Democrats out of office before a single vote is cast in the 2026 midterm elections has opened up a new chapter in an era of unconstrained partisan warfare.

For six months, Democrats have watched, sometimes haplessly and sometimes hopelessly, as Mr. Trump and his allies have bent much of the country’s political, legal and educational systems to his will.

But the bald attempt to redraw the Texas congressional map to shore up House Republicans has pushed many Democrats, including some longtime institutionalists, to a breaking point. Now, they are vowing to “fight fire with fire” and even to embrace some of the very gerrymandering tactics they have long decried as anti-democratic.

“The Texas Republicans are taking us on a race to the bottom,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who lamented in an interview that his party must reluctantly participate in “this rotten system.”…

The gerrymandering is deeply consequential at a time when a single House race can cost tens of millions of dollars. Republicans won control of the House in 2024 by only three seats, a margin the remapping in Texas alone would more than double.

One person close to the president, who insisted on anonymity to describe the White House’s political strategy candidly, summed it up succinctly: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

The redistricting push is only one element. Mr. Trump has targeted Democratic law firms with executive actions. He has threatened prosecutions of and ordered investigations into his political enemies, while the Justice Department has dropped lawsuits aimed at protecting voting rights. And his congressional allies are investigating ActBlue, the organization that processes an overwhelming share of online donations for Democrats….

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“Revealed: Elon Musk’s $1 Million Gift to Trump Inauguration”

campaign finance

Influence Brief:

A Jan. 15 in-kind contribution from X Corp., the social media company previously known as Twitter and owned by Musk, never appeared in any of the Trump inaugural committee’s original disclosure or in multiple amendments.

The donation only appeared in a supplemental FEC filing on July 18 — just days before a key federal lobbying deadline when lobbyists are legally required to report political contributions from their clients.

On July 30, a new lobbying disclosure filed by X Corp. confirmed the $1 million contribution.

Despite announcing plans to step back from political spending in May, new campaign finance reports filed July 31 reveal Musk kept making political contributions into at least June — even as his tension with Trump escalated.

Musk gave $45 million to his own pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC, with contributions into at least late June.

But Musk didn’t just give to his own super PAC.

Despite a dramatic falling out with Trump after his departure from DOGE, Musk gave $5 million to Trump’s main super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., on June 27, according to new FEC filings first reported by Politico.

That same day, Musk poured another $10 million to the main super PACs backing House and Senate Republicans — with $5 million of that to Congressional Leadership Fund, which is aligned with House Republican leadership, and another $5 million to the allied Senate Leadership Fund.

Musk’s multimillion-dollar contributions made him the largest individual donor to both super PACs allied with congressional leadership during the first six months of 2025….

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“How the New Texas Map Changes the Outlook for Control of the House”

redistricting

Nate Cohn for The Tilt:

So far this election cycle, most analysts have assumed that Democrats will win the House next November. No, it’s not a guarantee. But the party out of the White House usually does well in midterms, and Democrats need a mere three seats to retake the chamber.

Over the last few weeks, this reasonable assumption has started to get more complicated. It turns out that Democrats might need to flip more than three seats, as President Trump is pushing red states to undertake a rare mid-decade redistricting effort to shore up the slender Republican House majority.

On Wednesday, Republicans in Texas unveiled the first of these efforts: a new map that could flip as many as five seats from blue to red.

It’s still too early to say what might happen beyond Texas. Maybe other Republican states will join; maybe Democrats will retaliate. Obviously, a wider redistricting war could have far greater implications, to say nothing of whether it is healthy for the country. But on its own, while the Texas map makes the Democrats’ path to the House harder, it doesn’t necessarily make it hard. They would still be favored to win the House if the election were held today on the new map, even though they don’t hold a very large lead in the polls….

For another, recent electoral trends have positioned Democrats to win House elections more easily. The Republican advantage in the early 2010s was partly a reflection of the geographic distribution of the Obama coalition, which showed its greatest strength in urban areas where Democrats had already been winning House elections. Since then, Democrats have made big gains in highly educated suburbs, flipping many previously Republican-leaning districts. At the same time, the collapse of the Obama coalition cost Democrats many popular votes in urban and rural areas but didn’t cost them many House seats. Put it together, and today’s congressional map is arguably the most balanced map since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Perhaps the easiest way to tell: Democrats barely lost the House popular vote in the last two elections, and they barely lost the chamber. By some measures — including the so-called efficiency gap promoted by redistricting reformers — the current House district map actually leans slightly to the left. By others — including my preferred measures — the map leans slightly to the right.

Either way, the fundamentally balanced House map is the backdrop to the new Texas map. While a few more Republican seats will certainly help the G.O.P., it will take more to give Republicans a major structural advantage in the fight for the House….

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“Texas House panel advances redrawn congressional map that would add more GOP seats”

redistricting

Texas Tribune:

A Texas House panel on Saturday advanced a draft congressional map aimed at adding five new Republican districts next year over protests from Democrats that the proposal would suppress the votes of people of color.

The chamber’s redistricting committee approved the map on party lines, 12 to 6, after spending much of Friday hearing testimony from U.S. House Democrats from Texas and members of the public largely opposed to the plan. The map could be considered by the entire state House as soon as early next week.

Earlier in the hearing, GOP lawmakers said that they are redrawing the state’s congressional map to advantage Republican candidates, setting aside a legal justification offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and making their political motivations explicit for the first time.

“Different from everyone else, I’m telling you, I’m not beating around the bush,” Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican carrying the bill, said about the goal of the map. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.”

Texas Republicans launched the redistricting effort after pressure from President Donald Trump’s political operatives, who demanded state leaders redraw the map to help Republicans maintain their slim House majority ahead of a potentially difficult midterm election.

The House redistricting committee released its proposed redo of the map Wednesday. It slices up districts in the Houston, Austin and the Dallas areas, yielding five additional districts that would have voted for Trump by at least 10 percentage points in 2024. In 2024, Trump won 56.2% of votes in Texas. Under the current lines, Republicans hold 66% of Texas’ 38 House seats. The new map aims to push that share to 79%….

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“Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation”

campaign finance, campaigns, lobbying

NYT:

When the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Eric Schiermeyer heard that President Trump was holding small group dinners with major donors, he saw opportunity.

Mr. Schiermeyer reached out to a lobbyist with connections in Mr. Trump’s orbit, who arranged for him to attend a dinner with the president at his private Mar-a-Lago club on March 1 in exchange for donations to a pro-Trump PAC called MAGA Inc. totaling $1 million.

The personal and corporate donations were among dozens of seven- and eight-figure contributions to MAGA Inc. from crypto and other interests revealed in a campaign finance filing on Thursday night that hinted at the access Mr. Trump accords those willing to pay.

At the dinner, Mr. Schiermeyer, who had never given a federal political donation before, presented an idea for a cryptocurrency called “U.S.A. Token” that would be distributed to every citizen, according to interviews and a flier he distributed to attendees that sets out details of the proposal. He hoped it could be supported through a federal contract with his company.

“I don’t usually put time and attention on politics,” Mr. Schiermeyer said in a text exchange with The New York Times. But, he added, “I was able to say my piece, and the idea is clearly making the rounds, so mission accomplished from my view.”

While the Trump administration has not given Mr. Schiermeyer any indication it is pursuing the U.S.A. Token idea, the episode underscores the face time that Mr. Trump has been willing to grant to deep-pocketed interests seeking business, preferential treatment or protection from him and his administration.

It also reveals how lobbyists, political consultants and others in the influence industry have capitalized on Mr. Trump’s aggressive fund-raising while in office to deliver for clients and earn chits with a president who keeps close tabs on who is delivering cash and listens to their appeals. It is a cycle that has helped Mr. Trump fill the coffers of his political groups, defying the gravity that sometimes drags down the fund-raising of term-limited presidents….

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