Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing renewed blowback for allegedly sexually assaulting a former family babysitter after he reportedly decided to shoot her a late-night apology text.

The former babysitter, Eliza Cooney, accused Kennedy in a bombshell Vanity Fair piece of rubbing her leg, reading her diary, asking her to rub lotion on his back, and trapping her in the pantry and groping her, all on separate occasions in 1998, when she was 23 and Kennedy was 45.

Kennedy apparently thought the best way to smooth things over was via text. “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings,” Kennedy wrote in a text message to Cooney, sent just after midnight on July 4 and obtained by The Washington Post.

“I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

The presidential candidate then proceeded to invite Cooney to continue the conversation either by telephone or “preferably, face to face.”

“I recognize that this might not be possible. I have no agenda for sending this text other than making the most sincere and ernest [sic] amends,” Kennedy added.

The message was not well received—as unsolicited, late-night texts from men usually are.

“It was disingenuous and arrogant,” Cooney told the Post in reference to the message. “I’m not sure how somebody has a true apology for something that they don’t admit to recalling. I did not get a sense of remorse.”

And she was further surprised by the invitation to continue the conversation with her alleged abuser in person.

“Meet ‘face to face?’ What woman wants to do that?” Cooney added.

Kennedy initially brushed off the accusations in an interview on Breaking Points, chalking up the sexual harassment claims to his “very, very rambunctious youth.”

“In terms of the other allegations, listen, I have said this from the beginning: I am not a church boy. I am not running like that,” Kennedy said. “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote I could run for king of the world.”

He also derided the rest of the Vanity Fair exposé, which included a photo of Kennedy posing next to what veterinarians identified as a barbequed dog, calling the article “a lot of garbage.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson relied on some flimsy facts to back the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, to make it harder for noncitizens to vote in the U.S. elections, something that is of course, already illegal.

The bill, which would require a Real ID or U.S. passport for voting rather than the standard driver’s license, passed the Republican-led House Wednesday, but it was built on a false premise and backed by baseless claims.

To attract support for the bill, Johnson circulated a white paper that included some claims about voting by undocumented immigrants—that aren’t backed up by any evidence, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

In one section, Johnson’s handout referred to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who had ordered 137 noncitizens to be removed from the state’s voter rolls. But LaRose has yet to provide any actual evidence of illegally cast ballots.

LaRose even acknowledged in a May press release that some of those people could’ve been included as “the result of an honest mistake.”

“These may be well-meaning people trying to pursue the American dream, and communication barriers sometimes result in a registration form being submitted in error,” LaRose said. “We need to help them get that cleared up before an accidental registration becomes an illegal vote that could result in a felony conviction or even deportation.”

Under federal law, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles is required to offer voter registration forms to state residents seeking any service. As a result, some forms are filled out by noncitizens, who even mark themselves as ineligible to vote, but the forms are still processed anyway. Another possible explanation is that those voters have been naturalized, but have yet to visit the BMV to officially change their status.

If the evidence isn’t really adding up, there’s a good reason for that: noncitizens don’t really vote in state or federal elections. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Noncitizen voting is a right-wing conspiracy, though, and in reality, the only ones concocting a scheme to fake votes in the last election were in Donald Trump’s camp.

The SAVE Act is ultimately doomed to fail, but that may be by design. It will never pass the Democratic-led Senate, and President Joe Biden has already promised to veto it. But its failure sets the stage for Republicans to run rampant with claims of widespread voter fraud in the upcoming election, even though the numbers don’t support it.

In his latest desperate move to avoid being held to account, Donald Trump is arguing that evidence used to convict him for setting up hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election should be dismissed and his 34-count felony conviction should be vacated based on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that significantly expanded presidential immunity.

“Because of the implications for the institution of the Presidency, the use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution that tainted the District Attorney’s grand jury........

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