Trump Team’s Unnerving Plot to Ban All Voting Machines Exposed |
Trump Team’s Unnerving Plot to Ban All Voting Machines Exposed
The plan advanced far enough that the Trump administration was looking for a way to justify the ban.
The Trump administration floated banning voting machines in over 50 percent of the country by deeming Dominion Voting Machine software—used in 27 mostly blue states—a national security risk.
The plan, first reported by Reuters Friday, was spearheaded by White House adviser Kurt Olsen, whose primary job is to find ways to prove President Trump’s false rigged election claims to be true. Olsen’s plan was to force states to switch to hand counting, a method many experts say leaves even more room for potential cheating.
The plan advanced far enough last year that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other department officials began working to find a justification to implement it, but ultimately failed to do so, as there is no good reason to switch millions of people’s voting method—especially right before a midterm election. There is no proof that voting machines have ever been hacked despite allegations from the president.
The Trump administration appears desperate to gain an upper hand ahead of the midterms. In December, the Justice Department sued and raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and has filed lawsuits to gain voter rolls in more than 30 states. This is all aimed at creating chaos and doubt so that Trump can declare any election he loses fraudulent.
Both Secretary Lutnick and Olsen have yet to comment.
Epstein’s Assistant Names Three New Abusers in Harrowing Testimony
House Oversight Chair James Comer said Sarah Kellen’s revelation was “what we’ve been waiting for.”
Jeffrey Epstein’s former assistant has provided the House Oversight Committee with the names of three new alleged co-conspirators.
Sarah Kellen appeared before the committee in a closed-door hearing Thursday. Committee Chairman James Comer described her participation as forthcoming, and shared that her testimony was “what we’ve been waiting for.”
“Sarah Kellen has been very helpful. Of all the people we have interviewed thus far, this was by far the most substantive and productive interview that we’ve had,” Comer told reporters after the hearing. “She was very brave coming forward. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to go into detail about the abuse that she endured at the hands of Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell.
“One very positive thing today is she gave us three names of people that were involved in abuse. These were new names for us,” Comer continued.
The Kentucky Republican said that the committee would be releasing the transcript of Keller’s testimony as soon as possible, but that it would need to first redact the names of several mentioned victims.
“As far as the men that were the abusers—alleged abusers—the whole world will see that,” Comer said.
Kellen began working for Epstein in 2001 and stayed on his payroll for more than a decade, during which time she said she was “sexually and psychologically abused” by the pedophilic financier. It was only through years of therapy that she said she had come to realize that she too was a victim of Epstein’s grooming and manipulation.
“The abuse happened on average on a weekly basis, and was at times violent,” Kellen told the committee, according to her opening remarks.
“It included Jeffrey entering my room in the middle of the night and putting his fingers inside me, waking me up from my sleep,” she said. “It included an occasion in Palm Beach when he trapped me in the gym by lowering the metal hurricane shutter … choked me, and violently raped me.”
Kellen explained she stayed on as Epstein’s assistant for so long because she had “nowhere else to go.”
“I had no money, no family, no education, and no sense that I deserved any better.”
Kellen was named as a potential co-conspirator in Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors, which shielded him from federal sex-trafficking charges.
“I was not told this was happening,” Kellen said in her opening remarks of her co-conspirator status. “I was not asked about it. No one from law enforcement ever spoke with me, ever heard my side, ever asked me a single question.
“I want to start turning some of the pain and trauma into something good that can help others and bring awareness to this important topic,” Kellen told MS NOW ahead of her appearance on Capitol Hill.
Dani Bensky, another survivor of Epstein’s abuse, described Kellen’s situation to MS NOW as “complicated.”
“When you are victimized and then you are put in a position where you are manipulated to recruit, that is a very sticky, complex situation,” Bensky said. “People really need to understand what sex trafficking is and what it looks like.… It really is like a pyramid scheme.”
Feds Forced to Drop Case Against “Broadview Six” Anti-ICE Protesters
Federal prosecutors have dismissed all charges against the protesters after apparent misconduct.
The charges against the remaining “Broadview Six” protesters were dropped Thursday, in a win for anyone who has protested ICE activity under the Trump administration.
The six protesters were hit with felony conspiracy charges carrying a maximum sentence of six years in prison after they surrounded an ICE agent’s car in the Chicago suburb of Broadview in September, in an attempt to slow it down. It was alleged the protesters “pushed and scratched and otherwise damaged,” the vehicle, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. But like many charges brought by the feds against anti-ICE protesters, they failed to hold up in court.
The government first dropped charges against two of the protesters, Catherine Sharp and Joselyn Walsh. Then it threw out the conspiracy charges against the other four—Brian Straw, Michael Rabbitt, Andre Martin, and former congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh—and instead tried to convict them of one misdemeanor count each for impeding a federal agent.
In the end, the administration couldn’t even do that. Chicago’s top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, dropped the charges with prejudice in front of U.S. District Judge April Perry, meaning the case cannot be refiled in the future.
Boutros remained petty to the end. He called the protesters’ actions “unacceptable in a civilized........