Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon emailed Civil Rights Division attorneys and professional staff this week asking them to volunteer as election monitors on November 3.  NOTUS reviewed the message and reported from it. The department declined to discuss the internal email.

The Justice Department routinely sends federal election monitors to primaries, midterms, and presidential elections. Internal recruitment notes asking staff to volunteer are not new.

This is a volunteer call, not an order. Staff can go to polling places or work a D.C. call center. Trainings are short and assignments come a few weeks before the election.  Dhillon has already said the trainings use the same materials prior administrations have used.

The irony is hard to miss. Skeptics are treating a planned deployment of about 1,000 Justice Department election monitors as a radical break from practice. Yet the same department already sent 714 people to polling places for the 2024 presidential election, across 27 states and 86 jurisdictions.

The email asks Civil Rights Division attorneys and professional staff to sign up. U.S. Attorney’s offices have already sent extra personnel during the primaries.

Same observer job. Bigger roster. Still federal employees.

DOJ usually announces places. This time, they are  leading with a headcount of about 1,000 people. It has not published the November map or the fraud-training materials.

That gap is why the NAACP filed a FOIA on September 1, and why Senators have asked for the site list, the training, and the rules that bind a monitor on the floor.

At the polls, Dhillon has publicly stated monitors will watch access and fraud.

Separately, and for months now, the department has been pressing states to clean voter rolls so dead registrants, movers, and noncitizens do not stay listed or cast a ballot.

Dhillon has said publicly cooperating states have already turned up discrepancies, including dead names and suspected noncitizens.

Dhillon did not use the memo to invent a new legal theory. She wrote that the Civil Rights Division “has the opportunity and obligation to ensure the upcoming midterm elections are free and fair,” and that “nationwide monitoring of the voting process on Election Day is essential to ensuring compliance with federal voting laws.” The memo was an invitation, not a manifesto: “I’m writing to encourage each of you to sign up and join us in this effort.”

A September 1 Justice Department release on the Massachusetts primary said more than 80 monitors had been deployed across eight states and more than 200 polling places this primary season, with U.S. Attorney’s offices supplying extra personnel.

The official line in that release: monitoring should be “nonpartisan” and “nondiscriminatory,” and should promote “transparency, accountability, and… trust.”

Michigan clerks and city election officials told Votebeat and The Detroit News that primary monitors there were polite, asked about disability equipment and provisional ballots, and did not interfere. In Miami-Dade, the department assigned four Civil Rights Division attorneys for the August primary. Supervisor of Elections Alina Garcia told Local 10 she was “very confident that everything is going to be just fine.”

What the monitors do is narrower than the argument about them.

They observe. They do not run precincts, decide who may vote, or give orders to poll workers on Election Day.

They stand where state law allows authorized observers to stand, stay outside restricted perimeters when required, and report problems after the fact. Some states have tried to keep federal staff outside the room.

Monitors who overstep can be asked to leave. Staff monitors are not court-ordered federal observers. They do not need a judge’s order.

Volunteers who stay in Washington can staff the Election Day call center known as the Attorney Duty Center, or ADC. Field monitors phone in problems. The desk logs them and routes them the same way the Voting Section already takes complaints year-round. It’s a switchboard, not a second government of the polls.

Federal law does not tell the department to protect lawful votes and look away from illegal ones. It also does not turn an interpreter desk into an immigration checkpoint.

Dhillon has pointed to jurisdictions with language-access or disability-access problems and to places officials believe present fraud risk.

On September 1 the NAACP filed a FOIA seeking the legal basis for fraud-related monitoring, the target list, training materials, qualifications, and how monitors will follow state law.

NAACP general counsel Kristen Clarke called the mass deployment “a scheme to suppress voting rights.” Weeks earlier, Sen. Mark Warner and other senators asked the department for recruitment files, training materials, and proof that monitors will comply with state law.

The manuals are not a new doctrine.

The noise is more about the headcount and the word “fraud,” not a secret playbook. What is still unreleased is the November map: where the 1,000 people will stand.

So why the uproar?

Majorities in both parties tell pollsters they support voter ID and want elections that are free and hard to cheat.

Monitors do not count ballots, certify results, or decide who may vote. They watch whether federal law is followed and whether voters entitled to help get it. Nor do they take over the precinct, and they are not there to intimidate. They are there to observe.

Until the SAVE America Act becomes law, this is the work that remains.

The bill requires documentary proof of citizenship to register, photo ID to vote in federal elections, and a requirement that states scrub noncitizens from the rolls.

The House has passed it. It is waiting on the Senate. The bill is stalled because it needs 60 votes to break a filibuster. Republicans hold 53 seats.

The SAVE America Act is not the operating system for November. It has not become law. States still keep their own ID rules.

The Justice Department is using the authority current statutes already give it: maintaining the voter rolls states will share, and stationing monitors at the polls on Election Day.

NOTUS obtained a sign-up email. It did not unearth a hidden command to run the election.

By the time Election Day arrives, much of the battlefield is already set. This is about showing up prepared to watch it.

I was friends with Allison Guerriero. I worked with Allison every day. She was a researcher for StoneZONE.com, and I communicated with her both the day before her death and again on the day she suddenly and suspiciously died. She was engaged in her work. She was upbeat. She was focused. She was not, in my firsthand judgment, behaving like somebody preparing to take her own life. Allison took enormous personal risks as an FBI whistleblower.

She took these risks not because she was unstable but rather because she loved her country and desired to expose corruption. Her information helped expose disgraced former FBI counterintelligence official Charles McGonigal, who later pleaded guilty in separate federal cases involving concealed foreign payments and work connected to sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Allison was still pursuing corruption inside the FBI.

She was still naming names. She was still working. And she had told me that she was receiving multiple threats because of that whistleblower activity. She was also deeply religious, a devout Roman Catholic, and that was not a minor detail in her life. It shaped who she was and how she viewed the world.

So I am not prepared to accept any premature narrative about how Allison died. I will resist any rush to conclude that she took her own life, and I will do everything I can to make sure the evidence is independently examined and any potential cover-up is thwarted. Allison’s father has said the family was still waiting on the medical examiner.

Boynton Beach police said that the cause of death had not been publicly established. We must consider the threats, look at the communications, carefully examine the timeline and peer through the medical evidence. We must talk to the people who actually spoke with her in her final hours. I was one of them. Allison Guerriero deserved to be heard when she was alive, and she deserves the truth now. We must fight for justice for Allison Guerriero. It is what she deserves.

Seven years later, that prediction could hardly have aged worse.

In 2019, behind closed doors with House Intelligence Committee investigators, Michael Cohen made a prediction about Roger Stone: Donald Trump would never pardon him.

Trump would keep Stone loyal and “on message,” Cohen claimed, but eventually abandon him.

“He’ll let them rot in jail forever,” Cohen said. “He just doesn’t care.”

Seven years later, that prediction could hardly have aged worse.

Cohen misjudged Trump. He misjudged Stone. And he was wrong about which man would ultimately buckle under pressure.

One folded. The other stood firm.

By then, Cohen had already made his choice.

After federal investigators came after him, Cohen pleaded guilty, cooperated with prosecutors and turned against the man he once famously said he would “take a bullet” for.

He went before Congress and attacked Trump. He became a regular television critic of his former boss. He later served as a key witness against Trump in New York.

Cohen cooperated. Stone didn’t.

Stone made clear that he would not turn on Trump or give prosecutors what they wanted simply to make his own situation easier.

That is the central difference. When the pressure came, Cohen chose cooperation. Stone chose truth and loyalty. And Cohen mocked him for it.

His message to Congress was clear: Stone was foolish to believe Trump would ever stand by him. In Cohen’s telling, Trump would use loyalists as long as they were useful, then leave them behind bars when helping them became politically inconvenient.

But that is not what happened.

Trump commuted Stone’s sentence in July 2020, days before Stone was scheduled to report to prison. Five months later, Trump granted Stone a full pardon.

The man Cohen predicted would “rot in jail forever” never spent a day in prison.

Now comes the extraordinary irony.

In 2026, Cohen began moving back toward Trump. And Trump recently appeared on Cohen’s new 77 WABC radio program – the same New York station that carries The Roger Stone Show.

During their conversation, Cohen called Trump “boss.”

Trump said prosecutors had “weaponized” Cohen and praised him for recanting previous claims. Cohen himself has now said he felt pressured and coerced by prosecutors to provide testimony they wanted against Trump.

And then came the ultimate reversal. Cohen submitted a pardon application to President Trump.

Think about that.

The man who cooperated with prosecutors, turned against Trump and predicted Roger Stone would be abandoned to “rot in jail forever” is now asking Trump for the mercy he insisted Trump would never show Stone.

Pressure reveals character.

One stood his ground when the pressure was greatest. The other changed sides.

Forgiveness is admirable, and Trump’s willingness to forgive Cohen says something important about him.

But forgiveness does not erase the record.

Cohen predicted Stone would rot in jail because Stone refused to fold.

Stone never folded.

And Cohen could not have been more wrong.

After the sealed Hope Florida presentment leaked this week to CBS News Miami, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s primary focus was not the $10 million from a settlement with Medicaid contractor Centene for overbilling Florida’s Healthy Kids program, which insures low-income children. It was publicly labeling the grand jury’s findings a “hoax” and a lie.

That is not the response of a governor absorbing a report about taxpayer money. It is the response of a man protecting the people he promoted.

The money moved. Then they were appointed to higher office.

There was, he said, no diversion of Medicaid funds. The only crime “was whoever leaked the grand jury report,” and there would be “consequences.”

Attorney General James Uthmeier called the coverage a politically motivated attack and said leaking grand-jury material is a crime under Florida law. He warned reporters asking about the sealed report that they might themselves be breaking the law.

The misconduct is out in the open now. The people who moved the money got promoted. DeSantis, Uthmeier, and Moody are no longer protected behind a sealed report. What they treated as a leak problem is now a public record of who signed, who rose, and who looked away.

Three things are no longer sealed:

The $10 million was taxpayer money, misappropriated for politics.

Uthmeier had the authority to move it, and he was promoted.

Moody had the authority to stop the signature. She authorized it anyway.

Jurors wrote that the money was “misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities,” that intermediaries “mischaracterized” the intended use, and that senior officials tried to “circumvent” laws requiring the funds be returned.

The $10 million belonged to taxpayers. DeSantis once called it a “cherry on top.” The presentment rejected that. It was not extra. It was part of the settlement. DeSantis and Uthmeier can call the report a hoax. The jurors did not.

The panel pinned Uthmeier as the man with authority over the settlement team. As chief of staff he oversaw the officials who negotiated the Centene deal and the $10 million sent to Hope Florida.

Testimony and messages identified Uthmeier as telling an intermediary nonprofit to seek money from Hope Florida. He controlled Keep Florida Clean, which received most of what came next.

DeSantis then named him attorney general.

He had never been elected. He is on the ballot now.

The Leon County grand jury finished the report in January. It sat sealed for seven months until CBS Miami made the leak public.

“Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida,” the grand jury wrote. “This decision was the original misappropriation, and no witness would take responsibility for making the decision or had any memory of who made it.”

Keep Florida Clean, the panel wrote, “was the prime recipient of the majority of the $10 million taxpayer funds.” From there the money did not stop. Keep Florida Clean sent millions to the Republican Party of Florida and to the Florida Freedom Fund, a DeSantis-tied committee.

The funds helped finance the campaign that defeated Amendment 3, Florida’s 2024 recreational marijuana measure.

Money also moved into committees active in the 2024 fights. Amendment 3 won a majority of the vote and still failed the 60 percent threshold required to amend the Florida Constitution.

Those later transfers were already on the public books. The presentment is what named them as taxpayer money.

The $10 million came from a $67 million settlement with Centene for overbilling Healthy Kids. Florida had the overbilling on the books since 2021.

The settlement sat until September 2024, weeks before voters decided Amendment 3. Officials rewrote it: $57 million to the state, $10 million to Hope Florida.

From there it moved fast: two $5 million grants to Secure Florida’s Future and Save Our Society From Drugs, two 501(c)(4) groups that do not have to disclose their donors in the same way a PAC does, then $8.5 million to Keep Florida Clean.

The state later reimbursed the federal government for the $10 million “in an abundance of caution.”

They called it a cherry on top. They repaid it as Medicaid.

Jurors flagged the speed. The settlement took seven days to fund. They wrote that they believed the rush was “due to the impending election which was just 45 days away.” Once the $10 million reached Hope Florida, it was gone within 25 days.

Virtually everyone involved, the grand jury noted, was a lawyer acting on other lawyers’ advice. “We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution,” the panel wrote.

Neither Ashley Moody nor Uthmeier nor the governor were called to testify. Some legal observers told the Miami Herald that the absence of Uthmeier’s testimony could mean he was treated as a target of the investigation.

The report said then-Attorney General Ashley Moody was aware of the plan to send $10 million from the Centene settlement to Hope Florida.

Then-Chief Deputy Attorney General John Guard raised objections with her. The deal was rewritten so the Agency for Health Care Administration, not the attorney general’s office, directed the funds. Moody then authorized Guard to sign that final version.

The Attorney General’s Office was one of four state agencies required to sign the original settlement. The four signatories were Guard, then-AHCA Secretary Jason Weida, Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky, and then–Department of Health Chief of Staff Cassandra Pasley.

John Guard signed it for the office. He told the grand jury he signed only after raising it with Moody and getting her approval. Guard also testified that he “esoterically” agreed the $10 million belonged to the state and that he had “political concerns” about spending it without legislative approval, concerns he shared with Moody, who authorized the signature anyway.

Moody could have stopped this. That was the line of authority.

She authorized the signature. Then she was sent to the Senate.

Other officials said they relied on her office. Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky noted the “atypical nature” of the $10 million earmark and signed after being told by counsel and by Guard there was nothing contrary to law.

Andrew Sheeran, then AHCA general counsel, said he conferred with multiple AG lawyers and an outside firm and believed the deal complied with Florida law.

No witness admitted who first decided that Hope Florida — the foundation tied to the governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis, whose public brand the charity was built to support — would receive the $10 million.

The gaps were not small. Witnesses contradicted one another. Asked who ordered the $10 million to Hope Florida, their memories drew blanks.

The chairman of the Hope Florida board testified that the foundation’s lawyer called to say a $10 million donation was coming.

That lawyer, Jeff Aaron, who has personal and professional ties to DeSantis and Uthmeier, told the grand jury he did not learn of the donation until the affair exploded months later. The panel called the contradiction “curious” and found the board chair “transparent and credible.”

Katie Strickland, a deputy chief of staff whose portfolio included AHCA, said the idea came from then-AHCA Secretary Jason Weida. Sheeran said the same. Weida said he could not recall whose idea it was. DeSantis later promoted Weida to chief of staff after naming Uthmeier attorney general.

The man who could not recall whose idea it was runs the governor’s office.

In January 2025, after DeSantis appointed Moody to the U.S. Senate, the seat that opened when Donald Trump made Marco Rubio secretary of state, the governor named Uthmeier attorney general. He was sworn in February 2025.

The attorney general named in that leak is James Uthmeier, now on the November ballot against Jose Javier Rodriguez. Moody faces state Rep. Angie Nixon.

The grand jury also asked the Legislature to close the hole: require settlement money to go into the General Fund, and put real rules and consequences on how entities like Hope Florida may use taxpayer dollars.

Sen. Rick Scott called the findings “deeply concerning.” “Money designated to help poor kids was diverted to political ads. Florida families deserve accountability, not more finger pointing in Tallahassee.”

DeSantis is term-limited. Uthmeier and Moody are not.

The jurors could not name who pulled the lever. They named who had the authority, who signed, who got the money, and who got promoted. DeSantis and Uthmeier can call that a hoax. The presentment is now public. The ballot is in November.

CBP is carrying out President Trump’s Executive Order 14165, Securing Our Borders, and Proclamation 10886, which declared a national emergency at the southern border after southwest encounters surged under the prior administration.

What is going up now is a modern upgrade. The Smart Wall, unveiled by DHS and Customs and Border Protection in October 2025, is a physical barrier and a persistent detection system built as one machine across nearly 2,000 miles: steel, sensors, roads, drones, and satellites.

CBP publishes that work on its Smart Wall Map, an interactive tracker of the entire 1,954-mile U.S.–Mexico border, from the Pacific near San Diego to the Gulf near Brownsville. The agency updates the markers weekly as construction moves. The map covers new primary wall, replacement wall, secondary wall, waterborne barrier, vehicle barrier, and detection-only miles—stretches of remote or park terrain where CBP is installing cameras, sensors, and towers instead of 30-foot steel.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Smart Wall Map, as of Sept. 1, 2026.

The map tracks the 1,954-mile southwest border by project status: awarded (design), under construction, and completed since Jan. 20, 2025. Colors separate new primary wall, replacement wall, secondary wall, waterborne barrier, vehicle barrier, and detection-only stretches. CBP’s table that day showed about 193 miles completed across types, with hundreds more under construction. Detection-only miles mark terrain where the agency is installing cameras and sensors instead of 30-foot steel, especially in Big Bend.

Trump’s first-term wall was focused on height, length, and presence: about 458 miles of mostly steel and barriers from 2017 to 2021, the bulk of it replacement fencing and only a few dozen miles of new wall on previously unfenced ground. The second-term version builds on that work as a technological operations system. Detection now sits beside the steel.

The wall is changing to match the technology now available. Contracts covering hundreds of miles of these upgrades have been awarded from the $46.5 billion set aside in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill, signed July 4. New and replacement primary walls use tall steel bollards. In many sectors a second parallel wall creates an enforcement zone with a road in between.

Along the Rio Grande, cylindrical waterborne barriers and nets are meant to block swimming and small-boat crossings. Vehicle barriers and low-profile rails appear in rugged stretches such as parts of Big Bend, where a 30-foot wall on a cliff top would be pointless.

The sensors sit on and around that steel. Ground sensors, radar, cameras, lighting, and acoustic monitors feed a constant stream. Autonomous towers watch the line without an agent in the cab.

Cameras and radar pick up movement. Onboard AI classifies what it sees as a person, a vehicle, or an animal, and discards the rest. When the signature matches a human or a truck, the tower sends an alert to a patrol unit instead of waiting for someone to notice a blur on a screen.

Satellites and aerial platforms extend the view beyond the fence line.

Drones can patrol at night. Persistent overhead coverage and AI systems ingest the combined feed so humans are not staring at every screen.

That is how CBP describes the Smart Wall at the system level: barrier plus cameras, ground sensors, autonomous towers, AI classification, drones, and satellite feed.

The plan is to add detection technology to hundreds of miles of already-built barrier and to cover additional remote or steep terrain with sensors alone rather than fencing. In agency language, that is “domain awareness” that does not depend on an agent standing at every mile.

CBP is deploying hundreds of miles of technology on the existing barrier, plus hundreds more of detection-only coverage in Big Bend and other stretches where terrain or remoteness makes a palisade useless. East of Santa Elena Canyon toward Amistad Reservoir, cliffs and wilderness make a tall wall pointless.

Officials talk of finishing the primary wall from the Pacific to the Gulf by the end of 2027 and completing the broader system in 2028. Independent reporting has noted that the weekly pace so far would have to accelerate sharply to hit the most aggressive public timelines. The map is the place to watch the building progress on the border.

Under the Biden-Harris years, with Vice President Kamala Harris tasked as the administration’s border czar, southwest Border Patrol encounters ran into the millions. Fiscal 2022 and 2023 each cleared two million encounters. Fiscal 2024 was still above 1.5 million between ports of entry.

Since Trump took office in 2025, that volume collapsed.

Fiscal 2025 still closed at 237,538 southwest Border Patrol apprehensions, the lowest total since 1970, because most of that year’s count was recorded before January 20. Fiscal 2026 is not closed. Through July, southwest Border Patrol apprehensions stood at about 81,000. The year is on pace for about 90,000, fewer than one average Biden-era month.

Daily crossings that had run above 5,000 fell toward a few hundred. The word is out: the Trump administration is not welcoming illegal aliens. CBP agents stopped turning people loose into the country after they crossed.

The $46.5 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill is meant to keep that border from reopening once the initial shock wears off. The interactive map shows where the steel and sensors are going in. Lasting results are already visible.

The southern border is no longer an open road. It’s being built as a modern detection system by a president committed to keeping it that way.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office turned a campaign creator list into a City Hall influencer distribution list. A Columbia Journalism Review investigation with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that the campaign’s Creators4Zohran network was rebuilt as “NYC Creators Announcements,” a Signal group of about 200 creators run by Emilia Rowland, director of new media and cultural communications.

This is a real ethics problem. Government speech legally belongs on the record. A campaign list exists to get a candidate elected. A city list exists to inform the public. Turning one into the other blurs political loyalty with official speech. Creators who boosted Mamdani on the trail now receive daily talking points, clips, and access from City Hall on an encrypted app.

This is ultimately about promoting Mamdani and expanding the Democratic Socialists of America’s reach. The only problem is that the audience never sees the man behind the curtain. Instead, they encounter a familiar account presenting the talking points as if they were its own.

Would the posts land the same way if viewers knew the script came directly from the mayor’s office, and that some of those voices are later paid as city vendors?

This is not volunteer civic media. It’s a paid, controlled distribution system designed to influence people without their knowledge. Political insiders who have worked this circuit have told the New York Post that these accounts do not work for free when hired for specific campaigns.

Some are taxpayer-funded contracts, routed through marketing agencies, that have paid the same creators $5,000 to $20,000 to push messaging on voting, health care, immigration, tenants’ rights, participatory budgeting, and composting.

Organic support does not require a staffed Signal channel, daily talking points, packaged clips, and a roster of 200 accounts. Organic commentary does not arrive preloaded with shiny clips from the mayor’s new-media shop.

The machine around this communications program is not a volunteer commune. It is a professional messaging apparatus: controlled talking points first, city list second, agency contracts on the side. Access is the bait. City work is the payoff.

On September 2, when asked about concerns that the encrypted Signal chats violate the city’s record-retention laws, Mamdani deflected by arguing that tapping social-media accounts is no different from engaging radio, television, and other media. The comparison is revealing. Traditional media appearances create a public record. A private Signal channel of 200 creators does not.

This is not the first time a New York City mayor’s office used the app. In 2019 and 2020, Bill de Blasio and his aides discussed official business on Signal. Watchdogs warned then that disappearing messaging collides with the city’s duty to keep public records and honor FOIL requests.

These creators are not pressing City Hall. They are being briefed, then posting. Campaigns have figured out that a familiar TikTok or Instagram account can move voters the way a television spot used to; except the post looks like a person talking, not an ad. Recruit creators, feed them language and clips, and let them post from their own accounts.

The Federal Trade Commission requires disclosure when a creator is paid to sell a product. It does not require one for political messaging. The only reliable way to learn that a creator was paid is to reconstruct the payment later in campaign-finance filings, often after the money has already moved through agencies.

Young audiences are the primary target. Pew Research finds that 21% of U.S. adults regularly get news from “news influencers,” including 38 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds. Adults under 30 are far more likely to encounter this content on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube—and to trust what they see. The posts often read like a friend’s take. That’s the point.

Call it outreach. Call it civic education. It is not regulated, and it is being used to influence millions. The money trail has to be followed. These accounts are not asking the hard questions a journalist would. They are producing the story because a financial guarantee is attached to it.

Access is the bait. City contracts are the payoff. The audience is never told the difference.