2026-09-29 05:18:57
On Monday, Nvidia, the multinational tech company—which has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in significant part thanks to its role in developing chips for AI processing and model training—announced the launch of a new safety platform that will monitor and contain AI agents, amid recent reports of “rogue AI” incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacking fiasco.
As my colleagues and I have previously reported, accounts of autonomous hacks by AI models belonging to OpenAI and its rivals have exacerbated concerns about the minimally regulated AI sector, even as leading figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that AI oversight is an “engineering problem” that the industry can largely handle without government involvement—echoing statements by President Trump, who has lashed out at demands to legislate guardrails around what he now calls “superintelligence.”
Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” Among company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures are Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.
Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” The company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures include, among others, Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.
But in the context of Huang’s remarks, the company’s proposals for developing safe AI are in effect being presented as an alternative to regulatory action. The idea that AI safety isn’t a problem for state agencies, or that the recent spate of rogue AI incidents don’t call for swift political action, amount to an argument that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can police themselves. It’s often AI firms’ own conduct, and the words and actions of their leaders, that have made self-regulation a hard sell—especially as public opinion sours towards the technology’s sprawling infrastructure demands and footprint in daily life.
Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.
2026-09-29 03:39:49
For the last year, the FBI’s co–No. 2 has been an anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses. Back when Andrew Bailey was still the attorney general of Missouri, he tried to thwart a pro–abortion rights constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot by arguing that “aborting unborn Missourians will have a deleterious impact on the [state’s] future tax base.” Later, in a lawsuit against the FDA over the abortion drug mifepristone, Bailey and other attorneys general claimed that telehealth access to abortion pills is “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers,” potentially leading to a “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds.”
As arguments against abortion go, these were “absolutely insane,” one of Bailey’s Democratic rivals for AG declared. But pronatalist-tinged lunacy is hardly disqualifying in today’s GOP. In the summer of 2025, Bailey became co–deputy director of the FBI, a position that gave him enormous power over the agency’s operations—including, potentially, investigations against abortion advocates, providers, and patients.
But on Monday, in a sudden move that was no doubt deeply disappointing to his ultra-right allies, Bailey announced he is leaving the agency at the end of the week. He reportedly told colleagues in an email that he needed to spend more time with his family and followed up with a post on X.
MS Now reported that Bailey was upset about the demotions of two senior counterterrorism agents in the FBI’s Washington field office, who were supposedly removed from their jobs because FBI leadership was dissatisfied with their handling of a threat assessment involving harassing phone calls made to Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller. MS Now also said Bailey was frustrated at not being named to replace Kash Patel as FBI director, “a proposal once floated [after Patel] made numerous missteps and generated headlines that were unfavorable to the administration.”
Even in the wake of his departure, Bailey’s history of aggressive investigations into abortion providers in Missouri offers a chilling glimpse into what might happen at the federal level, as the Trump 2.0 administration faces growing pressure to ban or even criminalize medication abortion. Newly minted US Attorney General Todd Blanche has all but confirmed that a crackdown is coming, saying he would review the government’s stance on enforcing the Comstock Act, a 19th-century federal anti-vice law targeting “obscene” items sent by mail or any other means of shipping. Although it has long been dormant, Comstock was never repealed, and abortion opponents—including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—insist it remains the law of the land. Bailey’s suit against the FDA claimed that allowing telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone violates Comstock, and he warned CVS and Walgreens that they’d run afoul of the statute by dispensing abortion meds.
At the FBI, Bailey was in a position to direct criminal investigations into the distribution of those medications—whether prescribed by clinicians across state lines or mailed by human rights groups to patients. In March, a group of Senate Republicans urged the FDA to work with federal law enforcement agencies to clamp down on mail-order services selling mifepristone. That’s exactly the kind of investigation the FBI would likely have overseen, said former federal public defender Peter Moyers, who represented a New York woman prosecuted by the DOJ during the first Trump administration for selling abortion pills.
Patel has expressed openness to criminal probes. During a September 15 hearing, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley claimed that abortion-pill manufacturers are “actively coaching” people on how to use the mail and “other means of communication and commerce” to evade state abortion bans. “Without naming any of the companies—I’m not saying we’re not [investigating] already—but any use of the federal mail system is a federal crime that falls to the FBI to investigate, especially in conjunction with a violation of a state law that’s already on the books,” Patel said. “So we’re committed to that.”
Bailey didn’t have much of a public profile and had never run for office when, in 2022, he was appointed to replace newly elected Sen. Eric Schmitt as Missouri’s attorney general. The job has been a launching pad for many of the state’s best-known conservative politicians, from former Gov. John Ashcroft (President George W. Bush’s first attorney general) to MAGA showboat Hawley.
While Bailey lacked the Ivy League pedigree of many members of the state’s political elite, what he did share with other prominent Missouri conservatives—including President Donald Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer; Trump White House counsel Will Scharf; and Ed Martin, the Stop the Stealer who helped write the GOP’s pro–fetal personhood platform in 2024—was an unwavering opposition to abortion. Bailey and his wife, Jessica, have four children, three of whom they adopted. In 2017, they lost a daughter who lived for only a few hours after birth. Bailey told the Missouri Independent that they’d received a fetal diagnosis “inconsistent with life” early in the pregnancy but chose to continue it anyway. “I have faith that God designs every human being in the womb,” he said then.
He also defended Missouri’s 2022 abortion ban that allowed the procedure only in the case of medical emergencies. “I want all kids to have an opportunity at life,” he said, arguing that the ban was “the proper policy position to protect life.”
“I have faith that God designs every human being in the womb.”
Nonetheless, based on his work in the governor’s office, reproductive justice advocates had expected him to be “reasonable,” says Katy Erker-Lynch, executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization PROMO. That assessment ended up being “absolutely wrong.” Within months of taking office, Bailey was among the first red-state AGs to target providers of gender-affirming care, demanding that they turn over unredacted medical records of transgender minors—a move Trump’s Justice Department would emulate in 2025. He followed up by issuing an emergency rule that would have drastically limited access to such care for patients of all ages, withdrawing it only after the legislature passed its own ban on care for minors.
His focus on abortion bordered on obsessive. In 2024, he joined a lawsuit by religious doctors against the FDA over its regulation of mifepristone—a move that ended up keeping the litigation alive after the Supreme Court ruled the doctors didn’t have standing to sue. That same year, Bailey accused a Kansas City–area Planned Parenthood clinic of illegally “transporting” minors to help them obtain abortions, citing a staged sting video produced by the far-right activist group Project Veritas.
Meanwhile, he fought ferociously to keep Amendment 3, a voter initiative aimed at enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, off the 2024 ballot, delaying the gathering of signatures and otherwise gumming up the process until even the GOP-dominated state Supreme Court ran out of patience. When he lost that campaign and voters went on to repeal Missouri’s abortion ban by a 52 to 48 percent margin, he litigated aggressively to keep restrictions in place, while accusing the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates of providing medication abortions when they were not. Those efforts to subvert the amendment ultimately failed, despite a new state law that gave him special powers to intervene when courts blocked laws, and abortions have resumed. Now Missouri conservatives are trying to overturn the 2024 vote with their own ballot measure, also called Amendment 3, this November.
In one of his final anti-abortion initiatives as AG, Bailey sued the national office of Planned Parenthood for false advertising, arguing that it made misleading claims when it said that medication abortion is safer than Tylenol. Florida’s AG followed with a similar suit a few months later. Both cases remain active.
Records and internal correspondence obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight show that some of Bailey’s strategies may have come directly from anti-abortion organizations. For example, his claims that repealing Missouri’s abortion ban could lead to billions in lost tax revenue and federal funding echoed comments submitted to the state auditor’s office by Missouri Right to Life and the Heritage Foundation. Missouri Right to Life’s director also sent the Project Veritas sting video to Bailey’s office. Two years before Bailey filed the false advertising suit, his office received a memo from Students for Life of America outlining how state consumer protection laws could be used to attack access to medication abortion. Students for Life is now pushing the DOJ to revive the Comstock Act.
In response to questions about whether Bailey was present when Students for Life met with DOJ officials in May, the FBI said Bailey oversaw “a wide range of operational matters and interacts with a spectrum of stakeholders,” adding that he has “dedicated his career to upholding the constitution and enforcing the law.”
Bailey’s efforts on abortion didn’t distract from his fealty to the broader MAGA cause. He secured a “historic” $24 billion default judgment against the People’s Republic of China, among others, for misleading the public about supposedly starting the Covid pandemic, a legally pointless case he inherited from his predecessor, Schmitt. (China is now countersuing for $50 billion.) He tried to investigate the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for reporting on extremist content on Elon Musk’s X but was halted by a court. In a move that seemed calculated to prove his bona fides as a potential Trump attack dog, he sued the state of New York in the summer of 2024, arguing—unsuccessfully—that its prosecution of the once and future president for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels improperly interfered with Trump’s campaign.
After Trump’s victory, Bailey was reported to be on the short list to head the DOJ but, according to The New York Times, was deemed to be “too laid back” and “lackluster” for the president’s tastes. He lost out first to former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz—who was forced to withdraw after sex trafficking and drug allegations proved unacceptable even to his former congressional colleagues—and then to ex–Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. (Gaetz has denied the allegations against him.) Back in Missouri, Bailey doubled down on the kinds of cases sure to keep him on Trump’s radar, suing IBM over its diversity policies and Starbucks for allegedly discriminating against straight white men. IBM settled; Starbucks won a dismissal.
Eight months into Trump’s second term, Bailey finally got the nod to join the FBI as co–deputy director. It’s not clear why he was plucked for that role; what does seem clear is that far-right podcaster and ex–Secret Service agent Dan Bongino—who’d been doing the job solo for a few months—needed some adult supervision. (In response to questions for this story, the agency said Bailey’s “experience conducting complex investigations at the state level informs his management” in his FBI role.) After Bongino quit last winter, complaining about his long hours, career agent Christopher Raia became Bailey’s co-deputy.
In contrast with Patel, Bailey rarely made headlines in his FBI role. One notable exception was the agency’s raid in January on the Fulton County, Georgia, election office at the center of conspiracies around the 2020 election. Bailey, who has peddled election denialism, personally oversaw the raid, alongside then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Two Democratic senators called their presence during the search “unprecedented.”
The timing of Bailey’s resignation seems especially odd given his role in overseeing election-related matters at the FBI during the critical midterm elections. The Wall Street Journal noted that Bailey is stepping down amid massive staff turnover and other turmoil at the nation’s most important law enforcement agency.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we have delivered historic results in our mission to Make America Safe Again,” Bailey wrote on X. “I am confident Director Patel will continue to reform the FBI, combat violent crime, defend the homeland, ensure strong organizational accountability, and restore public trust in this institution of excellence.” In his own post, Patel said Bailey’s “fantastic contribution instituting critical reforms” to the bureau “will live on.”
There’s nothing to suggest that Bailey’s departure will deter abortion foes from continuing to press the Trump administration from clamping down on abortion pills. Federal agencies have a host of laws to weaponize should they decide to come after providers, including Comstock or even the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, according to Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Senate Republicans have called on federal agencies to work together to stop pills from coming into the country and being mailed between states, an effort the FBI typically would coordinate via a task force. Meanwhile, other diehard abortion opponents have been moving into influential positions in the administration, including pro–fetal personhood lawyer Josh Craddock at the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel and Dr. Heidi Overton, Trump’s new pick to lead the FDA. No one expects any big moves from the administration on the abortion front before the midterms. Then all bets are off.
A version of this story appeared on Autonomy News, a worker-owned publication covering reproductive rights and justice. Follow Autonomy News on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, Threads, and LinkedIn.
2026-09-29 02:25:30
On March 31, David Flippo, the Republican nominee for Congress in northern Nevada, loaned his campaign $600,000, according to federal records. In doing so, he massively increased his topline fundraising numbers for a quarter—the last before Nevada’s primary elections—in which he brought in less than $20,000 from outside supporters. Within weeks, Flippo’s campaign repaid him $12,000 of the money he had lent. Two days later, Nevada public records show he was listed as a debtor to a company that specializes in financing home improvement projects. The agreement was collateralized by “FLOORING” at the Flippos’ Las Vegas home.
The financing statement is one of many transactions, detailed in records obtained by Mother Jones, that do not typically fit the profile of an independently wealthy candidate who has reported providing his campaign operation nearly $2.5 million over his past two congressional bids. Adding to the mystery over the source of his funding: Flippo, dating back to his first run for Congress, has failed to submit the required disclosures that would illuminate his personal financial position.
Flippo’s campaign did not respond to a request I sent on September 14 to discuss the missing financial disclosures. The campaign also did not respond to a follow-up that included detailed questions about Flippo’s personal and campaign finances.
Between January 2025 and June 2026, FEC records show Flippo making numerous loans to his campaign committee worth more than $1.6 million in total. About two-thirds of that money came on the final days of the quarterly FEC reporting periods that help shape perceptions of a campaign’s relative strength.
While running for Congress in 2023, Flippo was required to file a financial disclosure form listing his assets. In 2024, the Nevada Republican should have provided the House Clerk with a second report. By May 2026, after launching a new congressional bid, Flippo should have submitted two additional financial disclosures.
Instead, Flippo has submitted nothing, according to House financial disclosure records. The result is that the public has no way of knowing through the normal disclosure channels what assets the Nevada candidate may hold and what conflicts of interest they may raise. Without financial disclosures, there is no clear way to determine where the money he has loaned his campaign may have come from. Nor does his employment history provide an obvious answer.
Previously unreported Nevada records I obtained raise further questions about how Flippo would have been able to loan so much to his campaigns. In Clark County, where Flippo lived until earlier this year, property and mortgage records show the candidate owns one home: a property in Las Vegas that he and his wife purchased in 2020 with a 30-year mortgage for $565,000. Financing statements also show Flippo being named as a debtor in relation to two apparent home improvement projects during the 2026 election cycle.
In most years, Flippo would be a shoo-in to join Congress next year. In June, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel won his Nevada primary by 12 points after securing an endorsement from Donald Trump. In the general election, he is running to replace retiring Rep. Mark Amodei in a district Trump won by 14 points in 2024.
But Flippo’s right-wing politics, the fact that he moved to the district only earlier this year, and Trump’s unpopularity have made the seat unusually competitive. He has also drawn a strong Democratic opponent in Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a former state assembly majority leader and social worker who once represented Nevada in the Miss America pageant.
Flippo’s status as a recent transplant led to predictable accusations that he was a “carpetbagger.” In the primary, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo and Amodei endorsed former State Senate Minority Leader James Settelmeyer. Amodei, who has represented the district since 2011, also made his distaste for Flippo clear. The district’s next representative, he argued, “should not be a 30-day ‘move in’ backed by a Vegas-paid manager.” (Amodei has since refused to endorse Flippo in the general election and has accused him of running an “absolutely scurrilous” primary campaign.)
Flippo ran well to the right of Settelmeyer and Amodei, who is conservative but not especially so by the standards of the Trump-era GOP. Flippo gave Trump’s second term an A+, announced that his first bill in Congress would seek to ban Islamic religious law, and relied on a campaign aide best known for attempting to recruit members of the Proud Boys to protest ballot counting in Nevada in 2020.
His hard-right stance has attracted the support of Republicans like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a Freedom Caucus member with ties to the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. Other primary supporters included former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the far-right former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Earlier this month, the Center for Politics—a nonpartisan election forecaster—shifted its rating of the race from “Safe Republican” to “Likely Republican.” In the event of a November blue wave, the race would be on the outer edge of what Democrats could hope to win.
Brendan Fischer, the director of strategic investigations at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, explained that financial disclosures are particularly important for helping to establish whether candidates actually have enough money to make the loans they are reporting. “The clearest example of that is George Santos,” Fischer said. “An early indicator that something was amiss was the fact that the large personal loans that he reported making to his campaign did not match the meager assets that he listed on his financial disclosure report.” (Santos filed three financial disclosure forms before entering Congress in 2023.)
Flippo’s campaign treasurer, Thomas Datwyler, also serves as the treasurer for scandal-plagued Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and has been accused of hiding the fact that he served in the same role for Santos. Both Santos and Ogles reported nonexistent loans.
It is illegal to report fake loans to the Federal Election Commission. The main advantage of doing so is that it can make a campaign appear stronger than it actually is. Fischer said that a “candidate might report fake loans to artificially inflate their fundraising numbers, but that is only possible if the money is actually fake.” He explained that the “much more concerning possibility is that the money is real, but came from a source other than the candidate—for example, that a wealthy donor secretly gave excessive contributions to the candidate, which the candidate then falsely reported as personal loans to their campaign.” (Santos reported the fabricated loans while working with a different treasurer, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to conspiring with Santos to lie to the FEC.)
When The Washington Sun reported on Flippo’s missing financial disclosures in August, Datwyler said that it was because Flippo was in the process of closing a business and moving assets into a blind trust. He added, “That is a complicated process, and his financial disclosure will be filed once that is complete.”
Datwyler’s explanation “does not add up at all,” Fischer said. He noted that setting up a blind trust does “not give you license to ignore financial disclosure deadlines.” Fischer added that Flippo is still legally required to disclose the assets he held while campaigning before any blind trust may have been set up.
Earlier this month, the Campaign Legal Center requested that the House Ethics Committee investigate missing disclosure reports from more than 60 House candidates. The letter highlights Flippo and two other House candidates who failed to submit financial disclosure forms despite each reporting loaning their campaigns more than $1 million. A day earlier, a Reno voter also requested that the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section investigate Flippo for failing to file his financial disclosures.
Flippo has put his service in the Air Force between 1985 and 2009 at the center of his campaign biography. After leaving the military, he spent the next decade doing preventive maintenance work for BP’s oil operations in Alaska. In 2014, while still working for BP, Flippo and his wife purchased their first home in Las Vegas, according to Clark County records. Three years later, the Flippos sold that home and bought another Las Vegas property for $385,000. Clark County records show that they took out a $375,000 mortgage to buy it. (The document does not disclose the interest rate.)
That same year, Flippo became the owner of a hobby shop in St. George, Utah. According to public records, Flippo’s personal property in the city consists of a parking space for an RV. He is in the process of selling the lot for about $80,000, per a listing posted on Zillow. Flippo and his wife bought that property after the retired Air Force officer pivoted to a new career as an financial adviser in 2019 for First Command, a financial company that works with military families.
At least initially, Flippo does not appear to have had substantial liquid assets while working as a financial adviser. In early 2020, Clark County records show that a representative for a Nevada LLC signed paperwork to sell the Flippos the Las Vegas home they currently own. Two days later, Flippo and his wife took on $68,000 of debt. About two weeks later, the couple officially bought their Las Vegas home for $565,000 with the assistance of a $423,750 mortgage, according to public records. They then sold their previous Las Vegas residence and satisfied the $68,000 debt. The sequence suggests that Flippo may have needed the assistance of a bridge loan for his 2020 home purchase. A few years later, when he launched a bid for a Las Vegas-area congressional district, he began reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal donations to his campaign.
Flippo was still working for First Command during the 2024 congressional run, when he narrowly lost a primary after reportedly putting in more than $700,000 of his own money. Later in 2024, First Command fired Flippo after he allegedly “violated numerous company policies and regulatory regulations related to electronic communications, books and records,” according to a disclosure filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. (The firm reported that “no client harm was involved.”) In March 2025, after about four months of unemployment, he began his current job working for an affiliate of the wealth management firm LPL Financial.
Flippo initially filed last year to run again for Nevada’s 4th Congressional District, which is located in and around where he lived in Las Vegas. But after Amodei announced his retirement this February, Flippo said he would run to replace the congressman in the northern Nevada district. He soon moved into a rental property in the district.
Between January 2025 and June 2026, FEC records show Flippo making numerous loans to his campaign committee worth more than $1.6 million in total. About two-thirds of that money came on the final days of the quarterly FEC reporting periods that help shape perceptions of a campaign’s relative strength.
Public records reveal that Flippo entered into financing agreements for what appear to be home improvement projects during the same period he reported having enough liquid assets to bankroll much of his campaign.
In September 2025, according to FEC records, Flippo’s campaign repaid the candidate $4,000. Two days later, a financing statement, which I obtained from the Nevada secretary of state’s office, listed the Flippos as debtors to Hatch Bank as part of an agreement under which “SOLAR EQUIPMENT” serves as collateral. Similarly, on April 28, Flippo received a $12,000 loan repayment from his campaign, according to FEC records. Two days later, Flippo was named in the financing statement collateralized by “FLOORING” at his Las Vegas home.
The campaign has also reported receiving eyebrow-raising donations from Flippo’s relatives. About a dozen members of the Flippo family and members of the family his sister married into are recorded as having donated the legal maximum of $7,000 to his current campaign.
In one case, Flippo’s niece and nephew were both reported as donating $7,000 on the same day in June 2025. No other donations from those relatives appear in FEC records. Both are listed in Flippo campaign records as being students. One graduated from college earlier this year, according to her LinkedIn page. Her younger sibling, who appears to have attended high school as recently as 2023, is an actor whose credits include minor roles.
It is not clear where the money for these reported donations came from. Under campaign finance law, it is illegal for individuals to make so-called straw donations that are funded by someone else. Fischer noted that it can raise “red flags when people who would not otherwise appear to have the finances to make a contribution are all of a sudden making large contributions for the first time.” (Flippo’s brother, niece, and nephew did not respond to requests for comment sent to numbers listed for them in public records.)
Flippo’s campaign reported spending $2.1 million through June. According to FEC records, about 70 percent of that money has been routed through a campaign firm founded by Rory McShane, a GOP consultant with a long history of working for far-right election deniers including Gosar and former Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant. (In 2022, I reported on questionable loans Marchant made to his campaign and what appeared to be violations of Nevada campaign finance law on his part. McShane did not respond to the questions sent to him and the Flippo campaign.)
Political ad spending records maintained by the Federal Communications Commission show more than $500,000 of television advertising contracts and invoices in the Reno area for the Flippo campaign during the primary. Those records are submitted to the FCC by local television stations and cable providers. They help confirm that significant sums are being spent by the Flippo campaign, but they do not show the source of the funds the candidate has reported loaning to his campaign.
Flippo has also benefited from the more than $350,000 that two of his siblings are reported to have donated to a super PAC called American Honor. His previous campaign committee and the super PAC share many ties: They were established on the same day in 2022 and have both paid companies affiliated with McShane, the right-wing political consultant through whose firm most of Flippo’s spending has been routed. Flippo and the super PAC also use the same treasurer: Datwyler, who was accused in a 2024 complaint submitted to the Justice Department of having a “long history of running roughshod over federal campaign finance law and the regulations of the FEC, where he has repeatedly filed or caused to be filed false reports.” (There is no indication that the Justice Department pursued the matter.)
Datwyler is perhaps best known for having been named in an FEC filing as Santos’ new treasurer while the disgraced then-congressman’s career imploded. At the time, Datwyler’s attorney told me, other reporters, and the FEC that his client was not Santos’ treasurer and that his name had been added incorrectly. But the attorney later retracted that claim after the Daily Beast reported that Datwyler had been Santos’ de facto treasurer, doing the work while a friend held the title on paper.
Datwyler also kept working Ogles after it was revealed that the Tennessee congressman had reported a nonexistent $320,000 loan to his 2022 campaign. (Ogles lost his August primary despite a Trump endorsement.) “He’s a sitting member of Congress, so, you know, you don’t want to lose them as clients, right,” Datwyler told congressional investigators looking into Ogles’ campaign finance practices. “So, you kind of just have to deal with certain things sometimes.” (Datwyler did not respond to questions sent to him on Friday.)
It has now been more than a month since Datwyler said that Flippo was tying up some loose ends before finally filing a financial disclosure. Last week, Flippo’s campaign told a Reno TV station that the process was still ongoing and would be completed soon. It was better, the campaign claimed, to be right and late than wrong and early. Flippo’s first disclosure was due in May 2023.
2026-09-29 02:08:59
After a week of intensifying public pressure and reporting from Cornell’s independent daily newspaper, prosecutors in New York have reopened a criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 gang rape of a former student at the campus’s Chi Phi fraternity house.
The student, identified as Jane Doe, filed a civil complaint earlier this month accusing Cornell of failing to protect her and choosing instead to level minimal punishment against the seven fraternity members who allegedly “plied [her] with alcohol and drugs to the point of intoxication” before raping her. Those actions, the complaint alleged, included temporary suspensions and opportunities for some of the fraternity members to mitigate those suspensions by submitting essays.
“We want to reexamine whether there’s additional evidence that we were not aware of in November of 2024,” Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten told ABC News, “that exists now that would change our assessment of the case and would result in the grand jury finding that there was criminal conduct.”
The complaint also included an image from a Snapchat text thread wherein one of the men appeared to encourage others to take advantage of the “free pussy” upstairs, referring to Doe. An attorney for one of the defendants denied the allegations. Speaking through the same attorney, the defendant claimed that he had nothing more than “thoughtlessly” engage in a text thread.
“Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.”
Cornell on Monday said that it welcomed the new investigation but vehemently defended the school’s handling of the case.
“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” a university relations official wrote in a statement. “A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported, and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.”
In a searing op-ed published last week, editors of the Cornell Daily Sun took the university to task for failing to protect its students, while condemning administrators for creating an academic environment where “enough ambiguity, enough he-said-she-said, enough familial connections, enough money will allow you to get off scot-free.”
“We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story,” the op-ed read, adding that “Cornell has failed [Doe]. Cornell has failed us.”
“We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance,” a Meta spokesperson confirmed. “The post is now fully visible for adults.”
Details from the civil complaint have since ricocheted across social media and ignited intense public outrage.
“After reading about the young woman who was gang raped at her college by her friend and school peers, I’m feeling uneasy and sick and anxious,” the actor Florence Pugh wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday. “I’m processing quietly and watching everything and everyone and every man.”
Soon after, Pugh accused Meta of suppressing her post.
“A label was initially applied to the post, warning people that the content may be sensitive before they click through,” Meta confirmed to Mother Jones. “We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance. The post is now fully visible for adults.”
On the same day that the Tompkins County district attorney announced it was revisiting the investigation, the Trump administration finalized its plan to repeal Title IX, the Biden-era rule that mandated a formal process for schools to respond to sexual misconduct claims.
2026-09-29 01:48:15
This story is part of the Life After Roe package, appearing this week, which looks at the surprising resilience of the abortion access movement in the Dobbs era—and at how hardliners are doubling down on their efforts to ban abortion nationwide.
This spring, the Mother Jones team heard a lot of talking points from anti-abortion leader Kristan Hawkins as we followed her around the country for a documentary. The one she most urgently wants progressive readers and viewers to consider: Abortion is wrong and should be banned nationwide.
Hawkins has led Students for Life of America for 20 years, and because of my work—including my recent book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights—she’s been on my radar for much of that time. Hawkins was once a fringe figure, but as the movement has shifted ever further to the right since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, she has become a leader of the anti-abortion mainstream.
Hawkins has been mobilizing conservative students on college campuses since her friend Charlie Kirk was still in middle school, rallying an army of young people to elect hardline politicians and lobby for draconian abortion bans. And many of the strategies she pioneered worked: The day Roe was overturned, she was on the podium outside the Supreme Court, cheering the new Dobbs era.
But four years later, things haven’t gone quite the way the anti-abortion movement planned, thanks to an explosion in abortion-pill access. These days, as she debates on college campuses using the format Kirk popularized, Hawkins is constantly confronted by an even farther-right faction of her own movement that wants to lock women up for having abortions. And she’s losing traction with her target audience, young women, who are more progressive than ever before.
It turns out, being a female version of Charlie Kirk can bring heat from all sides.
But Hawkins has kept at it, because she understands changing the law is not enough. Instead, her mission is to make abortion unthinkable. To do that, she knows she needs to change the culture—and reach progressive women—which is why she let us tag along while she put on makeup in an airport bathroom, filmed a botched abortion-pill sting operation in the parking lot of the Space Center Houston, and discussed whether abortion medication might be tainting her favorite energy drink.
Along the way, we saw Hawkins try to defend extreme positions at odds with how the majority of Americans think. It was an illuminating, and unsettling, look not just at Hawkins, but at the entire anti-abortion movement at a critical, and unexpected, crossroads.
Top image: Illustration by Blake Cale; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty, Allison Shelley/Getty, Anna Moneymaker/Getty
2026-09-29 00:51:07
President Donald Trump has become the subject of bipartisan pushback after another taxpayer-funded television ad aired during at least two Sunday NFL games.
“We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country,” Trump says in the ad. “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
“Don’t worry, using taxpayer dollars to run ominous campaign ads of the President has been done before and is completely legal…in banana republics,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted on X on Sunday night in reaction to the latest ad.
The ad is nearly identical to one Trump posted on Truth Social in January 2024, which included Trump’s presidential campaign logo. In place of the logo is now the message: “Paid for by the US government.” The audio of both ads strongly resembles part of a campaign speech he delivered in Claremont, New Hampshire, in November 2023 in which he used autocratic language, referring to himself as “a very proud election denier.”
“It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said about the first ad that aired Wednesday. “But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like [former far-right prime minister of Hungary] Viktor Orbán.”
Both Republican lawmakers have a history of criticizing Trump.
On Thursday, congressional Democrats on appropriations committees wrote a letter to White House chief of staff Susan Wiles, calling the first ad “the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea.”
“We write to demand that you immediately take this ad off the air and discipline the Federal employees who knowingly violated Federal law in working on and paying for this advertisement,” they continued, asserting the ad violated anti-propaganda law. “In addition, we demand a full account and breakdown of all Federal funds used to create and air this ad.”
On Friday, the White House called the ads “public service announcements” that are “very clearly not campaign ads” as Trump isn’t on the ballot and the president does not request any action. The White House pointed to other administrations that have run public service announcements to “explain policy and make the case for the nation’s direction,” including President George W. Bush’s anti-drug ads that played during the Super Bowl and President Barack Obama’s ads on the Affordable Care Act.
But as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz noted Friday: “Trump’s supposed PSA says and does very little beyond extolling Trump. Usually, a public service announcement announces something. This one announces pure right-wing vibes.”
