David Flores

There’s an open secret in Major League Baseball: MLB teams routinely make handshake deals with young Dominican players, an informal system that has created perfect market conditions for predatory moneylenders. Watch @ggarciaroberts.bsky.social break down his investigation 👇

"Sheriff: Franklin County detective fired for misuse of Flock Camera system" www.wral.com/news/local/f... "The Franklin County Sheriff's Office has stopped using Flock surveillance cameras after it found an investigator used the cameras to track an unnamed person."

Good piece from @dgraham.bsky.social on how the failure to appoint people to key positions undermines Trump's ability to get things done. The mass gutting of civil service positions compounds the problem. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

The Intimate Toilette (A Woman Urinating), by François Boucher, 1760s

Dozens of American military personnel joined Ecuadorean police in drug raids in the country, marking a new level of direct U.S. involvement. on.wsj.com/4yb4EPy

Trump's foreign policy is not isolationist. On the contrary, his ideologues want to build an international empire run by far-right political movements who serve American crypto, mineral and tech companies, many with links to the president. Read more here: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

“The worst place ever I’ve been in my life," Sakariye Abdi Mohamed, a Somali asylum seeker, told me over the phone from Guantanamo Bay last week. Sakariye is one of 7 or 8 Somalis who are being held at Gitmo. They say guards tell them the order to keep Somalis at the facility comes from DC.

EXCLUSIVE: A new report recovers nearly one million link shortener URLs used by OpenAI's agents while hacking Hugging Face. The agents attempt to message other chatbots like Claude, solve CAPTCHAs and exfiltrate Hugging Face's internal Slack messages. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/t...

No duh.

BREAKING 🚨 🚨 🚨 President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms, U.S. officials said. FREE WSJ GIFT ARTICLE 🎁 www.wsj.com/world/middle...

30-year fixed mortgage rate jumps sharply Thursday to 7.45%

Here's a graphic that does a better job of conveying the point than my original post: even by the (insane) standards of the first Trump administration, #SCOTUS is receiving—and granting—a truly unprecedented number of applications for emergency relief from the federal government:

Wild stuff. Sheri Mecklenberg, career prosecutor accused of misconduct in Broadview 6 case, resigns from DOJ. The NYT obtained her scathing resignation letter, in which she says the U.S. attorney directed her to bring felony charges over her objection. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Our new Strength In Numbers/ @Verasight.io poll: 58% say the U.S. is worse off under Trump vs Biden, 24% say it’s better www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-09-25...

Good morning from the ICE facility in Broadview, IL. As ICE vehicles trickle in and out of the lot, a small group of Chicagoland locals are holding a prayer service for those impacted by deportation efforts. The area around the facility is open, contrasting prior months of "protest zones."

A sample of 5,000 alleged agents seen by 404 Media includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and details on FBI employees' spouses.

Every taxpayer, no matter your party, should be outraged by this. Your money is being used to fund campaign ads for Trump. It’s totally completely illegally. He’s stealing your money for his campaign. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/u...

Two months after the CEO of defense contractor Navatek used a shell company to send $150,000 to the Susan Collins super PAC, the senator committed to getting Navatek $32 million in naval contracts, according to company emails.

The DOJ dropped 23,000 criminal cases — including hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime and drugs — while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of Trump’s second term. (Published March)

NEW FROM ME: The US Air Force has done dozens of secret ICE flights to Honduras since early June, in the largest and most regular use of their aircraft in Trump's second term. Read it here now, or read it in NYT six months from now. gillianbrockell.com/the-air-forc...

Exclusive: The Trump administration has deported more than 25,000 people to at least 28 countries even though the migrants are not their own citizens, according to data analyzed by The Post. Migrants say they have been subjected to inhumane conditions.

The DC Circuit has unsealed about 600 pages of litigation material from the Trump investigations at my request. They include a written 2-1 opinion and dissent (Millett, Wilkins, Katsas) rejecting Trump's attempt to block Mike Pence from testifying before a grand jury www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/u...

Put together some video from my time covering Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago/Broadview (including off topic behind the scenes clips, like when I invented a new way to lock myself out of my hotel room).

From 16,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle. "The state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen."

JUST IN: A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction upbraiding ICE for mass arrests that have strained detention facilities and forced detainees all over the country into "overcrowded, squalid, and degrading rooms for excessive periods of time" www.nysd.uscourts.gov/sites/defaul...

New — I had the opportunity to see NAZA, the documentary freaking out the Israeli government because of its horrifying firsthand descriptions of the way the IDF has used AI to target and massacre Palestinian civilians. My thoughts on the film’s damning revelations, and the banality of evil:

Corresponds to national environment around D+9 or 10. As I wrote when our forecast came out, indicators are in many cases even better for Democrats than in 2018 (www.gelliottmorris.com/p/democrats-...). This is firm “big blue wave“ territory

#BREAKING: Over dissents from the three Dem. appointees, #SCOTUS has *granted* the Trump administration’s request to freeze a district court injunction that had blocked the mail-in ballots executive order. But Trump’s EO remains blocked by a different injunction in a different case—at least for now:

In Tapachula, @theatlantic.com's Kevin Sieff finds a city that "looks and feels the way towns in northern Mexico along the U.S. border once did—a dumping ground for those expelled from the United States and a gathering place for those snagged on their way north." www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

Over the past two decades, governmental bodies, with the help of the courts, have degraded Texas’s public information apparatus—once, one of the most transparency-friendly in the U.S.—piece by piece, nearly hollowing it out. Here's how they did it. www.texasmonthly.com/news-politic...

The central problem with Chief Justice Roberts’s Friday afternoon “administrative” stay in the White House ballroom case isn’t just the lack of any clear standards for such relief; it’s that it’s hard to see how, *whatever* the standards are, this case could satisfy them. Me in today’s “One First”:

In West Texas, a century-old adobe church built by Mexican American families is being restored as the border wall construction approaches. It’s one of dozens of sacred sites across the Southwest now endangered, a fight that’s as much about immigration as lost history. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/u...

The @houstonchronicle.com editorial board follows up with a family we covered as part of the Pulitzer Prize winning series on dangerous railroad crossings: First, he lost his brother. Now ICE wants to take his dad. How much hardship is enough? www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/edit...

Missouri's Amendment 3 would restore an abortion ban with limited exceptions, but its advertising is focused on a different provision: banning gender transition care for minors. The campaign never explicitly states it would repeal the constitutional right to abortion voters approved 2 years ago.

For the last seven months straight, the U.S. government has refused to process immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries around the world; including visas for spouses of U.S. citizens. Today, a federal judge ruled the policy flagrantly illegal.

This is fascism.

The Trump economy: $40tn debt, 6.7% mortgages and $5 diesel ft.trib.al/yjvQxNr

The president has proposed building a ballroom at his private golf club in Bedminster that would be used for holiday events and weddings. on.wsj.com/4gsyk3d

Remarkable how little political noise it's made here in the US that a major American naval base in Bahrain was basically destroyed, and that this was kept quiet for five months www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/u...

There are going to be Democrats who say we shouldn’t rip it all out — it’s already built, we have other priorities — but removing the visible signs of Trumpism is absolutely necessary.

Yesterday, Aug. 20, was one of the worst days of ICE flights I've seen. -At least 82 ICE flights -At least 15 were removal flights, including Haiti -At least 5 removals were third-country removals (Cameroon, Costa Rica, Liberia, Paraguay, Rwanda) -Plus 1 emergency return for reasons unknown

Alarming escalation of the admin's cruel deportation campaign: over 24 hrs, we tracked flights carrying third country nationals from the U.S. to Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Paraguay & flights deporting Mexicans to Guatemala, Honduras & Costa Rica www.humanrightsfirst.org/library/ice-...

The number of U.S. service members reported wounded or killed in the Iran war has jumped to 774, after the Pentagon added scores of new troops to the wounded list in the last few days.

New at FiftyPlusOne: Rural and suburban voters haven’t looked this Democratic since 2018 blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/rural-and-...

We're at the "banality of evil" phase of ICE's dogged pursuit of prison space. The days of flashy "ICE buys warehouse" headlines are behind us. Ahead are less conspicuous ones like "ICE awards construction contract." Those are equally important. Boring is what "efficient" looks like.

How the Supreme Court could use Trump’s ballroom to gut environmental law www.vox.com/politics/499...

Chief Justice Roberts has issued an “administrative” stay In the ballroom case—which effectively allows Trump to keep doing what he’s doing while the full Court decides whether to let him keep working indefinitely while the case moves forward (which it probably will, given this intervention).

BREAKING: The editor of military newspaper Stars and Stripes says he has been fired for insubordination after calling any censorship a "red line."

Sleep now in the fire?

Among other reforms, it cannot stand that the President can sue everyone all the time but never face any lawsuits or criminal charges himself because he’s president. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/u...