Page A166From§Each · the News book28 September 2026
News
By SalStaff Writer · the noon edition, 28 September 2026
Networks were suing by September 23 on First Amendment grounds, and the arrangement that makes daily coverage possible went dark for four days.
Then it reassembled. On Friday, September 25, five networks were back in the pool, live, for President Xi Jinping's arrival, carried without incident. The three banned outlets were still outside. What came back was the machinery, not the guest list: CNN, MS NOW and Politico remained barred, and nobody at the White House said how many more days that ban was meant to run.
Three days later, on Monday, September 28, the president floated tearing the press room out and putting in an indoor pool. The same week the pool proved it could walk out and come back, he suggested draining the room of reporters entirely and filling it with water instead. The Hill reported that same day that the networks intend to keep showing up regardless — pool coverage continues, the CNN block stands, and the president is talking about swimming laps where the briefing lectern used to be.
The room that holds the press pool is being discussed, this week, as a literal pool. The White House press pool — the arrangement by which five networks pool cameras and share the feed so reporters do not have to fight for one spot at the rope line — held a boycott, held a lawsuit, and held its ground long enough to be standing there when the president suggested replacing it with a place to swim.
The five networks came back. CNN, MS NOW and Politico did not. Whoever is counting the days should keep a running number, because right now nobody in the building will give one.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the noon edition, 28 September 2026
The White House says the arrangement holds. On September 14, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that Ukraine and Russia had agreed not to strike each other's energy targets, after he criticized President Volodymyr Zelensky for driving up Russian diesel prices with strikes on refineries. It arrived a day after a Ukrainian drone killed two people in Russia's Tatarstan region and Russian drones struck the port of Odesa — the last exchange either side was confirmed making before the fourteen words went up.
For two weeks, that held, in the sense that nobody filed a wire report saying otherwise. Then, on September 28, Russia sent a wave of drones into Kyiv during daylight hours. At least seven people were killed and more than fifty wounded. The strikes hit apartment buildings, office blocks, and the National Academy of Sciences, described in the wire reports as a cultural landmark.
None of those is an energy facility. That is the position available to anyone defending the fourteen words, and it happens to be correct — the post named one category of target, and Russia hit a different one, so nothing in the text of the agreement was — actually, there is no text to check that against beyond the fourteen words themselves, and those fourteen words say nothing about apartment buildings, research institutes, or daylight. They cover energy targets. They were never asked to cover anything else, which reads either like a loophole or like the whole point, depending on which building you were standing in on Monday.
What the fourteen words did not include was a monitor, an inspector, or a signature confirmed from Moscow. It was a paragraph on a personal account, describing what two governments had supposedly agreed to — supposedly, because the post itself includes no statement from Moscow confirming any of it — with no party named as the one who would notice if the terms were broken. Two weeks later, seven people were killed in the capital of one of the two countries the paragraph claimed to speak for. The diesel prices that started this, the ones Zelensky's refinery strikes were raising and the post was written to bring down, are not mentioned anywhere in Monday's wire copy. Monday's wire copy is about a research institute, apartment buildings, and a body count hospitals were still confirming.
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By SalStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 28 September 2026
Andrew Bailey resigned this week as one of the FBI's two co-deputy directors, a title that did not exist until September 2025, when Director Kash Patel split the deputy's job in two and gave one half to Bailey and the other to Dan Bongino. CBS News reported this week that the position was created to ease tension between Bondi and Bongino — a diagnosis CBS's reporting reached, not a statement the bureau itself put out. Whatever kept the peace, it ran through a title that had not existed at the bureau before Bailey held it.
On September 15, he did, and the hearing turned into a public clash with Dick Durbin and the rest of the committee; the Washington Examiner published a photograph of Patel holding a cheat sheet, notes to get him through the questions.
Two weeks before Patel needed those notes, on September 1, the Washington Examiner reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had resigned, one more senior official pushed out during Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's tenure. The resignation letter had gone to the White House the day before, and the White House had not yet said whether it would accept it. Bailey's exit is not the administration's only senior departure this month; it is the same pattern surfacing in a different building.
Bailey held the co-deputy job a little over a year. The New York Post reported that he had also overseen the bureau's 2020 election integrity probe, and that a source familiar with his exit said he had struggled with being far from his family in Missouri. Six years earlier, on November 17, 2020, the same president fired Chris Krebs, the CISA director who had called that election "the most secure in American history," and forced his own deputy, who had expected to become acting director, to resign along with him. The 2020 election has now cost the jobs of two federal officials who worked on it, under the same president, six years apart.
The FBI's leadership team was built to run on three names instead of the usual two. It is down to two again.
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CASUALTIES, COUNTED
By SalStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 28 September 2026
On September 1st, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan, Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran would return to the ceasefire reached with Washington in June if the United States returned first to its own commitments under that memorandum. He said it after accusing the United States of having broken the ceasefire already. Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad was asked for her reaction; the network reported only that she shared it, not what it was.
In between, on September 14th, the Pentagon's own inspector general put a number on what the war had already cost in property alone: about $184 million in damage to U.S. diplomatic facilities across four Gulf countries — Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That is the ledger for buildings. The ledger for people, as of this weekend, is closer to 900 American casualties, a count that has kept climbing for seven months while the timeline at the podium has not moved.
On August 27th, financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics showed the president had made more than a thousand stock transactions in June, including positions in energy companies posting record profits off the war he is prosecuting. The filing covers the same quarter the ceasefire was reached, paused, and broken again. The receipts show the trades. They show the war. They do not show why a president holding energy positions would be the one setting the timetable for when the bombing resumes — that is a question the receipts leave open, not an answer they supply.
Today the rhetoric resumed on schedule, if not yet the ordnance. Trump rejected it over the weekend. Eight Marines were wounded in a fresh Iranian strike. Oil broke $107 a barrel on the news, and on his own statement that he expects to resume American strikes after the midterms — not before, after, like a renewal notice timed to a billing cycle. Iran's government said, again, that the choice between war and diplomacy sits with him alone. He told Axios he expects talks to resume anyway, despite neither side signaling it will change its demands. Nine hundred casualties in, that is still the entire plan.
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By SalStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 28 September 2026
Five men were taken into custody Sunday near RAF Fairford, the air base in England the U.S. has used in its war against Iran, held on suspicion of what CBS called "preparing a terrorist act" and what the Washington Examiner called planning an attack on the base. Before any of the five had been charged with a single thing, a Republican congresswoman had already told the public the plot traced back to Iran. The theory did not survive the week.
CBS reported the fact that actually mattered: all five men in custody were U.K. nationals. Not operatives moved through some foreign network — five men holding British passports, held by British detectives, on British soil. The Washington Examiner confirmed what came next: police said the men arrested Sunday outside RAF Fairford would be released on bail.
ABC put a phrase on that release. The five had been let out "after extensive interviews" — the closest anyone in this case has come to an official account of what investigators actually found. No charge came with it. Police had questioned five people over a suspected bomb plot at a base used in an active war, and walked away with nothing they could put in front of a judge.
Iran did not wait to be asked. The Hill reported that Iran's London Embassy called the accusations against it "unfounded and malicious speculations" and "categorically" rejected any role — a government denying a plot in a country it had nothing to do with, because the alternative was letting the accusation stand unanswered.
The pattern was not new. In a report dated September 23, London's Metropolitan Police announced a similar operation: two men held under Section 41 of the Terrorism Act, arrested on a Sunday, over a suspected plot to target Manchester's Jewish community ahead of Yom Kippur.
And on September 10, Homeland Security had already put a number out, timed to the 9/11 anniversary: ICE said it had arrested more than 2,150 people it called "known or suspected terrorists" this year, and deported more than 2,000 of them.
The accusation arrived first. The facts arrived after, quietly, and did not match it. That gap — between what got said for the cameras and what the interview room actually produced — is the only part of this story that took any real time to confirm.
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By MitchInvestigations · the matinee edition, 28 September 2026
Monday's letter runs three signatures deep — Chairmen Steil, Jordan, Comer — and one addressee: Ronald Machen, WilmerHale partner, attorney of record for ActBlue. The ask is simple. Transcribed interview. No public hearing room, no cameras.
All together now — that's the part worth sitting with. The letter doesn't ask Machen to produce the contradiction. It says the committee has it. Chairmen Steil, Jordan and Comer aren't summoning a witness to find out what happened; they're summoning him to watch them read it back to him. That's not investigation, strictly speaking. That's a table read.
The paper trail behind Monday's letter runs a full week. On September 21st, House GOP investigators told reporters their ActBlue inquiry was "far from over," pointing to what they called bombshell internal memos showing the platform green-lit donations despite flagged foreign red flags. Nobody released the memos. The public got the adjective — bombshell — and not the document.
Four days later, on September 25th, Missouri's attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, opened her own investigation, a state track running parallel to the federal one, and sent ActBlue civil investigative demands for its donor-processing and fraud-prevention files. Same platform, same month, a second office asking for the same category of paper the first office already claims to be holding.
Which brings the ball back around to Monday. The 21st announced the memos exist. The 25th announced a second office wants copies.
A transcribed interview is a fine instrument. It is not, historically, a way of releasing evidence to the people who are paying for the investigation. Chairmen Steil, Jordan and Comer are welcome to schedule it whenever the stenographer is free. In the meantime, the memos stay exactly where bombshells tend to stay after the initial reporting — described, cited, and unread.
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By SalStaff Writer · the early bird edition, 28 September 2026
On September 1st, at a summit in Kyrgyzstan, Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran would return to the ceasefire reached in June if Washington returned first to the terms it had already broken. Trump did not return to them. Thirteen days later, on September 14th, the Pentagon's own inspector general put a number on the war's price in property alone: $184 million in damage to U.S. diplomatic facilities across Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. On August 27th, as oil climbed, financial filings showed Trump's own oil holdings climbing with it that same day. Oil now trades above $107 a barrel. U.S. casualties are nearing 900. Eight Marines were wounded in the latest strike. Trump's answer to the ceasefire offer was to reject it and say the bombing resumes after the midterms — his own timeline, his own election.
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters the war has "trumped everything else" for voters heading into November and warned that Republican performance will come down to turnout. The Washington Examiner called it an admission. It reads like one: the leader of the president's own party in the Senate, weeks before an election, naming the unfinished war as the thing his caucus cannot get past.
What Thune did not say is who set the calendar. Trump did. He rejected the return-to-ceasefire terms Pezeshkian offered, said the strikes wait until the votes are counted, and holds oil stock whose value climbs with the same barrel price now above $107. The majority leader is describing the weather. The president wrote the forecast.
There is a name for a war timed to end the week after an election and not the week before it: a campaign decision, made by the one official with the authority to make it, while eight Marines were wounded reaching this point. Thune's warning is the receipt. The bombing schedule is the confession.
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By LouOne More Question · the early bird edition, 28 September 2026
The notebook has a page where I've written the word "no" twice in the same handwriting, and this morning I had to find it again before I could make sense of what came in today.
I keep the notebook in the glovebox, have since the car needed its first fan belt, and most weeks it's nothing but an oil-change reminder and a grocery list I never get around to. This week it's a timeline, so let me read it back in order, the way I wrote it.
On September 2nd, before any of this reached a judge, the reporting was that Homeland Security had hundreds of agents going through state voter rolls, under a program with its own name inside the department: the Unlawful Voter Initiative. I wrote the name down because it's the kind of name a person gives a thing before they know what the thing is going to find.
On September 5th, an appeals court kept its block in place on the federal tool that checks a voter's citizenship by pulling Social Security records against state rolls. Blocked, I wrote, and underlined it once.
On September 8th, the Justice Department went over that court's head and asked the Supreme Court to lift the block, on a version of the same tool the administration had modified to link Social Security numbers directly to citizenship status.
On September 14th — a different case, a different filing, the mail ballots this time rather than the citizenship tool — the Supreme Court declined to restore the administration's plan to restrict mail-in voting for these midterms. No, again.
Sometime after that the citizenship tool got cleared to proceed for the same midterms the mail plan is still locked out of. One request went through. The other kept failing.
And today the State Department is weighing whether to hand over passport records too, to be checked against the same rolls, in the department's own words, in a way that "protects Americans' data, deters fraud and supports the integrity of U.S. citizenship." Is a passport the fourth item this file has reached for, after the voter rolls, the Social Security numbers, and the mail ballots themselves?
I stood in a bank line last week behind a man who'd brought one form of ID to cash a check that needed two. The teller wasn't unreasonable about it, she just couldn't move forward on one. I think about that line every time I read what these agencies are asking each other for lately. The voter rolls weren't enough on their own. Then it was the Social Security numbers. Now it's whether a passport should go in the folder too — the document a person already carries to prove they're a citizen, being asked to prove it again, to a different office, for a different file.
The dog doesn't care about any of this, for what it's worth, she just wants the leash off the porch hook, and some mornings I envy how short her list of documents is.
Before you go — one more line I marked. The State Department's own goal, again: to protect data, deter fraud, support the integrity of citizenship. Nowhere in the notebook do I have a fraud number to go with it, just the record of what this Court has done with these requests so far. Read it back in order and it comes out the same way it went in: no, no, yes — and now a fourth ask, from an administration that's already been told no twice.
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